Customer Reviews

Yellow Light: The Flowering of Asian American Culture (Asian American History & Culture)

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Yellow Light is an important collection of interviews with different members of the Asian Pacific artists community who are still with us today.

Covering a wide swath of disciplines and styles, and catching people at different stages of their careers, it's an enormously intriguing insight into the diverse opinions which exist within our community and how we each set our priorities.

Is it a perfect text? Perhaps not. All books will have their detractors. But for Asian American writers and artists, this is a wonderful, often candid snapshot of where we're at, but hopefully not necessarily where we're staying.

Despite the uniformity of the interview questions, which some may see as an advantage or a disadvantage to the text, in most cases, the personalities of the subjects really do come to life within their words. We should be grateful to Ms. Ling for going through so much hard work and crossing so many cultural lines to bring this picture of Asian America to the world.

Having met some of the people interviewed in the book, some of their opinions have changed or remodulated since the original interviews it seems. People would do well to remember that and try and seek out other recent interviews and works by these artists after you've read this particular text.

Should you agree with all of their opinions? Of course not. But this book lets them say their piece and take key steps to articulating a greater Asian American consciousness that most of us don't hear within the mainstream today.

Or in a nutshell: I discovered several good writers within this book, and a few of the excerpted stories continue to linger with me long after I'd placed it back on my shelf.

If you're thinking of buying it, I can think of far worse things to buy.

This is the kind of pseudo-pc nonsense people grasp at while trying to "publish or perish." Talking on both sides of the issue -- pay more attention to Asian artists, but don't consider us as Asian, or as a group. Anger and ambivalence, "flavor of the month", whining that mainstream culture is insensitive and "nude pantyhose are three shades too light," this book collects a hypocritical melange of opinion and personal experience with little redeeming value.