Quotes from Cathy Park Hong

stay in your lane" politics in which artists and writers are asked to speak only from their personal ethnic experiences. Such a politics not only assumes racial identity is pure—while ignoring the messy lived realities in which racial groups overlap—but reduces racial identity to intellectual property.

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.

As I try to move beyond the stereotypes to express my inner consciousness, it's clear that how i am perceived inheres to who i am.

the curse of anyone nonwhite is that you are so busy arguing what you're not that you never arrive at what you are.

Humor was a form of survival, since it created a necessary psychic distinction from slavery.

But where does the silence that neglects her end, and where does the silence that respects her begin?

To be indebted is to fixate on the future (Page 186)

A Jewish friend told me he never went to a Jewish therapist because it's too easy to assume everything dysfunctional about your family is cultural. Sometimes you need to explain your experiences in order to understand them yourself.

He got rid of the punchline to prove that stand-up could be anything, which is what geniuses do: they blow up mothballed conventions in their chosen genre and show you how a song, or a poem, or a sculpture, can take any form.

It may baffle outsiders why poets would be so ingratiating, since there is no audience to ingratiate us to. That is because the poet's audience is the institution. We rely on the higher jurisdiction of academia, prize jury panels, and fellowships to gain social capital. A poet's precious avenue for mainstream success is through an award system dependent on the painstaking compromise of a jury panel, which can often guarantee that the anointed book will be free of aesthetic or political risk.

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.

In Pryor, I saw someone channel what I call minor feeling: 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.

Our feelings are overreactions because our lived experiences of structural inequity are not commensurate with their [whites'] deluded reality.

When I heard that Helen drank a bottle of whiskey and shaved off all her hair, I thought, This is it. She's going to kill herself. But of course I underestimated Helen. Stronger than her will to die was her will to endure, especially when she thought she was being tested.

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

It's as if readers relish white male writers behaving badly but they demand that minority writers must always be good.

My shame is not cultural but political. It is being painfully aware of the power dynamic that pulls at the levers of social interactions and the cringing indignity of where I am in that order either as the afflicted—*or* as the afflicter.

The takeaway from the crowd-pleasing scene in the novel and film Crazy Rich Asians is the following: "If you discriminate against us, we'll make more money than you, and buy your fancy hotel that wouldn't let us in." Capitalism as retribution for racism. But isn't that how whiteness recruits us? Whether it's through retribution or indebtedness, who are we when we become better than them in a system that destroyed us?

I wish you'd read your poems," she said sternly. "We need poems to heal." "I'm not ready to heal," I said as gently as I could because I was afraid how she'd respond. She nodded. "I respect that," she said, and walked away.

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.

Dao was not everyman, because not every man would have been brutalized in that way. In the same way I saw Dao and thought, He is not any man, he is my father, Chicago aviation officers thought, He is not any man, he is a thing. They sized him up as passive, unmasculine, untrustworthy, suspicious, and foreign. Years of accumulated stereotypes unconsciously flickered through their minds

One characteristic of racism is that children are treated like adults and adults are treated like children.

Henri Bergson writes that 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.

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.