Reading Y-Dang and Lorraine Together

I knew Y-Dang for two long years. She welcomed me to Vancouver when I was hired in her department at UBC in fall 2020 and she introduced me to her friends and family in that lonely time of social distancing. Together, we’d share meals and reminisce about the places we travelled to before closed borders, though she admitted she was happy to stay put in Vancouver, as she was tired and trying all possible treatments to calm her mysterious body pains. 

At the time, I was re-reading Lorraine Hansberry’s To Be Young, Gifted and Black, which I recommended to Y-Dang because she, like Lorraine, paid passionate attention to her people and developed her own critical analysis of the impacts of twentieth-century imperialism, war, and displacement. And, like Lorraine, Y-Dang complained of pain in her abdomen. After Y-Dang’s diagnosis and through her illness, I kept Lorraine’s book on my syllabus each term that I taught. The last time we were in her office, Y-Dang showed me her new copy of To Be Young, Gifted and Black, though I’m not sure she ever had the chance to read it; she’d soon undergo chemotherapy while finishing her manuscripts for Refugee Lifeworlds and Landbridge. Both Y-Dang and Lorraine died of pancreatic cancer before their books were published. 

Below, I offer reading questions for educators who would assign Y-Dang’s Landbridge and Lorraine Hansberry’s To Be Young, Gifted and Black together. 

1. Both authors navigated lives in the spotlight because political events made their families examples of changing national policies. How do you understand these events to have shaped their lives’ works? 
2. Both grappled with their special statuses as exceptional, as firsts (and lasts), yet were also keenly aware of the racial clichés projected onto their wider communities. How did each author bridge her personal and community identities and use story to resist expectations to perform Black respectability (Hansberry) and the role of the “grateful refugee.” 
3. Reflecting on why they write, each author speaks to the theme of dignity. How does each author understand the politics of dignity and the restorative and/or regenerative possibilities of storytelling? 
4. These books include letters of advice to younger generations: Y-Dang to her son, Kai, and Lorraine to students and aspiring playwrights. Are there common themes in their reflections and suggestions? What is one piece of advice that will stick with you? 
5. Each author writes about the influence of student movements on their own sense of political hope. How do you understand their writing to be shaped by acts of collective action and radical refusal? 
6. As they write through the pain of cancer, each author describes her difficulty writing in longer forms rather than in short fragments. Thus, their illnesses shaped the unique forms of these two books. How does it feel to read across lifeworlds in this fragmented way? What connections can you make across passages? 
7. Both authors are committed to recovering and sharing intergenerational stories. Can you remember a story that the oldest person in your family shared with you? If so, how has it changed your perspective? 

Let these reading questions open wider seminar discussions about writing for and towards communities. It is not just because Landbridge and To Be Young, Gifted and Black share a similar, fragmented form that these works are deeply related. Y-Dang and Lorraine desired to change the world and had faith in the process of artmaking both as catharsis and as catalyst for new ways of being together. They made art inspired by childhood experiences and family anecdotes (see Hansberry, Raisin in the Sun; Troeung, Easter Epic). 

You might observe, with students, how both authors lived lives punctuated by feminist achievement and the generous mentorship of others. Or how both wrote with the clear force of urgency and the sobriety of illness, and that they shared the bravery to look long at injustice and refused to suppress the rage that grew inside them as they did. Lorraine, only two generations distant from family born into slavery, and Y-Dang, having lost much of two generations of her family to the Cambodian genocide, understood intergenerational trauma and the complicated cultural politics of resilience. Published a half-century apart, their books tackle the impacts of the Cold War and grapple with the relevance of human rights trials to their peoples. The stories, notes, letters, sketches, and creative works-in-progress that make up their books reflect the radical hope, critical interventions, and connected struggles of all oppressed peoples of the world. 

Works Cited

Easter Epic: A Short Film. Directed and produced by Y-Dang Troeung and Alejandra Yoshizawa, 2024. 

Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun. Vintage, 2004. 

Nemiroff, Robert, editor. To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words. Prentice-Hall, 1969. 

Troeung, Y-Dang. Landbridge: [life in fragments]. Alchemy, 2023. 

— Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia. Temple UP, 2022. 

Dr. Ayasha C. Guerin (they/she) is assistant professor of intersectionality and practice-based research and media making in the department of World Arts & Cultures/Dance at UCLA. They are an interdisciplinary artist and scholar whose research and creative practices centre socio-ecological histories, connecting human and animal experience through questions of relational reciprocity, care, and companionship across Black diasporic contexts and anticolonial struggles.