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Cathy Park Hong

41 quotes

“minor feelings — that feeling of being targeted and ashamed, but not knowing why and not having it be explained to you.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Vox (2021)
“Americans still don’t know how to live together, and unfortunately, we don’t have a language to work through interracial violence. That was the case during the LA riots; I think it’s the case now, too.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Vox (2021)
“What Black and Asian and brown people know about each other is what white people have said about us, and this is why the real problem is still white supremacy, even if the perpetrators aren’t white.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Vox (2021)
“Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it’s more than a chat about race. It’s ontological. It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it’s even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don’t exist.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I hear the phrase “Asians are next in line to be white,” I replace the word “white” with “disappear.” Asians are next in line to disappear.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Innocence is both a privilege and a cognitive handicap, a sheltered unknowingness that, once protracted into adulthood, hardens into entitlement.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Asian Americans inhabit a purgatorial status: neither white enough nor black enough, unmentioned in most conversations about racial identity. In the popular imagination, Asian Americans are all high-achieving professionals. But in reality, this is the most economically divided group in the country, a tenuous alliance of people with roots from South Asia to East Asia to the Pacific Islands, from tech millionaires to service industry laborers. How do we speak honestly about the Asian American condition—if such a thing exists?”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The most damaging legacy of the West has been its power to decide who our enemies are, turning us not only against our own people, like North and South Korea, but turning me against myself.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My term “minor feelings” is deeply indebted to theorist Sianne Ngai, who wrote extensively on the affective qualities of ugly feelings, negative emotions—like envy, irritation, and boredom—symptomatic of today’s late-capitalist gig economy.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In many Asian American novels, writers set trauma in a distant mother country or within an insular Asian family to ensure that their pain is not a reproof against American imperial geopolitics or domestic racism; the outlying forces that cause their pain—Asian Patriarchal Fathers, White People Back Then—are remote enough to allow everyone, including the reader, off the hook.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’d rather be indebted than be the kind of white man who thinks the world owes him, because to live an ethical life is to be held accountable to history.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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, or even shame, and eventually this silence passes over into forgetting.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To other English is to make audible the imperial power sewn into the language, to slit English open so its dark histories slide out.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ever since I started writing poetry seriously, I have used English inappropriately.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a poet, I have always treated English as a weapon in a power struggle, wielding it against those who are more powerful than me. But I falter when using English as an expression of love.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing gets dated faster than a joke.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The flip side of innocence is shame.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Because I didn't learn the language until I started school, I associated English with everything hard: the chalkboard with diagrammed sentences, the syllables in my mouth like hard slippery marbles. English was not an expression of me but a language that was out to get me, threaded with invisible trip wires that could expose me at the slightest misstep.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One characteristic of racism is that children are treated like adults and adults are treated like children. Watching a parent being debased like a child is the deepest shame. 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.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most white Americans can only understand racial trauma as a spectacle.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Two thousand and sixteen was the year of white tears...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.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have to address whiteness because Asian Americans have yet to truly reckon with where we stand in the capitalist white supremacist hierarchy of this country.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anti-Asian racism has come roaring back with the coronavirus scare,” says Korean American writer Cathy Park Hong. “People don’t think Asians face racism, but it’s always lurking under the surface.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Asians are hyper invisible. We’re not even included in racial breakdowns in polls. We’re always listed as ‘other’, if we’re listed at all...It almost feels like we’re not publicly participating in this country.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The way Richard Pryor talked about race was so brutally honest and funny and unvarnished. It made me think that I had never encountered Asian identity being written in that way.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s one of the best benefits of growing up bilingual, right? You realise that meaning is slippery.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Maybe what I’m responding to is how white America has flattened our experience to a single story, how they perceive us as one kind. The book is an attempt to overthrow that.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“you have to write toward your discomfort.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Shame can make you more aware. Shame can make you more empathetic, too. What’s important, of course, is not staying in that shame, not wallowing in shame. If there are any political uses of shame, it’s that it allows you to see outside yourself. And to move, and to do something with that.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m a poet, so I look at prose differently than a journalist would. I’m not trying to make a singular argument. I want to document my thought process. And that thought process is never linear. It involves different subjects.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Western is now a global fantasy. It’s hard to pin down what the myth means because the frontier is now so abstract. To dream of the frontier is to dream of progress. But there’s also the fantasy of the frontier as being lawless. There are no regulations that hamper the body; there is no superego in the frontier.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In certain ways, the Western ideals of the frontier, of escaping regulation, are still alive today, but now they are carried on in the life of corporations rather than individuals.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The frontier is always the border of something, virgin territory where we can build new worlds, remake ourselves; always there’s this obsession with remaking ourselves. So to dream of the frontier is also to desire immortality. But there is no such thing as new territory. There are always previous civilizations, societies, families, and cultures. So when we build new worlds, there will be violence.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don’t create redemption for my characters. The narrative of redemption is a false and lazy conceit in art. Redemption through the act of violence is avoiding culpability.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The indignity of being Asian in this country has been underreported. We have been cowed by the lie that we have it good. We keep our heads down and work hard, believing that our diligence will reward us with our dignity, but our diligence will only make us disappear. By not speaking up, we perpetuate the myth that our shame is caused by our repressive culture and the country we fled, whereas America has given us nothing but opportunity. The lie that Asians have it good is so insidious that even now as I write, I'm shadowed by doubt that I didn't have it bad compared to others. But racial trauma is not a competitive sport. The problem is not that my childhood was exceptionally traumatic but that it was in fact rather typical.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whether our families come from Guatemala, Afghanistan, or South Korea, the immigrants since 1965 have shared histories that extend beyond this nation, to our countries of origin, where our lineage has been decimated by Western imperialism, war, and dictatorships orchestrated or supported by the United States. In our efforts to belong in America, we act grateful, as if we've been given a second chance at life. 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.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Racism is never new. It just changes, it adapts. I think people are louder. But when I hear Asians being called “chink” on the street, that’s not really different from what I experienced as a kid. It’s all part of a historical continuum. The issue is that people forget. My book is not offering new ideas exactly, it’s just a reminder. It’s a reminder of the history of Asian Americans in this white supremacist capitalist nation. I think sometimes we get lulled because we forget. Being a person of color, you’re either invisible or hypervisible. And when you’re hypervisible, your hypervisibility—when there’s a target on your back—is dependent entirely on what’s happening economically in this nation, or what’s happening with foreign policy. One year it’s Muslims, another year it’s undocumented Latinx people, and this year it’s East Asians. It’s like musical chairs.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A lot of us come from countries—if you’re South Asian or Southeast Asian—that have been colonized by Western powers. But that’s never talked about. It’s almost as if in immigrant stories we’re supposed to forget our past once our family comes over here. Or there is a kind of writing about the past, but it’s divorced from US foreign policy. It comes from immigrant parents as well. They say, “Oh, you’re here, it’s a rich land, and there are so many opportunities here, you should be grateful,” without actually acknowledging why we ended up here in the first place. I wanted to show how it was all interrelated.”
Cathy Park Hong (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source