One of the most acclaimed essayists of his generation, Wesley Yang
writes about race and sex without the jargon, formulas, and polite
lies that bore us all. His powerful debut, The Souls of Yellow
Folk, does more than collect a decade's worth of cult-reputation
essays—it corrals new American herds of pickup artists, school
shooters, mandarin zombies, and immigrant strivers, and exposes them
to scrutiny, empathy, and polemical force. In his celebrated and
prescient essay "The Face of Seung-Hui Cho," Yang explores
the deranged logic of the Virginia Tech shooter. In his National
Magazine Award–winning "Paper Tigers," he explores the
intersection of Asian values and the American dream, and the inner
torment of the child exposed to "tiger mother" parenting.
And in his close reading of New York Magazine's popular Sex Diaries,
he was among the first critics to take seriously today's
Internet-mediated dating lives.
Yang catches these
ugly trends early because he has felt at various times implicated in
them, and he does not exempt himself from his radical honesty. His
essays retain the thrill of discovery, the wary eye of the first
explorer, and the rueful admission of the first exposed.