Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

by Cathy Park Hong

Indebtedness is not the same thing as gratitude.

To truly feel gratitude is to sprawl out into the light of the present. It is happiness, I think. To be indebted is to fixate on the future. I tense up after good fortune has landed on my lap like a bag of tiny excitable lapdogs. But whose are these? Not mine, surely! I treat good fortune not as a gift but a loan that I will have to pay back in weekly installments of bad luck.

Upon release, Kochiyama returned to San Pedro. She couldn’t find a waitressing job anywhere because no one wanted to hire a Jap. It wasn’t until she and her husband moved to Harlem that she began to understand what had happened to her. Until then, nothing deterred her patriotism, not the FBI whisking her father away to prison without reason, not his death, nor even her family’s internment. She still clung to the myth she learned in her white church and school: that the United States was a land of liberty. What lay beyond the fault lines of her belief system was only fear. When Kochiyama found a waitressing job in New York, her black coworkers were the first to educate her about America’s racist history.

Kochiyama’s optimism was also what made her an extraordinary activist. Since she was young, she’d had a preternatural gift for bringing people together. After befriending her black neighbors and coworkers, she became an ardent civil rights activist.

In 1968, students at UC Berkeley invented the term Asian American to inaugurate a new political identity. Radicalized by the black power movement and anti-colonial movement, the students invented that name as a refusal to apologize for being who they were. It’s hard to imagine that the origin of Asian America came from a radical place, because the moniker is now flattened and emptied of any blazing political rhetoric. But there was nothing before it.

It concerns me how fast I dismissed the hard work of my activist predecessors after hearing enough “experts” spout off on the frivolity of identity politics when the international and interracial politics of Kochiyama was anything but frivolous. It makes me worried about the future, about this nation’s inborn capacity to forget, about the powers that be who always win and take over the narrative. Already, “woke” is a hashtag that’s now mocked, when being awake is not a singular revelation but a long-term commitment fueled by constant reevaluation.

Then be grateful that you live here. — Theresa Hak Kyung Cha writes, “Arrest the machine that purports to employ democracy but rather causes the successive refraction of her.” 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.

A fascinating little-known fact about the Korean War is that an American surgeon, David Ralph Millard, stationed there to treat burn victims, invented a double-eyelid surgical procedure to make Asian eyes look Western, which he ended up testing on Korean sex workers so they could be more attractive to GIs. Now, it’s the most popular surgical procedure for women in South Korea. My ancestral country is just one small example of the millions of lives and resources you have sucked from the Philippines, Cambodia, Honduras, Mexico, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, El Salvador, and many, many other nations through your forever wars and transnational capitalism that have mostly enriched shareholders in the States. Don’t talk to me about gratitude.

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.

I can’t entirely renounce the condition of indebtedness. I am indebted to the activists who struggled before me. I am indebted to Cha. 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. I’m also indebted to my parents. But I cannot repay them by keeping my life private, or by following that privatized dream of taking what’s mine. Almost daily, my mother demanded gratitude from me. Almost weekly, my mother said we moved here so I wouldn’t have to suffer. Then she asked, “Why do you make yourself suffer?”

Whiteness has already recruited us to become their junior partners in genocidal wars; conscripted us to be antiblack and colorist; to work for, and even head, corporations that scythe off immigrant jobs like heads of wheat. Conscription is every day and unconscious.

Asian Americans are fortunate not to live under hard surveillance, but we live under a softer panopticon, so subtle that it’s internalized, in that we monitor ourselves, which characterizes our conditional existence.