#Cathy Park Hong

[wellconstructedsentences]

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.

Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong

[dawsonscreekwasalwaysbad]

i want this to be a new trend

[kitchen-light]

Thinking about these tweets

[samballesbian]

"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, but turning me against myself."

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

[typewriter-worries]

[ Text ID: and this grief that has no release --- grows inward rooting into my spine, ]

Cathy Park Hong, from "Spring and All"

[abellinthecupboard]

The Song of Katydids

He rides into a shadowed plain, where a storm of grasshoppers hoving wings to wind, blacks the sky thick as larrup. These pests drop to earth, clumping on every growth, sucking sweat from all tooled handles, a rogue insectile rug is the land. Then he sees her witha nibbling chain of grasshoppers clipping away tendril strands of her hair as she bats the buf-furred corn. He stops, done in and gasps with the first feelings of want. he struggles to her, blinded by insects, and shouts with his little Spanish: ¡Te Quiero! Even in that mandible storm, her ma knows him as the killer outlaw and snatches her daughter away. She spits so luxuriously on the ground, she drowns a hopper, and pulls her child back into their sod- battened home, so he is alone in the roar of all nibbling, which clings, stains and gnaws his leather raiment to bitten lace. He clamps his hands to his ears from all the bedlamite mouths rising and just as suddenly, the insects spur their wings and fly farther off, leaving Jim be, to go in the denuded earth.

— Cathy Park Hong, Engine Empire (2012)

[waywordsstudio]

Best of 2023 Reads: Poetry -

From sacred texts and opera librettos to contemporary and politically intimate free verse, here are a few of the works that stood out in 2023!

[savings-club]

[shkavz]

[spudcity]

Happy Days

Garçon, you snore so rhapsodically but hup hup, peach schnapps & Coke Zero with a gumball-green mermaid swizzle stick— I need me a diabetic shock.

I yearned so long to be ensorcelling, yet I’m always a meter maid, never a mermaid. I’d populate this world w’ idlers of my kind, but pistil-less, I’m pissily only one.

Who made me this way? Oh you. Oolong Ma. (Go bury yourself in a sandpit, Ma, while my galpals and I split a cranmuffin 5 ways and watch.)

So here I gig, in this club empty as a tampon dispenser inside the shell of a Texas gas station—still I’ll stand, declaim:

Not enough letters in my soup, garçon! All I’m doing is inging like an atting instrel, I’m rank when I need to be frank!

Just you wait, I’ll hijack all type— My specialty? Scandinavian Modern Pinkface.

– Cathy Park Hong

[eggwhiteswithspinach]

an interesting read

[chanamuu]

“But she lives on I visit her I see her

     I see her I visit I see her

frail in the starless black night

     I see her, I am none wiser

I am none wiser for it”

[samballesbian]

"If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering."

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

[melophobia2013]

[ID:

it was my mind threatening mutiny. I was turning paranoid, obsessed. (the following sentence is highlighted in pink) I wanted someone to unscrew my head and screw on a less neurotic head.

/end ID]

Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning