Poet Cathy Park Hong explores race and growing up Asian American through a series of personal essays and reflections. . I finished this book a few daysPoet Cathy Park Hong explores race and growing up Asian American through a series of personal essays and reflections. . I finished this book a few days ago and have been thinking about it since. I’ve never read her poetry before, but her essay style is reflective, raw, and revealing. She draws on prominent artists, history, comedians, current events, and her own experience of being Other and yet not quite Other enough. She writes about the dangers of the model minority and the casual racism she experiences and even sometimes exhibited. . If you pick up this book specifically to learn more about AAPI experiences and the murders in Atlanta, pay attention to the essay about Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, an artist and writer who was raped and murdered in 1982. The Portrait of an Artist does talk about sexual violence against Asian American women, but it also breathes life back into Cha’s scholastic legacy and creates a lineage to Hong’s own. . This collection is at the same time personal and universal, conscientious about the limits of one’s own experiences and extrapolating to the human condition, fleeing rigidity of labels and categories. “I was never satisfied with those immigrant talking points about ‘not belonging’ … it seemed rigid and rudimentary, like I just need the right GPS coordinates to find myself. But I also understand the impulse to search for some origin myth of the self, even if it’s shaped by stories told to us…” . If you take away one lesson from this book, let it be to never assign a single dimension to a person based on assumptions from their race, immigration status, or education. Hong’s experience is one among many, and she does a marvelous job of humanizing each person and each experience. This won’t be an easy book to digest for many readers, but I urge you to pick it up anyway. ...more
Do yourself a favor, and read this book. For several years now, Ta-Nehisi Coates has been one of my favorite essayists - I've always loved his writingDo yourself a favor, and read this book. For several years now, Ta-Nehisi Coates has been one of my favorite essayists - I've always loved his writing on race in The Atlantic because of its potency and poignancy. Even though I'd read many of these essays before, I deeply appreciated how Coates reframed them for this collection. They build the story of racism in the United States that leads directly to oppression of Black America and to the election of Donald Trump, and his chapter introductions include reflections of these essays in the era of Trump. Reading the last two essays back-to-back--these are ones that I read when they were originally published separately--was stark and powerful: "My President Was Black" and "The First White President."
There were three important quotes that I couldn't get over: "But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it." And [one that I did not highlight] his pondering over why it is that white people like his writing so much. Several days after finishing his essay on Reparations, this thought also remains with me: "Reparations--by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences--is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. ... What I'm talking about is more than recompense for past injustices--more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I'm talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the acts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling 'patriotism' while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history." ...more
Seriously, if you've ever read Neil Gaiman before, read this book. If you haven't, get on it! Neil Gaiman is the author who shaped my ideas of adventuSeriously, if you've ever read Neil Gaiman before, read this book. If you haven't, get on it! Neil Gaiman is the author who shaped my ideas of adventure, wonder, and imagination as a teenager and young adult. His book of essays and articles reminds me of why: his ability to challenge genre, challenge expectations, challenge his readers. I admit I didn't read all of the essays, but I did read most of them. I skipped the essays that were introductions to books I would want to read, or books I might never read. On the whole, reading this book was like talking with a friend; conversational in tone, imaginative in voice.
Loading...
