Word: yang
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Staff writer Helen X. Yang can be reached at hxyang@fas.harvard.edu...
...Born William Young in northern Queensland in 1943, Yang grew up in Dimbulah, a tiny tobacco-farming town, with no connection to his Chinese heritage. His grandparents emigrated from China in the 1880s, and his family was completely assimilated - he and his siblings spoke only English. At 6, after a white schoolmate called him "Ching Chong Chinaman," Yang went home upset and asked his mother if he was Chinese. She gravely told him yes. "I knew in that instant," Yang writes on his website, "that being Chinese was a terrible curse...
...that I could, not with the way I looked. Also, I knew I was gay but didn't understand what that was." He went on to study architecture at the University of Queensland, where a love for theater was sparked, and moved to Sydney in 1969. Yang tried to make a living as a playwright but found it too difficult, so he switched to photography, holding his first solo exhibition, Sydneyphiles, at the Australian Centre for Photography in 1977. "It was very successful and that one exhibition established me as a photographer of the scene, both the glamorous celebrity...
...started searching for his lost Chinese ancestry by researching his immediate family and the history of the Chinese in Australia, and in 1983 he changed his surname from Young to Yang in a symbolic reclamation of his identity. "I described it as a kind of coming out as Chinese," he says. "It was a big thing for me to embrace." His first trip to China was in 1989. "The people welcomed me - they said, 'You've come back, you've come back home.' It was incredibly meaningful and moving...
...These days, Yang has become part of Australia's artistic mainstream himself, witnessing along the way an evolution in the country's attitude toward its minorities, particularly gays and Asians. He also notices more tolerance and diversity. "It's a slow process," he says. "There's always some resistance to change, but if the new attitudes hang around for long enough, then people start to accept them...