Cathy Park Hong may be best known for Minor Feelings, but she is first and foremost a poet. This is why her struggle to understand racism and identity is so closely tied to her quest to find an authentic authorial voice. She admits that, since she went through the U.S. school system, she was “raised and educated to please white people.” She grew up expecting her audiences to be white, and she learned that those audiences also have specific expectations about what she, as a Korean American woman writing poetry in English, should be producing for them. She acknowledges that these expectations have influenced her work, so her own voice isn’t even entirely hers: rather, it’s conditioned by her audience, and that audience is conditioned by American racism.
As Hong tries to counteract racism’s influence on her voice and work, she asks herself two crucial questions: who is she writing to, and whose behalf is she writing on? Put differently, who is the right audience for Asian American literature, and what does it mean to represent a group as diverse as “Asian Americans” in the first place? There are no easy or universal answers to these questions, but they are still extremely important—to the point that the questions themselves speak to a key element that Hong believes is at play in Asian American art. In fact, Hong believes that all artists of color must deliberately unlearn the industry convention of adapting their work to an imagined white audience and then choose their voice and audience for themselves. Hong, for her own part, argues that it’s important to embrace alternative approaches to language (including the nonnative dialects she calls “bad English”) and try to “speak nearby” other groups, or include their voices and perspectives without “speaking for” them. Yet there is no single right answer to her questions about voice and audience. Rather, she hopes that these questions will become topics of active debate in the world of Asian American art and literature, and she hopes that critics will learn to view the way each artist approaches such questions as a defining characteristic of their work—just like a poet’s choice of form or a visual artist’s choice of medium.
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Art, Voice, and Audience Quotes in Minor Feelings
My classmate’s repellent post was almost easier to handle than my graduate school experience, because the slow drip of racism at Iowa was underhanded. I always second-guessed myself, questioning why I was being paranoid. I remember the wall of condescension whenever I brought up racial politics in workshop. Eventually, I internalized their condescension, mocked other ethnic poetry as too ethnicky. 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. I knew other writers of color at Iowa who scrubbed ethnic markers from their poetry and fiction because they didn’t want to be branded as identitarians. Looking back, I realized all of them were, curiously, Asian American.
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.
Watching Pryor, I realized that I was still writing to that institution. It’s a hard habit to kick. I’ve been raised and educated to please white people and this desire to please has become ingrained into my consciousness. 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.
How naïve to think that my invisibility meant I could play God! If Whitman’s I contained multitudes, my I contained 5.6 percent of this country. Readers, teachers, and editors told me in so many words that I should write whatever felt true to my heart but that since I was Asian, I might as well stick to the subject of Asians, even though no one cared about Asians, but what choice did I have since if I wrote about, say, nature, no one would care because I was an Asian person writing about nature?
I suspected that if a reader read my poem and then saw my name, the fuse of the poem would blow out, leading the reader to think, I thought I liked the poem but on second thought, I can’t relate to it.
The ethnic literary project has always been a humanist project in which nonwhite writers must prove they are human beings who feel pain. Will there be a future where I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain? 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.
Writing about race is a polemic, in that we must confront the white capitalist infrastructure that has erased us, but also a lyric, in that our inner consciousness is knotted with contradictions. As much as I protest against the easy narrative of overcoming, I have to believe we will overcome racial inequities; as much as I’m exasperated by sentimental immigrant stories of suffering, I think Koreans are some of the most traumatized people I know. 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. To truthfully write about race, I almost have to write against narrative because the racialized mind is, as Frantz Fanon wrote, an “infernal circle.”
On its own, Moonrise Kingdom is a relatively harmless film. But for those of us who have been currently shocked by the “unadulterated white racism … splattered all over the media,” we might ask ourselves what has helped fuel our country’s wistfully manufactured “screen memory.” Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom is just one of countless contemporary films, works of literature, pieces of music, and lifestyle choices where wishing for innocent times means fetishizing an era when the nation was violently hostile to anyone different. 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.
It was once a source of shame, but now I say it proudly: bad English is my heritage. I share a literary lineage with writers who make the unmastering of English their rallying cry—who queer it, twerk it, hack it, Calibanize it, other it by hijacking English and warping it to a fugitive tongue. To other English is to make audible the imperial power sewn into the language, to slit English open so its dark histories slide out.
A side effect of this justified rage has been a “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.
We must make right this unequal distribution but we must do so without forgetting the immeasurable value of cultural exchange in what Hyde calls the gift economy. In reacting against the market economy, we have internalized market logic where culture is hoarded as if it’s a product that will depreciate in value if shared with others; where instead of decolonizing English, we are carving up English into hostile nation-states. The soul of innovation thrives on cross-cultural inspiration. If we are restricted to our lanes, culture will die.
I turned to the modular essay because I am only capable of “speaking nearby” the Asian American condition, which is so involuted that I can’t stretch myself across it. […] I sometimes still find the subject, Asian America, to be so shamefully tepid that I am eager to change it—which is why I have chosen this episodic form, with its exit routes that permit me to stray. But I always return, from a different angle, which is my own way of inching closer to it.
In thinking about my own Asian identity, I don’t think I can seal off my imagined world so it’s only people of my likeness, because it would follow rather than break from this segregated imagination.
But having said that, how can I write about us living together when there isn’t too much precedent for it? Can I write about it without resorting to some facile vision of multicultural oneness or the sterilizing language of virtue signaling? 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?
The avant-garde genealogy could be tracked through stories of bad-boy white artists who “got away with it,” beginning with Duchamp signing a urinal and calling it art. It’s about defying standards and initiating a precedent that ultimately liberates art from itself. […] The problem is that history has to recognize the artist’s transgressions as “art,” which is then dependent on the artist’s access to power. A female artist rarely “gets away with it.” A black artist rarely “gets away with it.” Like the rich boarding school kid who gets away with a hit-and-run, getting away with it doesn’t mean that you’re lawless but that you are above the law. The bad-boy artist can do whatever he wants because of who he is. Transgressive bad-boy art is, in fact, the most risk-averse, an endless loop of warmed-over stunts for an audience of one: the banker collector.
I would have had a happier four years in college had I never met Helen. But I wouldn’t have been the writer I am today. Helen validated us, solidified us, and made us feel inevitable. We were going to define American culture. […] We had the confidence of white men, which was swiftly cut down after graduation, upon our separation, when each of us had to prove ourselves again and again, because we were, at every stage of our careers, underestimated. But I wouldn’t have had it any other way. That struggle kept me faithful to the creative imagination cultivated by our friendship, which was an imagination chiseled by rigor and depth to reflect the integrity of our discontented consciousness.
Cha doesn’t ever direct your reading of Dictee. She refuses to translate the French or contextualize a letter by former South Korean leader Syngman Rhee to Franklin D. Roosevelt or caption the photo of French actress Renée Jeanne Falconetti in Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. The reader is a detective, puzzling out her own connections.
[…]
Cha spoke my language by indicating that English was not her language, that English could never be a true reflection of her consciousness, that it was as much an imposition on her consciousness as it was a form of expression. And because of that, Dictee felt true.
The length to which scholars will argue how Cha is recovering the lives of Korean women silenced by historical atrocities while remaining silent about the atrocity that took Cha’s own life has been baffling. […] The more I read about her, the less I knew. And the less I knew, the more I couldn’t help but regard Cha as a woman who also disappeared without explanation.
By introducing me to Cha, my professor Kim established a direct, if modest, literary link: Cha, Kim, myself. Not only did they share my history, they provided for me an aesthetic from which I could grow. For a while, however, I thought I had outgrown Cha. I’d cite modernist heavyweights like James Joyce and Wallace Stevens as influences instead of her. I took her for granted. Now, in writing about her death, I am, in my own way, trying to pay proper tribute. But once, when I read an excerpt of this essay in public, someone asked if Cha would have written about her rape homicide in the fairly straightforward narrative account that I’m writing in. “Not at all,” I said. “But I’m just trying to write what happened. I found that formal experimentation was getting in the way of documenting facts.”
Poetry is a forgiving medium for anyone who’s had a strained relationship with English. Like the stutterer who pronounces their words flawlessly through song, the immigrant writes their English beautifully through poetry. The poet Louise Glück called the lyric a ruin. The lyric as ruin is an optimal form to explore the racial condition, because our unspeakable losses can be captured through the silences built into the lyric fragment. I have relied on those silences, maybe too much, leaving a blank space for the sorrows that would otherwise be reduced by words. […] By turning to prose, I am cluttering that silence to try to anatomize my feelings about a racial identity that I still can’t examine as a writer without fretting that I have caved to my containment.
Our respective racial containment isolates us from each other, enforcing our thoughts that our struggles are too specialized, unrelatable to anyone else except others in our group, which is why making myself, and by proxy other Asian Americans, more human is not enough for me. 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, the formerly colonized; survivors, such as Native Americans, whose ancestors have already lived through end times; migrants and refugees living through end times currently, fleeing the droughts and floods and gang violence reaped by climate change that’s been brought on by Western empire.
