“They think Chinese is synecdoche for Asians the way Kleenex is for tissues.”
Source: Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
“Some people have a great fashion of calling things they do not like yellow. You exclude the yellow man. You fear the yellow peril. I edit a white paper turned out by yellow men, and many white men turn out yellow papers.”
Source: The White Devil's Daughters: The Fight Against Slavery in San Francisco's Chinatown
“In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status: not white enough nor black enough; distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down. We are the carpenter ants of the service industry, the apparatchiks of the corporate world, we are math-crunching middle managers who keep the corporate wheels greased but who never get promoted since we don’t have the right ‘face’ for leadership. We have a content problem. They think we have no inner resources. But while I may look impassive, I'm frantically paddling my feet underwater, always overcompensating to hide my devouring feelings of inadequacy.
There's a ton of literature on the self-hating Jew and the self-hating African American, but not enough has been said about the self-hating Asian. Racial self hatred is seeing yourself whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy. Your only defense is to be hard on yourself, which becomes compulsive, and therefore a comfort: to peck yourself to death. You don't like how you look, how you sound. You think your Asian features are undefined, like God started pinching out your features and then abandoned you. You hate that there are so many Asians in the room. Who let in all the Asians? you rant in your head. Instead of solidarity, you feel that you are less than> around other Asians, the boundaries of yourself no longer distinct but congealed into a horde.”
Source: Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
“In Pryor, I saw someone channel what I call minor feeling: the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one's perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.”
Source: Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
“The indignity of being Asian in this country has been underreported. We have been cowed by the lie that we have it good. We keep our heads down and work hard, believing that our diligence will reward us with our dignity, but our diligence will only make us disappear. By not speaking up, we perpetuate the myth that our shame is caused by our repressive culture and the country we fled, whereas America has given us nothing but opportunity.”
Source: Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
“In her satiric play Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, the playwright Young Jean Lee said: "The reason why so many white men date Asian women is that they can get better-looking Asian women than they can get white women because we are easier to get and have lower self-esteem. It's like going with an inferior brand so that you can afford more luxury features. Also, Asian women will date white guys who no white women would touch.”
Source: Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
“Asians are always mistaken for other Asians, but the least we can do to honor the dead is to ensure they're never mistaken for anyone else again.”
Source: Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
“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.”
Source: Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
“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 formally colonized. Survivors such as Native Americans, whose ancestors have already lived through endgames. Migrants and refugees living through endtimes currently, fleeing the floods and droughts and gang violence, reaped by climate changed that's been brought on by western empire. In Hollywood, whites have churned out dystopian fantasies by imagining themselves as slaves and refugees in the future.”
Source: Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
“Pilgrims and Nazis (Sonnet 2220)
The terrorists you call pilgrims,
did not immigrate, they invaded,
pillaged and plundered a continent,
they even plagiarized its name into
a symbol of atrocity and violation,
just like the nazis heisted
a holy symbol from the east,
and turned the sacred Swastika
into the global icon of hate.
History books are all messed up,
none teaches the history of humans -
world history was written by animals,
to maintain their narrative unchallenged.
The West broke the world, now
the human race gotta resurrect the world,
offspring of the terrorists and terrorized alike -
but we can do nothing at all,
till we decolonize our mind.”
Source: Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper