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The Making of Asian-American Flushing
A history of how Flushing went from being a middle-class Irish neighborhood to the mecca of Asian-America on the East Coast. Topics discussed: gentrification, Tommy Huang, the "Asian Donald Trump," and migration patterns within cities.
The History of Korean Food in America
A look at how restaurants in Koreatown, Los Angeles developed from the late seventies til today and the influences, both from Latino neighbors in the United States and from successive waves of immigrants from Korea and China helped shape the modern Korean restaurant. If you want to know why your favorite Korean BBQ restaurant exists, Kang will give you the history.
Is there really an Asian-America?
A provocative talk that argues that the modern boundaries of "Asian-American" as a racial/demographic group do not make sense to the vast majority of people who have been classified under that label. No "Asian-Americans" think of themselves as "Asian-American," but rather as "Chinese" or "Korean" or "Indian-American." This talk argues for a disaggregation of this category and suggests better ways to foster real solidarity between these groups.
Jay Caspian Kang discusses Asian American identity in a way audiences will never forget, weaving threads of history, calls for solidarity, and personal storytelling
Writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine JAY CASPIAN KANG captures audiences with his riveting blend of family history and original reportage that explores—and reimagines—Asian American identity in a Black and white world. A masterful storyteller, Kang explores what it means to be Asian American, and shares the unforgettable story of his family, as they move from a housing project in Cambridge to an idyllic college town in the South and eventually to the West Coast, against the backdrop of a rapidly expanding Asian America, as millions more immigrants, many of them working-class or undocumented, stream into the country. At the same time, upwardly mobile urban professionals have struggled to reconcile their parents’ assimilationist goals—all while trying to carve out a new kind of belonging for their own children, who are neither white nor truly “people of color.” Kang is also the author of The Loneliest Americans in which he discusses the existential loneliness in Asian Americans who try to locate themselves in the country’s racial binary, and how to cultivate solidarity.
Read some of Jay Caspian Kang’s New York Times articles > >
Listen to him discuss the question of what it means to be Asian American > >
Jay Caspian Kang is a writer-at-large at The New York Times Magazine and the author of The Loneliest Americans. He was a founding editor at Grantland and an Emmy-nominated correspondent on Vice on HBO. Kang's journalism career has been far from typical -- he started out in the writing business as a novelist, but found his way to journalism after spending much of his twenties as a professional poker player and overall surf bum. He writes now about race, identity, and economics for a variety of publications and outlets including This American Life, The New Yorker and The Nation and can speak at-length about a variety of topics, city planning, the history of immigration in the United States, education policy, Affirmative Action and gambling.
Jay is a co-host of the podcast, Time to Say Goodbye, providing commentary, reporting, and links about Asia, the Coronavirus and Asian-America.
He currently lives in Berkeley, CA with his family.
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