Quotes from Cathy Park Hong

Despite the violent turbulence of that year, Anderson, who was born in 1969, imbues his film with a manufactured, blinkered, pastiched nostalgia that the theorist Lauren Berlant defines as "a small-town one that holds close and high a life that never existed, one that provides a screen memory to cover earlier predations of inequality.

As the poet Prageeta Sharma said, Americans have an expiration date on race the way they do for grief.

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.

Can I write honestly? Not only about how much I've been hurt but how I have hurt others? And can I do it without steeping myself in guilt, since guilt demands absolution and is therefore self-serving? In other words, can I apologize without demanding your forgiveness? Where do I begin?

No matter our income, my family could not cough up the thorn embedded in our chests.

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." But

Indebtedness is not the same thing as gratitude.

The soul of innovation thrives on cross-cultural inspiration. If we are restricted to our lanes, culture will die.

It was made clear to me that the subject of Asian identity itself was insufficient and inadequate unless it was paired with a meatier subject, like capitalism.

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,

Their delusion is also tacit in the commonly heard defensive retort to Black Lives Matter that "all lives matter." Rather than being inclusive, "all" is a walled-off pronoun, a defensive measure to "not make it about race" so that the invisible hegemony of whiteness can continue unchallenged.

Well-meaning friends never failed to warn me, if a white guy was attracted to me, that he probably had an Asian fetish. The result: I distrusted my desirousness. My sexuality was a pathology. If anyone non-Asian liked me, there was something wrong with him.

Even to declare that I'm writing for myself would still mean I'm writing to a part of me that wants to please white people. I didn't know how to escape it.

Shame is often associated with Asianness and the Confucian system of honor alongside its incomprehensible rites of shame, but that is not the shame I'm talking about. 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.

Early on, my father learned that in America, one must be emotionally demonstrative to succeed, so he has a habit of saying "I love you" indiscriminately, to his daughters, to his employees, to his customers, and to airline personnel

The Korean girls I knew were so moody they made Sylvia Plath seem as dull as C-SPAN.

She talked about how 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

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?

English is our ever-expanding neoliberal lingua franca, the consumer language of brand recognition and outsourced labor.

Almost daily, my mother demanded gratitude from me. Almost weekly, my mother said we moved here so I wouldn't have to suffer. Then she asked, "Why do you make yourself suffer?

call 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.

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

Myung Mi Kim was the first poet who said I didn't need to sound like a white poet nor did I have to "translate" my experiences so that they sounded accessible to a white audience. No other mentor afterwards was as emphatic about this idea as her.

Stronger than her will to die was her will to endure, especially when she thought she was being tested.