Feeling invisible is a universal feeling— everyone has felt it one time or another. Some people find comfort in that invisibility, while others find it frustrating. And yet, to be Asian in America is to feel invisible on a mass scale, to leave too many things unsaid or unheard. Cathy Park Hong captures this experience in her memoir, Minor Feelings. Though geared towards her own experience as an East Asian American, the book truly is a reckoning that speaks to the Asian American condition. I intended to write a reflection on the memoir, but really, Cathy Park Hong has already said everything I’ve wanted to say, everything I’ve thought about and pushed back down without voicing. Things not only about being Asian American, but also about poetry, about culture, about womanhood. Things I couldn’t have said better myself:
“In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status: not white enough nor black enough; distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down.”
“Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it’s more than a chat about race. It’s ontological. It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it’s even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don’t exist.”
“During this period the model minority myth was popularized to keep Communists—and black people—in check. Asian American success was circulated to promote capitalism and to undermine the credibility of black civil rights: we were the ‘good’ ones since we were undemanding, diligent, and never asked for handouts from the government. There’s no discrimination, they assured us, as long as you’re compliant and hardworking.”
“The privilege of assimilation is that you are left alone. But assimilation must not be mistaken for power, because once you have acquired power, you are exposed, and your model minority qualifications that helped you in the past can be used against you, since you are no longer invisible.”
“I thought of Asians throughout history being dragged against their will, driven or chased out of their native homes, out of their adopted homes, out of their native country, out of their adopted country: ejected, evicted, exiled.”
“When I hear the phrase “Asians are next in line to be white,” I replace the word “white” with “disappear.” Asians are next in line to disappear. We are reputed to be so accomplished, and so law-abiding, we will disappear into this country’s amnesiac fog. We will not be the power but become absorbed by power, not share the power of whites but be stooges to a white ideology that exploited our ancestors. This country insists that our racial identity is beside the point, that it has nothing to do with being bullied, or passed over for promotion, or cut off every time we talk. Our race has nothing to do with this country, even, which is why we’re often listed as “Other” in polls and why we’re hard to find in racial breakdowns on reported rape or workplace discrimination or domestic abuse.”
“I only came into focus when I was making art and later when I began writing poetry, which I found freeing because my body was dematerialized, my identity shed, and I could imagine myself into other lives.”
“Readers, teachers, and editors told me in so many words that I should write whatever felt true to my heart but that since I was Asian, I might as well stick to the subject of Asians, even though no one cared about Asians, but what choice did I have since if I wrote about, say, nature, no one would care because I was an Asian person writing about nature?”
“As the writer Matthew Salesses elaborated in a 2015 essay in Lit Hub, the industry instituted the single story in two ways: (1) the publisher had a quota that allowed them to publish only one Chinese American writer, and (2) even if there were multiple writers of Chinese descent, they had to replicate the same market-tested story about the Chinese American experience.”
“As the poet Prageeta Sharma said, Americans have an expiration date on race the way they do for grief. At some point, they expect you to get over it.”
“I don’t think, therefore I am—I hurt, therefore I am. Therefore, my books are graded on a pain scale. If it’s 2, maybe it’s not worth telling my story. If it’s 10, maybe my book will be a bestseller.”
“Minor feelings occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance. You are told, ‘Things are so much better,’ while you think, Things are the same. You are told, ‘Asian Americans are so successful,’ while you feel like a failure. This optimism sets up false expectations that increase these feelings of dysphoria.”
“Minor feelings are also the emotions we are accused of having when we decide to be difficult—in other words, when we decide to be honest. When minor feelings are finally externalized, they are interpreted as hostile, ungrateful, jealous, depressing, and belligerent, affects ascribed to racialized behavior that whites consider out of line. Our feelings are overreactions because our lived experiences of structural inequity are not commensurate with their deluded reality.”
“When they immigrated here, they didn’t simply travel spatially but through time, traveling three generations into the future.”
“To grow up Asian in America is to witness the humiliation of authority figures like your parents and to learn not to depend on them: they cannot protect you.”
“To other English is to make audible the imperial power sewn into the language, to slit English open so its dark histories slide out.”
“When we are inspired by a poem or novel, our human impulse is to share it so that, as Lewis Hyde writes, it leaves a trail of ‘interconnected relationships in its wake.’ But in the market economy, art is a commodity removed from circulation and kept. If the work of art circulates, it circulates for profit, which has been grossly reaped by white authorship.”
“The soul of innovation thrives on cross-cultural inspiration. If we are restricted to our lanes, culture will die.”
“Rather than ‘speaking about’ a culture outside your experience, the filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha suggests we ‘speak nearby.’”
“I can’t speak for the Latinx experience, but I can write about my bad English nearby Toscano’s bad English while providing gaps between passages for the reader to stitch a thread between us.”
“white publishers want ‘the Muslim experience’ or ‘the black experience.’ They want ethnicity to be siloed because it’s easier to understand, easier to brand.”
“Art is to dream, however temporarily, of this not-yet.”
“The distance between us is class. In K-town, Koreans worked the front and Mexicans worked the back.”
“Does an Asian American narrative always have to return to the mother? When I met the poet Hoa Nguyen, the first question she asked me was, ‘Tell me about your mother.’ ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘That’s an icebreaker.’ ‘You have an Asian mother,’ she said. ‘She has to be interesting.’”
“I always know when there are too many people like me, because the restaurant is no longer cool, the school no longer well rounded. A space is overrun when there are too many Asians, and ‘too many’ can be as few as three.”
“If you reveal anything, they collapse your art with your life—and I don’t want my autobiography hijacking my art.”
“The reason why so many white men date Asian women is that they can get better-looking Asian women than they can get white women because we are easier to get and have lower self-esteem. It’s like going with an inferior brand so that you can afford more luxury features. Also, Asian women will date white guys who no white woman would touch.”
“men who feign helplessness—which Oberlin specialized in—can be just as manipulative as alpha males because they use their incompetence to free themselves of menial tasks that are then saddled onto women.”
“the circuits of a poetic form are not charged on what you say, but what you hold back. The poem is a net that catches the stutters, the hesitations, rather than the perfectly formed phrase.”
“I was encouraged to write about my Asian experience but I still had to write it the way a white poet would—so instead of copying a white poet, I was copying a white poet copying their idea of an Asian poet.”
“‘What is your earliest memory of language? Write a poem from that memory.’”
“We discussed art and poetry in relation to race and gender and class. Our identities informed our aesthetic but our aesthetic wasn’t exactly about identity either.”
“Murder has been desensitized to a crime statistic, but combine it with the word rape and it forces you to confront her body.”
“I find her style, while not exactly pleasurable, to be liberating because Cha—who was actually fluent in French, English, and Korean—made the immigrant’s discomfort with English into a possible form of expression.”
“It was more truthful to leave those horrors partially spoken, like Sapphic shrapnel, and ask the reader to imagine the unspeakable.”
“The problem with silence is that it can’t speak up and say why it’s silent. And so silence collects, becomes amplified, takes on a life outside our intentions, in that silence can get misread as indifference, or avoidance, or even shame, and eventually this silence passes over into forgetting.”
“I sometimes avoid reading a news story when the victim is Asian because I don’t want to pay attention to the fact that no one else is paying attention. I don’t want to care that no one else cares because I don’t want to be left stranded in my rage.”
“the Asian woman is reminded every day that her attractiveness is a perversion”
“If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering. The indebted Asian American is therefore the ideal neoliberal subject. I accept that the burden of history is solely on my shoulders; that it’s up to me to earn back reparations for the losses my parents incurred, and to do so, I must, without complaint, prove myself in the workforce.”
“Poetry is a forgiving medium for anyone who’s had a strained relationship with English. Like the stutterer who pronounces their words flawlessly through song, the immigrant writes their English beautifully through poetry.”
“I’d rather be indebted than be the kind of white man who thinks the world owes him, because to live an ethical life is to be held accountable to history.”
Letters to No One 