Sublime
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You don’t like how you look, how you sound. You think your Asian features are undefined, like God started pinching out your features and then abandoned you. You hate that there are so many Asians in the room. Who let in all the Asians? you rant in your head. Instead of solidarity, you feel that you are less than around other Asians, the boundaries
... See moreCathy Park Hong • Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
Well-meaning friends never failed to warn me, if a white guy was attracted to me, that he probably had an Asian fetish. The result: I distrusted my desirousness. My sexuality was a pathology. If anyone non-Asian liked me, there was something wrong with him.
Cathy Park Hong • Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
what I call minor feelings: the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed. Minor feelings arise, for instance, upon hearing a slight, knowing it’s racial, and be
... See moreCathy Park Hong • Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
To make myself, and by proxy other Asian Americans, more human and a little more relevant to American culture.
Cathy Park Hong • Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
The first thing I noticed was the size of her face. The therapist had an enormous face. I wondered if this was a problem for her, since Korean women are so self-conscious about the size of their faces that they will go under the knife to shave their jawlines down
Cathy Park Hong • Minor Feelings: A Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition
“For the last twenty years, until recently, Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories were the template of ethnic fiction that supports the fantasy of Asian American immigrants as compliant strivers. The fault lies not in Lahiri herself, who I think is an absorbing storyteller, but in the publishing industry that used to position her books as the “single story” on i
... See moreIt was once a source of shame, but now I say it proudly: bad English is my heritage. I share a literary lineage with writers who make the unmastering of English their rallying cry—who queer it, twerk it, hack it, Calibanize it, other it by hijacking English and warping it to a fugitive tongue. To other English is to make audible the imperial power
... See moreCathy Park Hong • Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy.
Cathy Park Hong • Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
So as long as it lasts, I want to write nearby Rodrigo Toscano, who pulls his Spanglish phonetic syllables apart like taffy (“tha’ vahnahnah go-een to keel joo”) or LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, who recombines black slang, Japanese, Spanish, Chamorro, and Tagalog into a remastered Afro-Futurist song (“…bubblegum kink / a Sheik’s interloper. / A radical
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