#Cathy Park Hong

[dawsonscreekwasalwaysbad]

i want this to be a new trend

[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

[bixy]

some snippets from a book I just finished and I have so many feelings and have no one to talk about it with so I’m putting it here

[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"

[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

[the-greatest-fool]

this memoir was so good 😭 it reminds me of jia tolentino’s description of cathy park hong’s minor feelings, writing in “agonized pursuit of a liberation that doesn’t look white—a new sound, a new affect, a new consciousness”. but hsu is writing not simply to negate, to be cynical and different, but to affirm this memory.

“I needed to figure out how to describe the smell of secondhand smoke on flannel, the taste of pancakes with fresh strawberries and powdered sugar the morning after, sun hitting a specific shade of golden brown, the deep ambivalence you once felt toward a song that now devastated you, the threshold when a pair of old boots go from new to worn, the sounds of our finals week mixtape wheezing to the end of its spool. Which metaphors were useful and which were not, what to explain and what to keep secret. The look when someone recognizes you.”

— Hua Hsu, Stay True

[anyataylorjoy]

Ophelia (2018) // November Nights, Arden Mae // House of the Dragon (2022-) // Persephone Returns, Emily Rose Cole // Ophelia, Friedrich Wilhelm Theodor Heyser // Mystery of Love, Sufjan Stevens // Fire with Fire (1986) // Spring and All, Cathy Park Hong // On-drakón (2015) // The Complex Sentence, Tony Hoagland // The Musketeers (2014-2016) // [from a letter], Sylvia Plath // 1883 (2021-22) // The Leaving Season, Jihyun Yun // Dorian Gray (2009) // The Lady of Shalott, Alfred Tennyson // Anne of Green Gables (1985) // Advantages of Being Evergreen, Oliver Baez Bendorf // Ophelia, John Everett Millais // Hamlet, William Shakespeare // Melancholia (2011) // Wild Geese, Mary Oliver // Revenge of the Sith (2005) // Summer Morning, Mary Oliver

[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