Minor Feelings: a Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition

In this essay, Hong considers the work and autobiography of the Korean American writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Cha was born in 1951 in Korea and moved to San Francisco in 1963, where she went to Catholic school. Just two years into learning English, Cha won a poetry contest when she was only 14. Ironically, Hong lived in the same rent-stabilized sublet as Cha in New York, 25 years later.

Hong first discovered Cha’s 1982 poetry collection Dictée in Myung Mi Kim’s class. The book, which forsakes traditionally storytelling for a structure like a structuralist film, is divided into nine chapters based on the Greek Muses and draws on Cha’s tri-lingual background, providing neither explanation nor translation for the reader. It features the stories of female martyrs and revolutionaries such as Joan of Arc. The work was an inspiration for Hong who had thus far found the Asian American fiction she encountered “inauthentic, as if it were staged by white actors” (154). Instead, Cha confidently conveyed through her style that English was not a language she was fluent in, so much as “an imposition on her consciousness” (155). For example, Cha’s short sentences and aggressive use of periods “made the immigrant’s discomfort with English into a possible form of expression” (163). Hong found this to be a more authentic expression of the Asian American experience and felt that Cha had established “an aesthetic from which I could grow” (171). Uncannily, Hong sees her family biographical details running along passages in Dictee. For example, she juxtaposes a scene where Cha is running to rescue her brother from a dangerous protest march to one in which her own mother is running to a pharmacy in order to save her grandfather’s life.

In 1982, Cha was raped and murdered by her security guard Joseph Sanza, a serial sex-offender. Although Sanza had committed several sexual assaults prior to becoming a security guard, this was unknown to Cha and her husband, who were friendly with him. The silence of Cha’s critics and biographers on her rape and murder feeds into Asian American silence on sexual crimes against women. Euphemisms for sexual violence abounded in Asian American families—for example, that “something ‘bad’ happened” (156). Statistics on how many Asian American women have suffered sexual assault are difficult and often impossible to garner. One reason for this silence is the fear that speaking of the crime would re-traumatize the survivor and their family. However, in Hong’s view “the length to which scholars will argue how Cha is recovering the lives of Korean women silenced by historical atrocities while remaining silent about the atrocity that took Cha’s own life has been baffling” (157). While Hong understands that Cha’s innovations should not be overshadowed by her “appalling death” (164), she cannot help but regard “Cha as a woman who disappeared without explanation” (157). Cha’s only obituary appeared briefly in The Village Voice and remained undocumented by mass media. Cha’s friend, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, argues that Cha’s death was overlooked because “she was just another Asian woman. If she were a young white artist from the Upper West Side, it would have been all over the news” (176).

Hong herself has been infected by the silence, hesitating to mention the nature of Cha’s rape in previous writing. She credits this resistance to her habit of avoiding news stories about Asian rape survivors because “I don’t want to pay attention to the fact that no one else is paying attention. I don’t want to care that no one else cares because I don’t want to be left stranded in my rage” (172).

While the media forgot about Cha’s murder, and the police were incompetent in investigating it, her family remained haunted. Cha’s mother dreamed of her as a little girl, leading her to the number 710. Cha’s brothers and husband searched the basement of her building for themselves. By a brick column marked 710, they found Cha’s gloves, blood-caked hat, and boot. While Hong is spellbound by this story, she is almost reluctant to include it in her narrative, lest it enhance Cha’s already etherealized reputation.

The extent of Cha’s elusiveness culminates in the fact that a Google image of her brings up the face of her sister, Bernadette, from Cha’s 1976 Permutations video. In this image, Bernadette, who has “stoic symmetrical beauty […] looks haunted in that inscrutable way where the viewer could project any tragic story they want onto her” (173). The phenomenon of one Asian woman being mistaken for another is unfortunately common, and Hong describes the trend of how “from invisible girlhood, the Asian American woman will blossom into a fetish object” (174). Where a preference for white bodies is regarded as the default, “every other race is a sexual aberration” (174). Hong has struggled with body dysmorphia as a result of this stereotype and to this day regards her body “warily […] at arm’s length” (175). Cha too seems “less interested in the sensuous presence of her body than its erasure” (176). Cha often wore the color white, which is synonymous with death in Korean culture (176). However, in the ninth minute of Permutations, Cha sneaks in a headshot of her idiosyncratic face. Hong notes that Cha’s eyes appear alert and present, defying her etherealized reputation.

Hong states that she wrote this book as a challenge to her personal prejudice that “writing about my racial identity was minor and non-urgent, a defense that I had to pry open to see what throbbed beneath it” (183). Most difficult of all, was to contend with the notion of Asian Americans as a collective, a “we” that “remains so nonspecific that I wondered if there was any shared language between us” (183).

For the duration of her life, Hong has felt the weight of indebtedness. In the first instance this was because she saw herself as the unworthy, defiant female replacement for the son her parents lost. However, indebtedness is a common phenomenon amongst Asian Americans, as “the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America” and their children think that “they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering” (185). Still, in contrast to the model of the good Asian immigrant, Hong feels ungrateful to America, the racist country that committed so many atrocities against Asians. These include the Japanese internment camps during the Second World War and two American officers’ casual division of Korea into North and South in 1945.

Hong performs a thought experiment when she imagines what would happen if she obeyed racist commands that she should go back to the country of her ancestors. Hong, who has visited Seoul several times, has not been back there since 2008. She says that she would find it difficult to live there owing to the social and aesthetic pressures on women, the volatile economy, and the poor air quality. However, her main retort to the suggestion that she should go back to where she came from is that “I am here because you were there” (194).

Hong’s ultimate goal in her work is not to make an apology for Asian Americans, but to destroy the concept of white Americanness as a norm, which is imposed on the non-white populations that white Americans have exploited. She stands passionately against the Asian American tendency to copy white people, whether through the neoliberal acquisition of wealth, or through conscription into racism against other non-white groups. While Asian Americans are lucky to not be subjected to the constant harsh surveillance that troubles African Americans, they live under a “softer panopticon” (202). This constitutes an internalized monitor of how much they belong in America, when “our status here remains conditional; belonging is always promised and just out of reach” (202). In order to be free, Asian Americans must liberate themselves from the notion of a conditional existence and prefer activism and participation in a multicultural country rather than dissolution into whiteness.