Quotes from Cathy Park Hong

Hollywood, an industry that shapes not only our national but global memories, has been the most reactionary cultural perpetrator of white nostalgia, stuck in a time loop and refusing to acknowledge that America's racial demographic has radically changed since 1965. Movies are cast as if the country were still "protected" by a white supremacist law that guarantees that the only Americans seen are carefully curated European descendants.

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.

When I made art alone, it was a fantasy, but shared with Erin and Helen, art became a mission.

Minor feelings arise, for instance, upon hearing a slight, knowing it's racial, and being told, Oh that's all in your head.

To recite my poems to an audience is to be slapped awake by my limitations. I confront the infinite chasm between the audience's conception of Poet and the underwhelming evidence of me as that poet. I just don't look the part.

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.

In psychoanalysis, the pain that trolls your nerves detaches from your body once you talk about it. Naming that pain takes the sting out of the incident, makes it mortal, manageable, even extinguishable.

white tears" does not refer to all pain but to the particular emotional fragility a white person experiences when they find racial stress so intolerable they become hypersensitive and defensive, focusing the stress back to their own bruised ego.

Alcoff calls this self-examination "white double-consciousness," which involves seeing "themselves through both the dominant and the nondominant lens, and recognizing the latter as a critical corrective truth.

Being indebted is to be cautious, inhibited, and to never speak out of turn. It is to lead a life constrained by choices that are never your own. The man or woman who feels comfortable holding court at a dinner party will speak in long sentences, with heightened dramatic pauses, assured that no one will interject while they're mid-thought, whereas I, who am grateful to be invited, speak quickly in clipped compressed bursts, so that I can get a word in before I'm interrupted.

Does an Asian American narrative always have to return to the mother?

When Kochiyama found a waitressing job in New York, her black coworkers were the first to educate her about America's racist history. Finally, Kochiyama had a vocabulary, a historical context. What had happened to her wasn't a nightmarish aberration but the norm.

I was so privileged I was acquiring the most useless graduate degree imaginable.

In 1997, the International Monetary Fund bailed out South Korea's crippling financial crisis with a $58 billion loan upon the agreement that the nation open up its markets to foreign investors and relax labor market reforms, making it easier to hire and fire workers and loosen carbon emission standards so that American cars can be imported.

Kochiyama had a compulsion to help others, and was adamant that she not be the center of attention, which was admirable but also gave me pause; made me question if there was something inherently Asian and female about her selflessness, which probably betrays my own internalized chauvinism and my own rather predictable preference for the melancholic poet or the messianic hero rather than organizers, like Kochiyama, who worked tirelessly behind the scenes.

He raised his shot glass of soju. "I have never tried to kill myself," he declared, and downed his glass. The other musicians clinked their glasses and also downed their drinks. There was nowhere to go after that, so we stopped playing.

In 1945, two fumbling mid-ranking American officers who knew nothing about the country used a National Geographic map as reference to arbitrarily cut a border to make North and South Korea, a division that eventually separated millions of families, including my own grandmother from her family.

Those who praise the illusion of assimilation should be reminded that… "The privilege of assimilation is that you are left alone. But assimilation should 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.

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.

Like the stutterer who pronounces their words flawlessly through song, the immigrant writes their English beautifully through poetry.

I want to destroy the universal. I want to rip it down. It is not whiteness but our contained condition that is universal, because we are the global majority. By we I mean nonwhites,

humor is godless and entirely human since humor runs counter to the sublime: instead of transcending, you are made acutely aware of the skin in which you exist.

I began to feel the whiteness in the room. If a neutral background color, say white, turned traffic-cone orange everywhere you went, you'd become chronically stressed and your mind would curdle like a slug in salt. That's how I felt. Only I had to pretend that I wasn't seeing traffic-cone orange everywhere.

My uncle said he used to start and end all his sentences with "motherfucker" because he learned his English from his black customers when he was a clothing wholesaler in New York.