Cathy Park Hong Quotes

born 1976 United States

Cathy Park Hong (born August 7, 1976) is an American poet, writer, and professor who has published three volumes of poetry. Much of her work includes mixed language and serialized narrative.

United States
20th-century poets
Academics
Authors
Poets

Random Cathy Park Hong quote

23 quotes

To other English is to make audible the imperial power sewn into the language, to slit English open so its dark histories slide out.

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020)

Most white Americans can only understand racial trauma as a spectacle.

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020)

Innocence is both a privilege and a cognitive handicap, a sheltered unknowingness that, once protracted into adulthood, hardens into entitlement.

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020)

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.

Interview with Vox (2021)

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.

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020)

minor feelings — that feeling of being targeted and ashamed, but not knowing why and not having it be explained to you.

Interview with Vox (2021)

Ever since I started writing poetry seriously, I have used English inappropriately.

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020)

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.

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020)

Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020)

Nothing gets dated faster than a joke.

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020)

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.

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020)

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.

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020)

The flip side of innocence is shame.

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020)

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.

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020)

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.

Interview with Vox (2021)

It’s one of the best benefits of growing up bilingual, right? You realise that meaning is slippery.

Interview with The Guardian (2020)

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.

Interview with The Guardian (2020)

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.

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020)

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.

Interview (2011)

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.

Interview with The Guardian (2020)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Cathy Park Hong (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.