Dear Ms. Hong,
Thank you for your ingratitude. Thank you for the elegance of your anger. You have elucidated this anger, which remains in many Asian Americans, including myself, an impenetrable and formless lump, in a way that has given me tools for metabolizing the conflicted position in which Asian Americans find ourselves. As you adroitly delineate the U.S. imperialist practices that destroyed our countries and the racist social hierarchy which immigrants find themselves entering, I let out an exhale I didn’t know I was holding. Your statement: “I am here because you vivisected my ancestral country in two…Don’t talk to me about gratitude” (195) made my heart sing.
The honesty and acuity you marshal when you take up the task of disentangling the Gordian knot of Asian American positionality are an inspiration and challenge to me. Like many, I would wager, I have been circling the subject like a lone lion around a herd of elephants– hungry and scared. You provide a voice for my anxiety, and you don’t sugarcoat: “[Writing about race] was harder than I thought, like butterflying my brain out onto a dissection table to tweeze out the nerves that are my inhibitions” (183). What a mess! But if you did it, then maybe I can, and should, too. Minor Feelings is a terrifying and galvanizing call to action.
As we both know, it’s hard enough to be taken seriously as an Asian woman artist without talking about it and thereby further highlighting the “Asian” and obscuring the “artist.” What I so appreciated was the dexterity with which you voiced the precarity and complexity of this position: “…I used to think I’d rather leave a blank space for my pain than have it be easily summed up for consumption…I am cluttering that silence to try to anatomize my feelings about racial identity that I still can’t examine as a writer without fretting that I have caved to my containment” (197). Again I am inspired, thinking, I can try to be this honest, this insightful. I too have been a poet who reluctantly sets aside that silence. You have me puzzling out, as an Asian American writer, how not to write for the White audience, as has been so ingrained in me to do. As you say, “It’s a hard habit to break.” You make it clear how hard it is to see the bars of the cage after a while, and how urgent.
One of the biggest gifts you gave me in this book was you, an Asian American woman artist. In the essay “An Education,” you allow us to intimately trace your development as an artist and thinker, via friendship with two other Asian American women who are also artists. This essay brings the three of you to life in an incredibly human, incredibly nuanced portrait. While each of you were distinctly individual, you also showed how the relationships between you fostered your artistic growth in such crucial ways. You wrote: “No one else cared. No one else took us seriously. We were the only ones who demanded we be artists first” (150). It was so inspiring to see you hold each other in and to your art, because it is so rare for Asian American women to be held up as artists. Your portrait of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was equally inspirational. Something in me is still freed by seeing an Asian woman, an immigrant woman, upheld and taken seriously as an artist, though the countries our families came from are so far apart.
The Asian American umbrella is heterogeneous in the extreme, and I’m grateful to you for making that clear, citing socioeconomic disparities, histories of conflict between ancestral countries, and geopolitical distances. It’s something that can’t be overstated and is often understated. You express hesitancy to position yourself as the voice of “we” for this unruly group, voicing yet another barrier for speaking out. So prone to silence as many of us are, your voice opens the channel for the tentative we to arise. I am proud of you and ignited by you as, in the final essay, “Indebted,” you finally claim this we, not just as an Asian American but as a person of color calling for the obliteration of the cages built for us: “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…nonwhites, the formerly colonized, survivors…” (197). Thank you for including everyone in your mission to humanize us all. You spoke deeply to my personal experience, as well as my desire for justice on a grander scale. That’s the depth and the breadth of your vision in Minor Feelings.
Sincerely,
Sasha Evangelista
