Karen: Seattle Public Library hosting tonight's program with Cathy Park Hong and Vince Schleitwiler.
Cathy Park Hong is the author of three poetry collections, including Dance Dance Revolution,
chosen by Adrienne Rich for the Barnard Women's Poet Prize, and Engine Empire.
Hong is a recipient of the Wyndham Campbell Literature Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship,
and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.
Her poems have been published in Poetry,
The New York Times, The Paris Review, McSweeney's,
Boston Review and other journals.
She's the Poetry Editor of The New Republic,
and a full professor at the Rutgers University Newark MFA Program in poetry,
and tonight she appears in conversation with a local scholar, critic, and journalist, Vince Schleitwiler,
a fourth generation Japanese American, he
was raised in Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood,
and currently lives in Seattle.
He is the author of Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific: Imperialism's Racial Justice and Its Fugitives,
and this book explores the intersecting
migrations of Japanese Americans,
Filipinos, and African Americans across
U.S. imperial domains.
As a public scholar he has collaborated with artist Rea Tajiri on Wataridori: Birds of Passage,
he served as a contributing writer and researcher for Japanese American heritage on Vashon Island,
and he's also a frequent contributor to Seattle's Pan-Asian American newspaper, The International Examiner,
he's also quite a lively presence on Facebook, as Cathy Park Hong is on Twitter.
So months ago, it actually seems like a lifetime ago, we were set to host this talk at Elliott Bay,
and we started promoting this book in late December, early January,
before the full effects of Covid-19 was even imagined in much of the world,
and so much has happened since then,
including waves of Black Lives Matter protests nationally and internationally,
and also waves unfortunately of anti-Asian violence.
In her book, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning,
poet critic and essayist, Cathy Park Hong, wrote,
"For as long as I could remember, I have struggled to prove myself into existence."
For me this line sets the tone for one of the most thoughtful and important books I've read in years.
I had to stop for a minute and think
about it. Much of this book is like that.
Lines that you could pass by, but you can't because you know that you're going to recognize something here,
that is percolating away in yourself and within our communities,
and this recognition is powerful.
In this book she raised something within
us as a community and there's no turning back,
and she might be writing about the uncertainty of Asian Americanness as an identity or as a people,
or about the revolutionary comedy of
Richard Pryor,
or of the unknown life of Teresa Hak Kyung Cha,
and she's one of the four mothers of Asian American avant-garde writing,
and it was really wonderful to see more details about her life in this book.
All this year I've been saying this book
woke me up,
and now I have to say I have to live up to it,
reading it was a life-changing experience for me,
and I think it will be for you too,
and speaking of that.
There's been a bit of time so I'm thinking that some of you may have read this book.
You may also have questions raised by the Q & A.
We're going to try to get to as many questions as possible,
and we would like you to enter those questions in the Q & A function,
but with that please join me in welcoming Cathy Park Hong and Vince Schleitwiler,
to this virtual Seattle Public Library event.
Vince: Thank you, Karen. And thanks to Stesha and Karen for really keeping the faith with this event,
that was really a long time coming,
and I wanna add part of what makes it a long time coming, Cathy, as you know,
is that our paths kind of crossed quite a bit in our lives,
but we've never really had a chance to sit down and talk,
but the two of us both overlapped over in college,
we were both in New York after that,
and I didn't realize that, I can't remember if we, I don't think we overlapped with the Village Voice,
but I think we were both at the Village Voice at some point.
Cathy: Oh.
Anyway, we've encountered each other through the years,
but we were supposed to talk in March and then, you know, things happened.
I was actually scheduled to teach this book in a class in the spring quarter,
and it was scheduled for the last week of the quarter and,
then they burned down the precinct in Minneapolis and so we didn't talk about this book, we talk about things.
So I'm really really excited to finally have this conversation,
and, you know, I was thinking I wanted to start actually talking about how the world has changed,
because I think not only did the pandemic reveal or expose a lot of anti-Asian racism,
that has always been in U.S. culture and never gone away,
but I also think that the George Floyd protests even more so have caused Asian Americans,
to try to understand our place in a U.S.
racial order in a different way,
and that kind of reckoning, right, I don't
think it has anything comparable with it,
since the 60s when the term Asian American was invented.
So you wrote a book that is really resonant with these questions, but you wrote it before, right,
and I imagine that that's an experience of a kind of intense vertigo, right, to see,
the world playing out in ways that are
clearly resonating with your book,
after the book's already out there so I was wondering if you wanted to talk a little bit about,
how you have thought about these events, how you felt about these events,
in relationship to your book.
Cathy: Yeah, sure. Thank you, that's a really
thoughtful question,
and before I speak on that, I want to thank Karen,
thank you so much for your really moving introduction. I'm really happy that this is finally happening, you know,
in a virtual form, I'd rather see this irl (in real life),
but you know, c'est la vie and Vince, it's really exciting to be talking to you.
We are Oberlin Alums. Oberlin is featured in my book Minor Feelings,
and I think we've always had friends in common.
I think we were in a group together, some kind of club or something you were the head of?
You were like the president of this group, right?
I, um, I got kind of - well, okay so we had this experimental college...classes...
they were essentially just excuses to get a discounted beer, right.
Cathy: Yeah.
Vince: There's this night where instructors get a beer
and so I ran this really shameful excuse
of an Asian American literature or arts class,
and I think you were part of it and I remember thinking,
I don't think these people were really, you know, going to have these serious questions,
and I was just looking for cheap beer.
Cathy: Yeah, I couldn't remember that at all. I thought I was a total slacker.
Like do you remember, I think that's like
my memory of you leaving the ExCo,
and I was also thinking that you were very serious,
and scholarly too.
So, you know, but anyway I'm really excited to be here.
How do I answer this question, I mean,
it's been really a vertigo to see this book, Minor Feelings, come out during this kind of political hurricane,
and if I were to know that this book was going to come out during this time period, pandemic,
and what happened to George Floyd and everything else, I would have thought that the book,
would have just gotten lost in the maelstrom and I've been really heartened to hear how the book,
has actually been a kind of, been sort of a guiding light, one of many guiding lights for Asian Americans,
and that has been really really really gratifying.
You know, I've been asked - I've been told that the book is quite timely from a number of people,
and timeliness is a description that I, you know, approach rarely,
because race is always timely,
but I would say even I was a little - I was not expecting the anti-Asian racism.
We East Asians, and here I must be specific about, not South Asians,
but East Asians are used to being hyper-invisible rather than hyper-visible,
and to see us as a target the way Muslims were during 9/11 was indeed very much -
it took some getting used to.
That being said, you know, I've been saying this over and over again and many other critics have said this before,
anti-Asian, everything that's xenophobia yellow peril, you know, being called Chink,
that was always under the surface, you know.
We have many historical moments from the Exclusion Act,
to what was happened to Japanese Americans in the 80s.
It was always there, it was always percolating,
and I just feel like with the U.S., with more non-white immigrants, it's like musical chairs.
It's like, what group is gonna be the scapegoat based on what's happening economically,
or foreign policy and I guess, this time it was East Asian Americans turn.
I am seeing what I'm really feel excited about is how,
and maybe this is just the people who I tend to be in contact with,
how Asian Americans have been galvanized,
and are really doing as much as they can to ally themselves with Black Lives Matter,
really being active protesters and it does really feel exciting to me that I hear echoes,
that I'm seeing echoes of kind of the marchers, the protesters in the late 60s and 70s,
when a lot of Asian American activists allied themselves with the Black Power movement,
and there was also a third world power as well and a lot of that coming from the bay area.
So all of that, I mean, there's like so many things to say about it.
One thing I will say though is that when I was writing the book,
this was happening while I was writing
the book.
I started writing the book in 2015.
Black Lives Matter was happening in like November 2014.
That's when it started, so it was like while I was working on this book, you know,
you had the Black Lives Matter uprising and there were protests at university campuses,
and the arts and education, everywhere, it was all percolating,
and I was seeing this activism incubating in my classroom as well.
My students are poets, you know, and I was really seeing this energy where,
like say 10 to 15 years ago the poets
in my class,
or when I was a grad student, the poets didn't want politics in the classroom at all,
or didn't want to talk about race at all,
whereas within, especially within the last five years the poets really consider themselves activists,
and so basically it was percolating, it was incubating,
and then it just blew up, you know.
So as heartened as I am, I'm also not entirely surprised. I'm actually really happy.
I was like when is the revolution gonna happen and it's not happening, I mean of course it's also really scary,
but that's my long-winded response and I think - I don't know if I answered your question?
Vince: No that's great,
and I want to get back, maybe in a question or two to that earlier period, I think it's important right now,
and I think that those of us who've been following the poetry world know that there was a kind of reckoning,
that began then that you were part of and so it's interesting now to look back on it,
or to look at a new wave of it.
I think there's something underneath there that was happening with -
maybe I'll go ahead and ask this
question now right,
in an era of multiculturalism, in an era when multiculturalism went from this kind of insurgent force,
that came out of what was left of those older third world movements,
and became a kind of dominant language for talking about difference in a time of unquestioned U.S. power,
and we dealt with the politics of that at a time that was,
probably as reactionary appeared in American culture as you can find going back 100 years,
and that's what started to break down a few years back,
and yet there's this tremendous change
now.
The students I'm teaching in class now that I taught in the winter,
and the students, it's like they took a couple years of graduate school in ethnic studies in between.
I was teaching a class in Asian American theater and performance right before the George Floyd protest,
taught the same class in the beginning
of the summer, again completely different students,
and so I'm kind of curious to somebody who was very very involved with teaching poets with younger poets,
but also in participating in this kind of reckoning of our race that the poetry world had a few years back.
What is it like to see this new wave of it,
and to see new challenges coming from folks who kind of take that for granted?
Cathy: I think that's a very good
question,
you were breaking up in the middle in the very beginning here. You were saying something about multiculturalism,
what period of time were you talking about?
Multiculturalism coming out of the 1980s. By the time we're in college that's when it becomes dominant,
and we don't notice that because we
think we're still fighting,
and also because Oberlin, like a lot of large colleges, is generally 10 to 20 years behind the times anyway.
But it became dominant and we didn't know that and that is -
(connection weak - untranscribable)
Vince: That's very big picture. I was kind of curious about your experience.
I don't know how much people here in the audience were sort of following those debates in the poetry world,
but the reckoning began in poetry earlier than this year.
Cathy: It was happening in the arts,
definitely in poetry it was happening and in visual arts as well.
It's funny, I have to talk about Oberlin since you went to Oberlin too,
and Oberlin is always made fun of by the press,
for being overly PC and just getting really pissed off about how bad the Bánh mì sandwiches are in cafeteria,
and so forth and they're always like kind of dubbed as being overly entitled and so forth,
and that Oberlin overly politically correct culture has never changed, never changes at Oberlin,
and it was the same way when we were in school, but in a way it's like none of what's happening now,
with woke culture or cancel culture or whatever.
That's what I grew up with, that was Oberlin,
but I do think that kind of racial discourse goes in waves.
Claudia Rankine has talked about it.
The anthology that she edited she talked about how,
Americans can only talk about race when it's a scandal,
and they have a hard time considering it and talking about it as a chronic condition,
something that actually is not
changing and it's the bedrock of this country.
I quoted Gita Sharma in Minor Feelings, where white Americans treat race like they treat grief,
at some point they expect you to get
over it.
And I think politically and I think we've seen that wave, like this wave of multiculturalism in the 80s,
and then by the time I was in grad school, by the time I was living in New York, no one wanted to talk about it,
and there was like post-race America, there was Obama,
and also the poetry world was really apolitical, very white,
which I write about in Stand Up and then there was again sort of a reckoning I would say with Black Lives Matter,
but also think within the last five years there's also been a lot of thinkers who've been,
I feel like we can't discount them,
like Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates and Claudia Rankine,
and Kiese Laymon and all of these writers and activists and so forth,
who've been like really doing the work,
and the fact that you have some stay-at-home mom,
white woman from Wyoming talking about structural racism,
that was not happening like five years ago.
So I think that this movement is only growing.
We also have to realize, I think this is also bound to happen, that in 2050 the minorities will be the majority,
and we are seeing that and we're going to see more of that with global warming.
What's going to happen too with climate refugees? Are we going to build a wall?
Millions will die in Guatemala and so
forth,
so it's like there's also kind of this global reckoning that's gonna happen where the formerly colonized,
are gonna wanna want to come into the west.
They're going to swarm the west and this
is like a xenophobes perspective.
So what's America going to be?
What is race going to be and this was something I was really thinking about in Minor Feelings.
Asian Americans are going to be double what they are now.
We may now be like such a small percentage that we don't even register in the polls,
that we're still considered other,
but we are a growing demographic and we
cannot be ignored.
Nor will other non-whites and even though we have to center Black voices,
Indigenous voices, we also have to consider what's going to happen with these other immigrants ,
and we also have to consider America's racism abroad with say the Chinese Exclusion Act,
the Japanese internment, what they did to South America, and all of it.
There's a lot of reckonings America needs to deal with,
and we have to be as precise as possible in our activism.
Vince: I wanted to make sure I got in a question about the concept of Minor Feelings,
and ask you to talk about that.
You mentioned earlier in your last comment, you were talking about Gita Sharma, about grief,
and it made me think about a line that James Baldwin says, white Americans don't believe in death,
and that's why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them.
There's something really complicated that you're trying to get in that concept of Minor Feelings,
and I just wanted to start by saying for most non-Asian American audiences,
introducing these kind of ideas you talk about, you have to work with stereotypes of passivity or submissiveness,
or emotionlessness of Asian Americans to Asian American women,
I'd like to think that the Elliott Bay/Seattle Public Library audience,
is one that is a little bit more informed in Asian American and Asian American feminism,
where the obvious thing that people talk about is actually anger and rage,
and there's a lot of anger and rage in
this book too,
but there's a point that you're making about
Minor Feelings that I think is really complex and new,
and I was wondering if you could just have a look at that.
(inaudible)
Cathy: I'm wondering if it's better if I just read it, read a passage.
Vince: Sure, sure.
Cathy: I feel like every time I try to define
it, I'm like I wrote about it,
I should be able to find it because
I think it's kind of slippery term,
and then I'll talk about it afterwards, but I think my book does a better job defining it than I do extemporaneously.
So I'll just read just a couple paragraphs.
This is when I talk about Richard Pryor.
In Pryor, I saw someone channel what I 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.
Minor feelings arise, for instance, upon hearing a slight, knowing it's racial, and being told,
"Oh that's all in your head."
A now classic book that explores minor feelings is Claudia Rankine's Citizen
After hearing a racist remark, the speaker asks herself, "What did you say?"
She saw what she saw, she heard what she heard, but after her reality has been belittled so many times,
she begins to doubt her very own senses.
Such disfiguring of senses engenders the minor feelings of paranoia, shame, irritation, and melancholy.
Minor feelings are not often featured in contemporary American literature because these emotions,
do not conform to the archetypal narrative
that highlights survival and self-determination.
Unlike the organizing principles of bildungsroman,
minor feelings are not generated from
major change but from lack of change,
in particular, structural
racial and economic change.
Rather than using racial trauma as a dramatic stage for individual growth,
the literature of minor feelings explores the trauma of a racist capitalist system,
that keeps the individual in place.
I want to stop right there because I think that is a key characteristic of what minor feelings is,
the sort of feelings that are generated in a system that doesn't actually change your position,
and I think it's actually getting
worse as the pandemic has indicated,
where we're going from like a neoliberal country to a neo-feudal country.
I'm really curious about this book that's coming out, I think her name is Isabel Wilkerson, called Caste,
and it's something that is where race and class are just so sedimented,
so built in, and yet we still have this sort of mentality, we're still fed this sort of American optimism,
and so it's this kind of feeling where you are stuck,
whether you're Indigenous or Black or Chinese American or whatever,
but then at the same time your reality of being stuck is constantly gaslight by the dominant culture,
who believes, really believes so wholeheartedly in individual triumph,
and believe so wholeheartedly in individual freedom for the sake of any kind of collective,
for the sake of any kind of collective sacrifice,
and what that does to you mentally,
and I think my idea of minor feelings has a lot to do with this Korean,
which I talk about in the book, this national emotion called han,
which is a combination of melancholy
and paranoia and shame,
and minor feelings that has to do with Korea's own history of colonization and war and dictatorships,
and I was like well this is something, like han is what I really relate to, but why is it,
I don't think it's just a Korean phenomenon,
it's something that could also be translated in American soil too.
And I do think I'm wary of analogizing, making analogies between different races,
but I do think there are some parallels between Korean han and then also the Black condition in America.
Vince: Yeah, thanks for that.
I know that there are a bunch of questions piling up,
we're gonna go to questions in the Q & A soon,
and get through as many of those as we can.
I have so many questions that I did not get to so let's see what we can do,
but one thing I did want to actually ask you about, one more question before we go to Q & A,
at the end of your book you talk about Yuri Kochiyama.
Did you meet Yuri at Oberlin?
Cathy: What? Did I met Yuri?
Vince: Yeah.
Cathy: No.
Vince: Yuri came to Oberlin and I was actually on the London program that you when on when she came.
My wife, all my friends, they all
met her.
I made a movie about her, anyway, Yuri Kochiyama,
a great Japanese American activist,
who is famous for her work with Malcolm X, with Puerto Rican nationalists.
You talk also in the end about the protests at Fort Sill, Oklahoma by Tsuru for Solidarity,
and you quote Tom Ikeda, I don't know of you know,
Tom Ikeda, the head of Densho, somebody a lot of folks here in Seattle know really well.
Talking about solidarity, the last question I want to ask before the Q & A,
thinking about this problem of solidarity,
in that essay you talk about a lot of things are very specifically Korean American,
what is the meaning of a term like Asian American in that context,
and then how do you take that sense of solidarity and extend it to questions of anti-Blackness,
questions of stuff like colonialism, at a time when that solidarity is very, very questionable.
Do you have thoughts on how you feel those acts of solidarity can hold up?
Cathy: I don't know, I think it's a really complicated question.
I do believe in solidarity, I do believe in allianceship,
I think as much it's important to talk about how racial capitalism,
where the different slots we're in because of racial capitalism,
and how my oppression is nothing like your
oppression.
it's also important to talk about how we are connected too,
because I think in order to really tear the house down and tear the rotten plumbing down,
we need to band together, easier said than done, but
I think that - I'm very wary about how social media and digital capitalism puts us into these -
it's like branding, I think it's an extension of branding,
where you're like this is my territory, this is my spot, this is my identity,
and you're over there and I'm over there, and I think it creats what Hannah Arendt calls negative solidarity,
where it's like we're in competition with each other and there's resentment and envy,
and I tend to be really wary of that and it's easy to see that actually on Twitter and Instagram and so forth,
and unfortunately because of the pandemic,
a lot of the activism that's happening, the life of activism you see it happening online as offline,
when you see it offline it's much messier, much more nuanced,
and you do see people banding together.
I think the way I define Asian American identity,
I said it was like a tenuous alliance of different ethnicities, different nationalities,
and I see the Asian American racial condition and identity to be very porous,
and I talk about Asian American identity I don't think I could just talk about being Asian,
for me what's more interesting is the relationship between identities,
rather than just talking about the identity itself.
Especially if you think about the way Asian American identity was formed.
Asian American was the term itself, the moniker itself,
was defined by these activists who are very much inspired by the Black Power movement,
and so none of this exists in a vacuum, you know.
I mean as much as Asian America was formed through white supremacy and the immigration laws,
it was also formed by the civil rights movement,
and therefore I think it's almost impossible to talk about ethnicities as just one,
and they're allianceship has to be
created,
and later, towards the end of the book, Lorraine O'Grady, I quoted the artist
fabulous artist Lorraine O'Grady who
said,
in the future white supremacy will not
need white people,
and that really scared the shit out of me
and I think there was a lot of conflict there,
I think I felt very ambivalent writing the book,
because I always thought people will assume that Asian American identity is a non-urgent subject,
it's sort of anemic,
it's sort of not the same kind of urgency when you're writing about the Asian American condition.
but when I heard that I felt this real need and urgency to finish this book,
and I can't really articulate what it was about that quote that really shook me,
but it did and I was like I need to address it by writing this book.
Vince: Yeah, absolutely.
I think the real issue underlying a lot of this is,
Ishmael Reed put it as, when you talk about white supremacy a dying mule kicks the hardest.
The conditions that produced this long history of white supremacy are falling apart,
and that's why we feel it so intensely,
but also that means that all these other racial positions are getting renegotiated,
and understood and the question is do they
then reproduce white supremacy without white people.
Cathy: Yeah, yeah.
This it it. I think racial identities are being renegotiated right now,
and I don't think Asian Americans were not always in control of their own narratives,
and the parameters of what Asian American identity was always defined for us by white supremacy,
and I was like we need to re-negotiate it ourselves.
We need to take responsibility, both as victims and perpetrators of white supremacy.
Vince: I think that the last moment when this happened right was when the term was created,
and the term, if you look at the movements that produced it, they were solidarity movements first,
they were solidarity movements that turned into figuring out, well what are we then, what is our position?
The answer to that might not be -
I think you said this in an interview maybe with Franny Choi,
that the answer might not be Asian American anymore that might not be the term.
(inaudible)
Cathy: I was gonna say it has to be addressed.
Vince: Yeah.
There's a number of questions here,
and I should say if you're seeing them that the depth of gratitude people have to you for writing this book,
and how deeply impacted people have been through all these questions,
so I'm going try to grab a couple of them,
there's on here about the way that you balance different threads of this book.
Says, Cathy, I have to thank you from the bottom of my heart for writing this book,
it deeply touched me and I use what I learned from you in the artwork I create today.
I'm so impressed by the many entry points used to explore Asian American identity,
through your own memories, the stand-up of Richard Pryor,
the life and work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, for example.
How do you choose these threads and keep them balanced?
And I know you talk about having to find a form in which you could express these ideas,
going from poetry, learning from stand-up and moving to what you call this modular essay,
which sometimes looks like a very simple form, but when you look at what you're doing,
and all these things you're pulling together it's quite complicated.
Do you want to talk about how you chose those things, kept them balanced, and found a form for that?
Cathy: It was through a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of anguish, and pain, and stress,
and making my husband read multiple drafts and that's how I did it.
It was not fun.
I think the organization of the book is where my background as a poet has been has been key,
to working on this book.
I'll say that if you read my poetry Engine Empire and Dance Dance Revolutionary,
or even my first book Translating Mo'um.
I've always been a poet who's been very restless. I've always played with genre,
whether it's narrative genre like throwing in science fiction and poetry,
or using prose or different dialects and
so forth, I like to kind of use them all,
and one of my influences was Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in the book.
So my approach to the essay was the same it was like I'm not going to do just a memoir,
I'm not going to write as a memoirist, I'm going to also put on my critic's hat, my historian's hat,
and my asshole hat.
I wanted to kind of embody as many different identities as possible.
So when I was writing about reckoning, thinking about reckoning with Asian American,
I have to do it from many different positions as a woman who was once a girl, as a poet, as a former artist,
as a citizen of this country, as a woman of color, as a mother, as a daughter,
and I wanted to inhabit as many roles as possible in writing and writing this book,
and therefore it was very important for me to have all these different entry points.
What was also very important for me - I've gotten some flak for this book,
people are like, why was this book so digressive,
or I don't understand why it wasn't like this overarching historical perspective on Asian America,
and why she wrote about her friendship,
like why did she spend so much time writing about a friendship with college,
and for me to write a book about the Asian American condition I had to be as viscerally subjective as possible,
as personal as possible.
In the subtitle it says an Asian American reckoning,
and I really wanted it to be as singular as possible and in that way it was probably,
and I think that was also why it reached out to people.
A lot of people say -
there's been a lot of terms thrown around about the psychological condition of it being Asian American,
you're invisible or you're in between or you're not belonging or you're not represented,
and when those terms get used so many times they just get tired,
and as a poet I wanted to be as specific as I can get, I just want to really embody being in an invisible body,
like write what it's like to be in my body in this country,
and the physiological reactions of alienation, estrangement, and so forth.
Writing in that sort of non-linear way and writing with these different passages really helped with that.
With the essays I didn't write from beginning to end by any means,
it's almost like each prose passage was like a stanza, each paragraph was a stanza,
that I was kind of connecting together almost associatively,
maybe almost more musically or like
through certain strands of ideas,
and I also wanted the essays to interconnect so I'll have one idea, drop it, pick it up in the next essay,
because I wanted to have that kind of continuity.
Vince: That was really great.
I'm trying to sort of pull together some of these questions on the side here,
because we have so many that people
want to hear,
and you actually answered several of them
in a row.
So I want to thank the person who's asking about  whether you consider Minor Feelings a biography,
which I think you started to address.
This is a question about what it's like for a poet to work so deeply in prose,
referencing the chapter Bad English,
which I should say that chapter was really really moving to me.
Your line in there, my method of other English is to eat English before it eats me,
it just kind of opened up the whole book to me.
Cathy: Thank you.
Vince: And I also want to thank you by the way because you wrote about Theresa Cha,
not as a critic, but as a poet writing as a critic,
I think you're able to do something that nobody else writing about Cha has done and it is really powerful,
and I recommend that chapter to anybody, and I hope that folks here know more about Theresa Cha.
Let me pick up on a question here about the relationship between Minor Feelings and gender,
so I think in talking about Asian Americans it is absolutely intersectional -
I think the question about gender throughout and very much so in your discussion discussing writers,
like Cha and Young Mie Kim,
(inaudible)
So do you want to talk about the relationship between Minor Feelings and gender?
Cathy: As gendered?
Vince: Yeah, the relation between Minor Feelings and gender.
Cathy: Oh, that's a very good one.
Vince: It's very wide open.
Cathy: It's quite wide open,
I guess -
I think Minor Feelings is very much gendered in terms of the way women,
I would say women are - their interior life, once it's actually outwardly expressed is often dismissed,
or not acknowledged or not considered legitimate in any kind of way,
I think that's very much of a female experience as well.
I think it's even doubly so as an Asian American woman,
and there was a lot more that I could have written about,
in terms of being Asian American, gender, and sexuality.
I think many poets and scholars have written about it, but it needs to be tapped even deeper.
I have to say it's all the kind of emotions that I felt as an Asian American woman,
this is a very good question and I have to sit on it and think about it.
(inaudible)
Framing it in terms, if you want to talk more about what Theresa Cha's work has meant to you,
or the work of someone like Young Mie Kim,
writers who very deliberately through their form rejected a lot of the limiting ways that people read them,
strictly through the lens of ideas about race and gender,
but we're nonetheless deeply concerned with those issues.
In writing about them you're thinking consciously about a lineage or not,
but if you talk about one of those.
Cathy: Yeah, I was definitely creating -
Jenny Zhang said something really great, where she's like,
the canon is being created now in relation to Asian American writing and I definitely agree with that,
and what I wanted to do with the book -
usually when you read a lot of Asian American novels in particular it's usually related to family,
intergenerational trauma and one's relationship with one's mother, father and so forth,
which is absolutely necessary but I wanted to do something a little bit different,
and have a different idea of what family was, I was thinking about artistic family, creative families,
I wanted to write about and Minor Feelings is also a portrait of an artist.
It's my portrait of an artist, but it's also portrait of artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha,
but it's also a portrait of an artist - of what I went through to become the writer I am today,
and I think it's very important to kind of acknowledge the friendships that you had,
and the friendships that you had and the women that I was influenced by,
like Young Mie Kim and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and a number of other writers who I listed a lot of them,
I purposely wrote and mentioned women of color,
because, I write about it in this book, artistic friendships are mythologized all the time,
and they always tend to be male or white, and women of color are just not acknowledged at all,
and so for me it was really really important to center that and to prioritize that as much as possible,
which is why such a large part of the book is about friendship,
it was also for me a way of decentering whiteness,
and I'm like yes, Asian American is so much defined by white supremacy,
but the way I really came of age as a writer wasn't because I read a lot of well students,
it was because of these friendships I had, it was because of Young Mie Kim and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha,
and it was really really really important for me to enunciate and amplify that as much as possible.
(inaudible)
Vince: When you're asked to have that lineage, usually the expectation is will you fill that in with people like you,
but I know that your influences and your relationships with other writers of color or other women writers,
are also really important - I need to
quickly name drop our mutual friend, Evie Shockley.
I just taught her book this week and was talking to her about you actually,
so I was wondering if you want to talk about some other writers you've seen -
that when you two aren't necessarily Asian American or within a lineage,
or in the network of friendships that sustained you as a writer.
Cathy: Oh that's a great question, I would say Evie Shockley is one of them, she's amazing.
If all of you are not familiar with Evie Shockley's poetry and criticism,
I recommend that you go out and get her work. She's absolutely brilliant.
and I would say she's really amazing -
this is my opportunity to plug friends work,
Sejal Shah's This Is One Way to Dance like she's someone whose work I really admire,
and someone who I connect to.
Monica Youn is a poet who's absolutely fucking brilliant.
Dawn Lundy Martin.
A lot of the people who I really connect with - I come from the poetry world so it's a lot of poets of color,
women poets of color, who are doing really interesting difficult radical work and who are just really kickass,
and I feel blessed, I feel really blessed to have these friendships,
and also not just women, Rick Barot's Galleons, whose book is absolutely fantastic,
Douglas Kearney, Ronaldo Wilson, I could go on a litany of writers.
I feel so much existential despair of what the future is going to be,
but when I think about just the sheer amount of talent that's coming from voices that were previously ignored,
I'm absolutely in awe and I feel blessed that I'm writing at this time,
where there is this real camaraderie.
I've said this, Solmaz Sharif is another poet who I love.
I remember when she was doing a book launch, I think it was 2017 or 2018.
I was saying that it was like a renaissance, I think it is still a renaissance of Black writers,
Indigenous writers, Latinx writers, Muslim writers, Asian American writers. They're all intersected,
and I think it's going to grow and I hope it will grow.
Vince: Yeah, absolutely. I should say teaching right now in the midst of this,
and seeing how students are responding, not just to the kind of political issues,
that sometimes it was harder to get them
to pay attention to the past,
but the way they connect that with really nuanced readings of poetry,
and the imagination is really remarkable.
So I think that there's a another wave of this coming,
but I also think that it's important to acknowledge, just as we said,
the idea of Asian America as a category was built in solidarity.
The creative possibilities that you're talking about they're not just Asian American, they are relational.
Cathy: Mmhmm, yeah.
I'm not sure how much time we have.
There's a
couple other questions I want to ask,
which I was too frightened to ask myself.
So it's here, so i'm going to ask it.
Going to give you a chance to turn away from it if you don't want,
so the question about your mother and writing about your mother,
and then there's also a question about indebtedness.
And I don't know whether the ending of this and talking about indebtness and weight -
give any thoughts about how Asian Americans can imagine liberation,
while also weighing this condition
of indebtedness.
Then also earlier this question where you kind of step around writing more intense about your mother,
and whether that's something that is
is waiting for you as a tasker writer,
or that's something that you want to
think about?
Cathy: That's for my next book.
Yeah, but I've always shied away from writing about my mother,
just because it's like, oh my God, every Asian American writer has written about their mother,
and all writers go through a mother phase, usually the first book is about their mother,
and then they write about other things and it's always been sort of like kryptonite,
I don't like to go there really, I don't know how to approach the subject of motherhood,
being of my mother and I also thought with that book it wasn't appropriate to write about my mom,
because, like I said in the book, she would just take over, she would take over Minor Feelings,
it's more about questions of race and having scores to settle with the way we've been scripted,
and also scores to settle with this country.
But I am thinking about writing about my
mother but I don't want to do it in a memoiristic way,
and this is where I'm trying to figure
it out, I want to write it in a way -
after writing this book there's a part of me that wants to go back to my really weird avant-garde roots as a poet,
I was like okay that was me, minor feelings was me being very direct, now let's go back to me being weird,
and I guess right now I'm trying to figure out a way to approach the subject in a way that feels strange,
and fresh, and urgent to me.
I think part of that is I've been talking to my mother, but also been talking to other people,
from childhood and so forth and their
relationships with their toxic mothers,
and it's been very eye-opening,
and right now what I'm trying to do is just
listen.
I think Minor Feelings is very much about me and it was also me amplifying other voices,
but it was more through works of
literature and artwork and memories, of course,
and I'm more interested in now actually listening to living stories and seeing what I can do with that.
So that's that question of being a mom, what was the first question?
I think we're also out of time? I don't know if I have time to answer the first part of the question.
Vince: Yeah, we have a little bit of time left.
Cathy: what was the first part of the question, again?
Vince: The question was about the essay at the end about indebtedness?
I was particularly challenged by how you end discussing the condition of indebtedness. It just feels heavy,
because the work of activists and our ancestors shouldn't have had to happen in the first place.
Do you have thoughts about how Asian Americans can imagine liberation,
while also weighing this condition of indebtedness.
Cathy: Weighing this condition of indebtedness?
Vince: Yeah.
Cathy: I'm not sure if I'm quite - that's a very good question.
I think the whole book is in a way dealing with a question of debt.
I think there is good debt and bad debt.
There is a kind of debt, that I don't even know if it's all Asian Americans, I'd be curious -
actually I would like to ask you that question as a fourth generation Japanese American,
and I wonder if this question of indebtedness is also particular for me,
being a second generation Korean American,
because Korean Americans are so obsessed with debt and carrying on the legacy of parents,
and a part of that debt is as immigrants you never look back, you only look forward,
but by looking forward your children
are an investment,
and your children are treated as an investment for coming here and that's a real psychological weight.
That's also capitalist too,
and I wonder how much of it is this kind of colonized idea of the American dream,
where we're kind of fed this idea that once you come here you should be grateful,
because you've been given this opportunity and you can't complain,
and you don't ask for handouts or anything like that,
and also how much is maybe quite frankly cultural as well,
maybe that is also something that does come from our parents, our parents culture.
I could maybe say that is the case with Koreans.
I grew up in the etiquette, in the culture of debt, that there's always something that you owe,
and then there's also of course accumulated debt and so forth,
but then there's also the kind of debt that you do owe to history,
and to all the activists who have made it possible for you and you have to remember,
and you have to also be held accountable for that as well.
So I think that I was trying to kind of weigh those options, these are also questions I wrote in this book.
I specifically wrote essays because I had these questions that I wanted to answer,
and I think instead of excavating or digging for the truth I also ended up with more questions,
but I'm also hoping that through this book I opened up space for readers to address that question,
and answer it for themselves.
Vince: What I find really powerful about this book, and also maddening at times,
is that you find the language to work through all these kinds of encrusted ideas about Asian Americaness,
that you get impatient with frankly, like why do I have to deal with this,
or why does every body want to know about my mother?
How do you write about your mother, how do you deal with that,
well actually maybe I do want to write my mother,
but I can't write about my mother because everybody wants me to write about my mother.
That sense of of debt, I think that second generation immigrant kids sense of debt,
so much of it is encrusted with the narratives of the American Dream,
nationalist narratives about immigration that don't get to what those relations are.
For me I always go back to Fred Moten's work on debt.
Cathy: Yeah, yes.
Maybe bad debt is what we want, it's actually only when you think about that in strictly economic terms,
that we want debts to cancel out.
I think we want to be in a condition of indebtedness to each other all the time,
because that's how we are in meaningful relation to each other.
Maybe we want to be that source of bad debt,
because if you imagine paying off your debts to your parents, what does that say?
You pay off your parents that's like saying fuck you to your parents. I don't want to deal with you anymore.
We need to have that, but I think again what is really so fantastic to me about this book,
and why I think everybody I know who reads it, loves it,
and sometimes wants to throw it against the wall,
sometimes you face up to these things that
we don't know how to talk about.
Cathy: Yeah.
Vince: I think that in this book you kind of liberate the language to ask some questions,
that you couldn't ask before.
So I hope that is also true if you choose to find time to write about your mother,
because I'm very excited to read that book.
Cathy: (laughter)
I don't know if I'll be writing about my
mother, maybe mothers.
Vince: Yeah, yeah,
Cathy: Oh, you were gonna say.
Vince: Oh, I was just gonna say we're a couple minutes over and we're about to end,
and I know there's some brilliant questions here we didn't get to or we skimmed over.
Thank you so much for those questions.
Cathy: Yes.
Vince: Is there anything more you want to add?
Cathy: I'm just looking at the Q & A quickly right now.
I have to say I really appreciate what you're saying about debt,
and Fred Moten's Undercommons is a book that was also an inspiration,
one of the many inspirations for Minor Feelings and me thinking about debt.
I talk a little bit less about financial debt or capitalist debt the way he does,
but of course it's all part of the immigrant story.
It's all monetized too, it's like cultural and monetized,
it's like why extricate yourself from that, just be in debt, you know,
and maybe only that way we can liberate ourselves.
But thank you, Vince. Thank you so much for your really thoughtful questions.
It was really delightful to be doing this Zoom conversation with you,
and I'm also really happy that I didn't glitch out or something,
because that tends to happen.
But this was this was really lovely,
and I'm sorry I couldn't answer all your questions,
I hope there'll be another opportunity where I can maybe in person somewhere in the universe.
Vince: One day.
Cathy: In 2025.
Vince: If there's still a country.
Cathy: If there's still a country, yeah.
Stesha: Well on that hopeful note. Thank you so much Cathy and Vince and that was such an interesting,
and important conversation and I'm so grateful for both of you taking the time to be here tonight.
If you attendees are interested in reading a little bit more,
Minor Feelings is available as an ebook and an audiobook on the library's website, that's www.spl.org,
and you can also order it for delivery or curbside pickup through our partners on this event,
Elliott Bay Book Company and their website is www.elliottbaybook.com,
and actually a side note, Isabel Wilkerson, who you mentioned earlier, the author of Caste,
is actually going to be doing an event with Elliott Bay Book Company,
and I believe the Northwest African American Museum,
and that will take place on August 7th so save the date for that.
I think she's spoken in Seattle before and she's a wonderful speaker.
So thanks again to our sponsors The Seattle Public Library Foundation,
the Gary and Connie Kunis Foundation,
Seattle City of Literature, and the Seattle Times,
and thanks to all of you for joining us tonight and we'll see you next time.
Cathy: Thank you, thank you so much.
