An interview with Paula Yoo (Fiction ’02)

Paula Yoo, a 2002 fiction alum, was recently interviewed in the Kirkus Review. Read an excerpt of the interview, in which Yoo discusses her new book, From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry, below:

As you worked on the book, did your impressions of the problem of anti-Asian racism change?

We have always been excluded and erased from the dialogue about racism in this country. Vincent Chin’s case was the first federal civil rights trial for an Asian American, and this was the 1980s. My friends and I joke occasionally about [how] being Asian American is like dying by a thousand cuts, a thousand microaggressions. But I’m realizing now that’s also part of the conversation: Unfortunately, most Americans think of racism in very broad strokes, as wearing a KKK hood or [going] up to someone, [punching] them in the face, and [calling] them a racist slur. Obviously, there’s a higher priority for violent physical crime, but that does not erase the importance and complexities of microaggressions. Trauma happens, whether it’s one shocking, horrifying event or a lifetime of tiny microaggressions that add up. What I am happy about, though, is that we’re finally having this conversation and finally addressing all forms and varying degrees of racism. You cannot have one conversation about racist mass shootings and not have an equally important conversation about microaggressions. For the Asian American and Pacific Islander experience, that is what we know, and the rest of the world is now finally finding out. So I would say my one surprise is that it took me this long to have this conversation.

Read the rest of the interview here: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/paula-yoo-whisper-rallying-cry-interview/