Wesley Yang

My father died last night and there is going to be a criminal investigation. I'll be attending to that for a while but will be back soon enough to pursue all ongoing polemics.

Some minor picaresque lore about my father:
-- He was born in Japan-annexed Korea in 1936
-- He spent the Korean war years in Tokyo under General MacArthur and after a sickly youth spent indoors because of his intense asthma, he reinvented himself as a ladies man
-- He was one of fewer than 3,000 people of Korean descent living on the American mainland when he attended Southern Methodist University in 1954
-- He was kicked out of SMU in his sophomore year when he cleaned out the deacon's son playing poker
-- He went to Las Vegas and tried to make a living gambling but went broke at age 19. 
-- A Catholic priest at a small Alabama college took pity on him and let him attend as a student for a year in order to maintain his visa and restore his academic record. He taught himself to play golf by sneaking onto a neighboring course. 
-- He was unsure which bathrooms he was supposed to use during his year in the Jim Crow South. He used the white bathroom and nobody told him to leave.  
-- He eventually went to UCLA as an econ grad student and had a student job as the manager for John Wooden's Bruins when Lew Alcindor (soon to be renamed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) was the star
-- He met my mother at a radio station in Los Angeles that brought a handful of Korean people to sing
-- He owned a convertible Jaguar as a grad student but the soft top disintegrated and he could not afford to replace it, so he would drive with an umbrella when it rained 
-- His research published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, where he was scholar in residence, is collected here: https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/author/yang-jai-hoon#633627
-- He died 71 years after the armistice freezing hostilities in the Korean War was signed with the nation still divided and still technically at war

This was his father: https://x.com/wesyang/status/1554553395922567173

All these details should convey that yes, my father was one of the most privileged Koreans extant in 1949. But his father, who was entirely self-made, lost everything in the Korean War and was not able to win back a fortune afterward. My father was thus a rich man's son without any money, with all the minor eccentricities of such but without the fortune to backstop it.  

He raised someone a lot like himself. 
https://x.com/wesyang/status/1940615986765599015

This person is malignant and mentally ill and has no ability to disturb my bereavement in any way.   I did reply to him, though, to illustrate the difference between a wise person who understands history and takes it in stride and a loser who knows one fact about it that consumes him in bitterness.   The bits of lore I have about my grandfather obviously paint him in the best light; he was no doubt a figure like many who arise in times of social disorder and regime change (Russia after the end of Communism, India and Pakistan at partition, etc.) which afford predatory vultures in the prior ruling class -- but also brash young men on the make, like my grandfather -- opportunities to prosper amidst a changing world. You can see those qualities in my grandfather's face to an amusing, nearly parodic, degree, especially relative to the humbled and much diminished figure I knew as a boy.   

He sired sickly progeny -- from him to his grandson noodling on an electric guitar and tweeting from Canada is a parable of decline in itself. All that was obtained along the way was wisdom and understanding and the ability not to be malignant and mentally ill about the past: a quality sorely in need today.

https://x.com/stonedjayyid/status/1940759092618055978