Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

I embraced all these half-baked opinions without doing my homework. Whatever their politics were, I thought, they were now outdated. It concerns me how fast I dismissed the hard work of my activist predecessors after hearing enough “experts” spout off on the frivolity of identity politics when the international and interracial politics of Kochiyama

I bring up Korea to collapse the proximity between here and there. Or as activists used to say, “I am here because you were there.”

Comparing yourself at the age when a young writer died drives home how early their lives were cut off, since likely you are thinking, But I was just getting started! I still didn’t know anything!

Until I talked to her, I could only imagine Cha’s New York as a shadowy abstraction of a city, a Gotham of unlit steel and windswept empty boulevards.

As the scholar Seo-Young Chu puts it, I was exiled back to the uncanny valley, where I was returned to my silicon mold and looked out of monolid eyes. To be a writer, then, is to fill myself in with content.

Blade Runner 2049 is an example of science fiction as magical thinking: whites fear that all the sins they committed against black and brown people will come back to them tenfold, so they fantasize their own fall as a preventative measure to ensure that the white race will never fall.

The wretched of the earth know this candy. Hershey’s doled out after a firefight, M&Ms handed out before a raid. Americans sprayed Dum Dums lollies from a fighter helicopter and the children of Afghanistan ran after the chopper with their arms raised. Sometimes candy was used as a trick. In Vietnam, bored guards planted candy under barbed wire

Rape burns a hole in the article and capsizes any argument. There is no way to continue on with your analysis, no way to make sense past it. You can only look at it or look away—and I looked away.

“Our cities today glow with crosses like graveyards.”