After receiving his MFA, Kang spent a number of years in San Francisco and Los Angeles teaching creative writing and world history. He says he spent more than 40 hours a week playing poker at the Commerce Casino during this time. In January 2010, Kang began writing for literary basketball blog FreeDarko. In his first contribution to the blog, "The Lives of Others," Kang wrote an analysis of how Chinese-American basketball playerJeremy Lin and Chinese-American rapper MC Jin "offered an alternative interpretation of what it meant to be an Asian-American." He asserted that Asian-Americans "have been conditioned our entire lives to imagine White," and that "Like Jin before him, what Jeremy Lin represents is a re-conception of our bodies, a visible measure of how the emasculated Asian-American body might measure up to the mythic legion of Big Black supermen." Kang has continued to write about race throughout his career, with "A significant majority of Kang's columns, television segments, and magazine features hav a central focus on the role of race in culture." Kang was subsequently noticed in 2010 by several prominent editors for his work, "The High is Always the Pain and the Pain is Always the High," a lengthy first-person essay concerning his gambling addiction. The work has been seen as a turning point Kang's career. Kang's debut novel The Dead Do Not Improve was released in 2012 by Hogarth/Random House. The book was summarized by Kirkus Book Reviews as a "Pynchon-esque menagerie of California surfers, cops, thugs and dot-com workers converge in a comic anti-noir." The book revolves around a disgruntled MFA graduate named Philip Kim, who discovers that his elderly neighbor has been murdered, and who soon becomes the unlikely protagonist of a quickly unfolding mystery involving a struggle between fictionalized versions of two San Francisco institutions: Cafe Gratitude and Kink.com. Kang has said that he wanted to write the book about Korean American male anger and reflect on how the Virginia Tech shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, was also Korean. Kang joined Vice in June 2016 as civil rights correspondent, appearing on HBO's "Vice News Tonight". He is also a writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine. Previously he was a founding editor of the ESPN sports and pop-culture blog Grantland, and then served as editor of the science and technology blog Elements at The New Yorker from April to November 2014.
Personal life
Kang is a thyroid cancer survivor. He has remarked that "Surviving cancer can cleanse the soul, sure, but once you're left facing the rest of your life, a patient's vision can tunnel down to a list of demands." Kang is married and currently lives in New York. He has a daughter who was born in January 2017.
