06 Feb “The ‘story behind the story’ of No-No Boy: Shawn Wong Impresses at this Year’s Friends of the Libraries Lecture” via UW Libraries Blog
I was the keynote speaker for the 2020 Friends of UW Libraries Annual Lecture in January. I shared the publishing history of No-No Boy by John Okada it’s importance as a part of Asian American literary history.
Read an excerpt:
“Throughout the lecture, Wong expertly wove together his experiences in a way that authentically and humbly underscored his life’s work to preserve the integrity of No-No Boy. From his painstaking quest to find Okada, to dealing with rejection from every publisher he met, to eventually going it alone and distributing books out of the trunk of his 1966 Mustang. Perhaps one of the most compelling moments was seeing hundreds of hand-written letters to Wong, effectively a word-of-mouth mail order system to distribute the book in the mid 1970s. These letters were written by a generation hungry for their own stories — letters Wong keeps in his office to this day.”