Cathy Park Hong on the Loneliness of the Asian-American
In her formidable new essay collection, Minor Feelings: An Asian-American Reckoning, poet Cathy Park Hong examines the shame and confusion she felt growing up the daughter of Korean immigrants. Those feelings have morphed into anger over the years, anger for which she believes America must hold space. Now. Hong “is writing in agonized pursuit of a liberation that doesn’t look white — a new sound, a new affect, a new consciousness — and the result feels like what she was waiting for,” says the New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino.
As the host of The Lonely Hour podcast, it was not only Hong’s book that made me want to speak with her, but also this striking moment in her recent New York Times essay “The Slur I Never Expected to Hear in 2020”: “To be Asian in America during the time of coronavirus is to feel very alone. You might think that everyone’s alone during the pandemic. But it’s a different form of isolation carved out by that insidious model-minority myth, with its implication that as long as you worked hard and didn’t ask for handouts, racial inequities could be overcome.” Below, find an edited transcript of our conversation.
Julia Bainbridge: One month has passed since you wrote that essay in the Times. I wonder if you’ve seen any kind of change in anti-Asian racism, or if any of your thinking has changed, in that there might be something you want to add?
Cathy Park Hong: It’s hard to say, because I’ve been quarantined and I haven’t really looked at the news reports or statistics from the AAPI Hate forum, but hate crimes are still occurring. I just did a talk about anti-Asian racism with Jeff Chang, Russell Jeung, Anicka Yi, and Bowen Yang. Jeung gave some statistics and it seems like it’s holding pretty steady — and he’s concerned, actually, that it might get worse when people are no longer sheltering in place because Trump hasn’t really let up on the Chinese virus rhetoric. I think people are still really angry and looking for a scapegoat, so I think it’s probably here to stay for a while. A lot of Asian-Americans are very upset and afraid, but what I feel gratified by is the fact that there’s also a lot of collective rage. I’m hoping that will lead to something.
Bainbridge: The re-emergence back into society: Had you already been thinking about that or did Jeung’s idea put new fear into you about how to prepare?
Hong: I didn’t really think about that, but I was wondering what would happen when everything reopens again. When I went out in the public with a mask on in early April, I was definitely afraid. Now, I’m just much more vigilant. I make sure never to go out at night. When my husband and I — my husband’s white — and my daughter went for a drive out of town, I made sure that he went to the convenience store at the gas station instead of myself. So, I take these precautions that I would not have taken before — and it’s not because of COVID, it’s because I feel self-conscious being Asian.
Bainbridge: You write, “I had a habit of minimizing anti-Asian racism because it had been drilled into me early that racism against Asian just didn’t exist.” I wonder if you can expand on that: How have you been pushed into thinking it didn’t exist?
Hong: It was inculcated in me since I was a kid, so it’s hard to shake. And I also faced microaggressions growing up, but there was no vocabulary for it. Also, there was no representation of Asians on TV.
My parents were very much involved in the Korean community in Los Angeles, where we were living, but they didn’t talk about racism. They just said, “Ignore it and look forward.” So it wasn’t just coming from American society; it was also coming from the immigrant society. I didn’t feel open to say, “Okay, this racist incident happened,” because while my parents would feel terrible for me, they would just say, “Let it go. Don’t think about it.” There was just no outlet for talking about anti-Asian racism, and when it did happen, it was dismissed. Friends of mine or teachers would feel uncomfortable and wouldn’t know how to respond, or they would say, “Oh, it’s not a big deal. It’s all in your head.” After many, many years of that, you just become used to minimizing racism.
A few times throughout my life, I’ve been called a ch**k, and I was absolutely enraged. But then, it turns to doubt or even shame: “Wait, is there something wrong with me?”
Bainbridge: That’s a lonely feeling.
Hong: It’s very lonely thinking you’re the only person who feels this way. And it’s a huge relief when you realize that’s not the case. After that New York Times article, I got a flood of support from people saying they felt the same way.
But there were also plenty of Americans saying, “Why are we paying attention to this? This is trivial; it’s identity politics.” I’ve been hearing that throughout my life, and I have taught myself, later in my adult life, that I can’t minimize it. I have to acknowledge it and confront it and also talk to other people about it. If you encounter it and don’t talk to anyone else, then you think it only happens to you. But talk to other people and realize, no, this is not an isolated incident. It’s actually structural. So it’s very, very important that Asian-Americans speak up, not just in terms of racial harassment, which is the easiest way that people understand racism, but also about job discrimination. Condé Nast laid off a whole bunch of people of color, and a huge percentage of them were Asian-American, for example.
Bainbridge: How would you respond to the person who commented, “This is distracting from the main issues”?
Hong: I think I would probably say, “How is the threat to human life a distraction? What is more important?” Also, “People are able to be concerned with more than one issue at the same time.” I mean, when is it not a distraction? Do Asian-Americans have to be murdered? It doesn’t matter how many racist incidents there are, you’re still going to think it’s a distraction because you don’t care. You don’t want to think about it. The problem is you, refusing to see outside your own reality.
Bainbridge: You mentioned not really having an outlet growing up to express this anger, or to even get real about your experience with other Asian-Americans. Did you feel that was different from what was available to other minority groups? Did you feel that there was more room for anger outside of your community?
Hong: I think I wasn’t very awake when I was growing up… Asian-Americans have been here since the 1500s, but I was part of a new wave that came after 1965. I didn’t really know about the history of Asian-Americans and it wasn’t taught in school, and while there’s been a long history of oppositional movements in black history, and African-Americans have a vocabulary and leaders that they can look to, you could say the same for them: Black and Latinx histories were not taught in school. So there’s that same feeling of estrangement, and of racism always being minimized, your reality never being acknowledged or understood. That’s a universal experience for people in marginalized communities.
Bainbridge: In your piece you talk about the particular loneliness of being Asian-American, though. Where does that stem from?
Hong: Being a model minority isolates us from other people of color. This wedge has been placed between us and other black and brown Americans because we are seen as a “good minority.” We benefited from that, and from being white-adjacent, so other minorities would, for very good reason, resent us. I think Asians have to do a lot more work to not only push up against whiteness, but also really have ourselves understood by other people of color, as well.
Bainbridge: What made you want to pursue these ideas in your work?
Hong: Race has always informed my writing. Even as a teenager, I was combining [this interest] with art making and writing and thinking about language in a political way. And the first time I read James Baldwin, in college, was life-changing.
After graduation, I worked at The Village Voice, and that was really invigorating. The paper was writing about AIDS in Africa and going after Giuliani and talking about racial profiling. I really felt like I was a part of something urgent and important. So, those were very formative years, and I think I was always interested in politics in my writing and my poetry has always been interested in race, colonialism, and capitalism.
Admittedly, I was not always interested in writing directly about Asian-American identity because I didn’t want to fall into this trap, where I was writing the kind of clichéd Asian-American poetry that I see in a lot of anthologies. But, after I became a mother, I decided that I needed to be much more plain-spoken and direct about it. That’s why I decided to write this nonfiction book about Asian-American identity. When I was writing it, it was like 2018 or whatever, and I was like, “People still don’t know us. We don’t know ourselves.” Of course, I’m not saying that there weren’t other brilliant Asian-American writers, but I felt I could help fill this hole.
Bainbridge: Who are some of the other leaders in this space? Asian-American thinkers or writers who have been important to you…
Hong: God, there are so many. I don’t even know where to start! Jeff Chang is brilliant. He was a hip hop journalist and wrote Can’t Stop Won’t Stop and he’s also written a bunch of books on critical race theory. Elaine Kim up at UC Berkeley has written a lot on Korean-American communities. When I was in college, I started thinking about race and double consciousness not just through black literature, but also through South Asian writers like Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha. But there’s a real renaissance of Asian-American literature happening right now.
Bainbridge: I’m a big Alexander Chee fan.
Hong: I love his writing, and he’s also an amazing advocate. There are a lot of really great writers coming out now…
Bainbridge: Ocean Vuong…
Hong: Ocean, yeah. Jenny Zhang has a new book of poems coming and she said, “The canon is being made right now.” That’s such a great way to put it. When I was growing up, yes, there was a lot of really great Asian-American poetry and fiction, but I wasn’t getting exposed to it. There are a lot of really exciting voices out there right now, and, I don’t know, I’m just super exhilarated.
Bainbridge: What do you want to encourage in Asian-Americans?
Hong: Reach out, speak out, don’t minimize anything that’s happening to you — and don’t listen to your parents. If you’re young and you come from a more traditional immigrant family who has a very set path for you, break out of that. Find belonging, but not to a mainstream American culture that gaslights your experience. Find belonging in people who understand you and will hear it.
Bainbridge: And what about for all of us?
Hong: Read people who are in racial groups other than your own. If you’re a man, read women. Listen to your friends who are non-white — and if you don’t have non-white friends, that’s a problem.
And also, you need to try to make other white people understand. White people are super divided. My husband, for example, has an uncle who is totally racist. I said, “Well, you need to talk to him,” and he’s like, “No way.” But I think that can make the most difference, talking to people you love or who you’re related to, to try to help change this country.
Cathy Park Hong is the author of the creative nonfiction book Minor Feelings: An Asian-American Reckoning, and three poetry collections including Dance Dance Revolution, chosen by Adrienne Rich for the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Engine Empire. Hong is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. She is the poetry editor of The New Republic and full professor at the Rutgers University-Newark MFA program in poetry.
