Asian Americans

"To other English is to make audible the imperial power sewn into the language, to slit English open so its dark histories slide out."

"Ever since I started writing poetry seriously, I have used English inappropriately."

"As a poet, I have always treated English as a weapon in a power struggle, wielding it against those who are more powerful than me. But I falter when using English as an expression of love."

"Nothing gets dated faster than a joke."

"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."

"The flip side of innocence is shame."

"Because I didn't learn the language until I started school, I associated English with everything hard: the chalkboard with diagrammed sentences, the syllables in my mouth like hard slippery marbles. English was not an expression of me but a language that was out to get me, threaded with invisible trip wires that could expose me at the slightest misstep."

"One characteristic of racism is that children are treated like adults and adults are treated like children. Watching a parent being debased like a child is the deepest shame. I cannot count the number of times I have seen my parents condescended to or mocked by white adults. This was so customary that when my mother had any encounter with a white adult, I was always hypervigilant, ready to mediate or pull her away. 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."

"The indignity of being Asian in this country has been underreported. We have been cowed by the lie that we have it good. We keep our heads down and work hard, believing that our diligence will reward us with our dignity, but our diligence will only make us disappear. By not speaking up, we perpetuate the myth that our shame is caused by our repressive culture and the country we fled, whereas America has given us nothing but opportunity. The lie that Asians have it good is so insidious that even now as I write, I'm shadowed by doubt that I didn't have it bad compared to others. But racial trauma is not a competitive sport. The problem is not that my childhood was exceptionally traumatic but that it was in fact rather typical."

"Childhood is a state of mind, whether it's a nostalgic return to innocence or a sudden flashback to unease and dread. If the innocence of childhood is being protected and comforted, the precarity of childhood is when one feels the least protected and comfortable."

"Two thousand and sixteen was the year of white tears...And white tears are why 63 percent of white men and 53 percent of white women elected a malignant man-child as their leader. For to be aware of history, they would be forced to be held accountable, and rather than face that shame, they'd rather, by any means necessary, maintain their innocence."

"Whether our families come from Guatemala, Afghanistan, or South Korea, the immigrants since 1965 have shared histories that extend beyond this nation, to our countries of origin, where our lineage has been decimated by Western imperialism, war, and dictatorships orchestrated or supported by the United States. In our efforts to belong in America, we act grateful, as if we've been given a second chance at life. But our shared root is not the opportunity this nation has given us but how the capitalist accumulation of white supremacy has enriched itself off the blood of our countries. We cannot forget this."

"I have to address whiteness because Asian Americans have yet to truly reckon with where we stand in the capitalist white supremacist hierarchy of this country."

"Anti-Asian racism has come roaring back with the coronavirus scare,” says Korean American writer Cathy Park Hong. “People don’t think Asians face racism, but it’s always lurking under the surface."

"Asians are hyper invisible. We’re not even included in racial breakdowns in polls. We’re always listed as ‘other’, if we’re listed at all...It almost feels like we’re not publicly participating in this country."

"The way Richard Pryor talked about race was so brutally honest and funny and unvarnished. It made me think that I had never encountered Asian identity being written in that way."

"It’s one of the best benefits of growing up bilingual, right? You realise that meaning is slippery."

"Maybe what I’m responding to is how white America has flattened our experience to a single story, how they perceive us as one kind. The book is an attempt to overthrow that."

"you have to write toward your discomfort."

"Shame can make you more aware. Shame can make you more empathetic, too. What’s important, of course, is not staying in that shame, not wallowing in shame. If there are any political uses of shame, it’s that it allows you to see outside yourself. And to move, and to do something with that."

"I’m a poet, so I look at prose differently than a journalist would. I’m not trying to make a singular argument. I want to document my thought process. And that thought process is never linear. It involves different subjects."

"Racism is never new. It just changes, it adapts. I think people are louder. But when I hear Asians being called “chink” on the street, that’s not really different from what I experienced as a kid. It’s all part of a historical continuum. The issue is that people forget. My book is not offering new ideas exactly, it’s just a reminder. It’s a reminder of the history of Asian Americans in this white supremacist capitalist nation. I think sometimes we get lulled because we forget. Being a person of color, you’re either invisible or hypervisible. And when you’re hypervisible, your hypervisibility—when there’s a target on your back—is dependent entirely on what’s happening economically in this nation, or what’s happening with foreign policy. One year it’s Muslims, another year it’s undocumented Latinx people, and this year it’s East Asians. It’s like musical chairs."

"A lot of us come from countries—if you’re South Asian or Southeast Asian—that have been colonized by Western powers. But that’s never talked about. It’s almost as if in immigrant stories we’re supposed to forget our past once our family comes over here. Or there is a kind of writing about the past, but it’s divorced from US foreign policy. It comes from immigrant parents as well. They say, “Oh, you’re here, it’s a rich land, and there are so many opportunities here, you should be grateful,” without actually acknowledging why we ended up here in the first place. I wanted to show how it was all interrelated."

"The Western is now a global fantasy. It’s hard to pin down what the myth means because the frontier is now so abstract. To dream of the frontier is to dream of progress. But there’s also the fantasy of the frontier as being lawless. There are no regulations that hamper the body; there is no superego in the frontier."

"In certain ways, the Western ideals of the frontier, of escaping regulation, are still alive today, but now they are carried on in the life of corporations rather than individuals."

"The frontier is always the border of something, virgin territory where we can build new worlds, remake ourselves; always there’s this obsession with remaking ourselves. So to dream of the frontier is also to desire immortality. But there is no such thing as new territory. There are always previous civilizations, societies, families, and cultures. So when we build new worlds, there will be violence."

"I don’t create redemption for my characters. The narrative of redemption is a false and lazy conceit in art. Redemption through the act of violence is avoiding culpability."

"Her vision and execution are so breathtaking."

"She brings acute intelligence, scholarly knowledge, and recognizable vulnerability to the formation of a new school of thought she names minor feelings."

"When I read Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, it felt like I was being shaken awake to something I had convinced myself wasn’t real. The subtle ways Asian Americans are dismissed; how Asian American women feel the need to apologize when taking up any sort of space. I was also floored by how she described the ripple effect of the Chinese Exclusion Act: how that fear of not wanting to stick out has been passed down through generations, and how this survival tactic limits us and can cause self-hate. And at the same time, Cathy shares stories that feel so personal, so fresh and so specific, nobody else could’ve written them. I had never read a depiction of three contemporary, young Asian American women that was so complicated, interesting or full of both love and conflict. Her writing is beautiful, funny, sharp and—most importantly to a working mother of two who has few brain cells left at the end of the day—easy to read. I annotated the hell out of Minor Feelings—it’s the kind of book you want to dog-ear and underline. Reading it was such a crazy feeling: I felt so seen that I couldn’t believe that this book existed. And it’s become even more painfully relevant in a year in which anti-Asian violence, which has always existed in America, has spiked so aggressively, putting our communities on high alert and searching for solidarity. This is the book to read when you ask me, “How can I be an ally?” This is the book to read if you want to educate yourself. This is the book to read if you want to be more in touch with your humanity."

"New York City was my first introduction to America. It was a beautiful welcome because in the streets I saw people of all colors, wearing different outfits, clearly from different parts of the world. While I was still feeling like a foreigner, an immigrant, an outsider, there were so many people I could point to even as a young child who looked completely different, too."

"The professional food world is dominated by men. But most of the actual cooking of food in the world is done by women. And we women have always had to make do with whatever we can. We’re a little bit like water—we find our way because we’ve had to."

"I wanted to do a show to give people whom I have grown up with, whether they were Filipino, Mexican or whatever, the platform to speak for themselves."

"Growing older gracefully means having a keen curiosity about learning things about the world that you didn’t know yesterday, no matter how many yesterdays you've had."

"You know how you’re completely different with your mom than you are with your best friend, than you are with your romantic partner, than you are with your boss? They’re just different facets of me."

"The world is getting bigger and smaller at the same time. The possibilities and opportunities to taste different kinds of foods are much more prevalent today than even 10 or 15 years ago. At the same time, because people are traveling, in spite of certain parts of the world that are dangerous, you do get to try more things. With the Internet and Instagram, you get to know about all these funky dishes."

"Rejection is a part of my job. It has been a part of my career as a food person and a filmmaker. It was certainly part of my job as an actor, and even more part of a job as a model. So, it is something that I have to accept. It’s not for the faint of heart."

"And the truth is, models are freaks of nature. We are not normal people, and we're just born this way because of a genetic cocktail that our parents gave to us. You know, most of us have a really high metabolism."

"I would love to write more children’s books. I think children can understand complex things so long as you explain them in words they can wrap themselves around."

"Just by the very fact that my mother divorced my father — it was so taboo to have a divorce in India and you were ostracized — I saw her break barriers within her own life."

"The best way to improve matters in your own actions is to first understand and accept the reasons for systemic prejudice and how that discrimination manifests in people’s lives over generations. Then you have to accept the ways in which some groups — perhaps your own — have benefited from this societal favoritism. And then you have to open your mouth and be an active member of your community to vote out elected officials who are part of the problem."

"I grew up going on that beam. If I wasn't in the gym I was always outside on the beam doing extra things because I didn't want to get behind or I always wanted to get better. It was something we kind of cherished because whenever I was bored, I would just go outside and he [father] would watch me and try and coach me even though he didn't know what he was talking about."

"You just can't get distracted easily. If you're having a bad day you just gotta keep going and you just can't be too hard on yourself."

"My community supports me a lot. I don’t want to let them down so I go out and compete for them."

"I felt like I wanted to make everybody else happy because bars is my thing and a lot of people were rooting for me."

"There were so many times in my bar routine where I could have just gave up and jumped off but I didn't and now I have a bronze medal. This medal probably means more to be than the all-around gold medal did, just because bars is my thing. To mess it up like this, I was just kind of sad about it."

"I'm probably going to delete Twitter. Instagram is not as bad because I can't really see what people say, but [on] Twitter it's just so easy to see everything. So I'm probably going to have to end up deleting that."

"I'll probably cool down a little bit and just focus on what I need to do especially because we're coming to the end. I want to just do the best I can and end it off good."

""I want to do it for my family and coaches obviously, but I also want to do it for myself. I've just been through so much."

"I focus more on bars and beam just because those are my strongest events, and I just try and maintain whatever I can do on floor and vault. I'm consistently training on all events. It's just I spend more time on bars and beam. I obviously want to perfect those and get those to be the best that I can be because those are going to be my strongest events and the two events that I could contribute to the team."