Quotes from Cathy Park Hong

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 (a common Korean compliment: "Your face is so small it's the size of a fist!").

We have a content problem. They think we have no inner resources. But while I may look impassive, I am frantically paddling my feet underwater, always overcompensating to hide my devouring feelings of inadequacy.

Shame squats over my face and sits.

But it would be wrong of me to say that we were all on equal footing, which is why I can't just write about my bad English next to your bad English. In my efforts to speak nearby, I also have to confront the distance between us, which is challenging because once I implicate myself, I can never implicate myself enough.

Three Chinese laborers died for every two miles of track built to make Manifest Destiny a reality, but when the celebratory photo of the Golden Spike was taken, not a single Chinese man was welcome to pose with the other—white—railway workers.

To live an ethical life is to be held accountable for history.

Shame gives me the ability to split myself into the first and third person. To recognize myself, as Sartre writes, "as the Other sees me.

But I felt constrained using the voice of an adolescent girl who didn't know enough because I didn't know enough. I was too young then. It was a crisis that swirled around me, rather than cut through me, and yet the riots have weighed on my conscience as a crucible of race relations that this nation failed.

But where does the silence that neglects her end, and where does the silence that respects her begins? 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 be misread as indifference, or avoidance, or even shame, and eventually this silence passes over into forgetting.

Innocence is, as Bernstein writes, not just an "absence of knowledge" but "an active state of repelling knowledge," embroiled in the statement, "Well, I don't see race" where I eclipses the seeing. Innocence is both a privilege and a cognitive handicap, a sheltered unknowingness that, once protracted into adulthood, hardens into entitlement.

Sometimes you need to explain your experiences in order to understand them yourself.

We were like two negative ions repelling each other. He treated me badly because he hated himself. I treated him badly because I hated myself.

My home was a provisional space in which the present was always wasted in dreaded anticipation of the future.

themselves. 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

where Chinese immigrants couldn't even leave their homes without being spat at, clubbed, or shot in the back, a campaign culminating in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the first immigration law that banned a race from entering the United States, after legislators and media characterized the Chinese as "rats," "lepers," but also "machine-like" workers who stole jobs from good white Americans.

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.

acquired power, you are exposed, and your model minority

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.

Asians lack presence. Asians take up apologetic space. We don't even have enough presence to be considered real minorities. We're not racial enough to be token. We're so post-racial we're silicon.

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 question of racial identity can bedevil the children of Asian immigrants. But it's assumed that immigrant parents themselves are unfazed by the race question because they are either working too hard to care or they identify with the country they hail from and there's nothing more to say on the subject.

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.

A space is overrun when there are too many Asians, and too many can be as few as three.

Whatever power struggle your nation had with other Asian nations—most of it the fallout of Western imperialism and the Cold War—is steamrolled flat by Americans who don't know the difference.