Book Event: Jay Caspian Kang | The Loneliest Americans
In conversation with journalist Imran Ali Malik
Friday, November 12, 2021
6:00-7:00 PM PST
Logan Multimedia Center, Room 142 North Gate Hall
[Directions to North Gate Hall]

RSVP for this hybrid event (masks required indoors).
Livestream the event on YouTube: https://youtu.be/zutP-S7527g

In his new book The Loneliest Americans, Jay Caspian Kang locates the loneliness of the Asian American identity within a black and white racial binary. Examining the history of his own family and the millions that immigrated to the United States after the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965, Kang describes a remote existential middle of his generation—on one hand struggling to reconcile the assimilationist goals of his parents generation while also trying to carve out a new kind of belonging for their own children who do not fall neatly into the available racial categories. The loneliness, Kang argues, comes from our attempts to assimilate.

Please join us for a conversation with Jay Caspian Kang in conversation with journalist Imran Ali Malik (‘22).

The event will be followed by a book signing. Books will be available for purchase by Eastwind Books of Berkeley.

Recommended Reading:
The Myth of Asian American Identity (The New York Times Magazine, October 2021)

Jay Caspian Kang is a writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine. His other work has appeared in The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, and on “This American Life” and Vice, where he worked as an Emmy-nominated correspondent. He is the author of the novel The Dead Do Not Improve, which The Boston Globe called “an extremely smart, funny debut, with moments of haunting beauty.”

Imran Ali Malik is a second-year student at Berkeley Journalism. He writes about politics, identity, and religion, and produces the podcast Submitter. Prior to journalism, Malik studied medicine, philosophy, and theology, and was a member of The Kominas, a post-9/11 Muslim punk band.