Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning Quotes
"The face is the most naked part of ourselves, but we don’t realize it until the face is somehow injured."
"I wanted someone to unscrew my head and screw on a less neurotic head."
"My confidence was impoverished from a lifelong diet of conditional love and a society who thinks I’m as interchangeable as lint."
"Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy."
"In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status: not white enough nor black enough."
"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."
"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."
"I am frantically paddling my feet underwater, always overcompensating to hide my devouring feelings of inadequacy."
"Minor feelings are not often featured in contemporary American literature because these emotions do not conform to the archetypal narrative that highlights survival and self-determination."
"Minor feelings arise, for instance, upon hearing a slight, knowing it’s racial, and being told, 'Oh, that’s all in your head.'"
"Memories don’t come when I expect them summoned."
"I am not passing down happy memories of my own so much as I am staging happy memories for her."
"To look sideways at childhood is tainted with the sicklier haze of envy."
"The elusive maroon cover added to its mystique."
"Holden Caulfield was just some rich prep school kid who cursed like an old man."
"The alignment of childhood with innocence is an Anglo-American invention."
"Shame is that sharp, prickling awareness that I am exposed like the inflamed ass of a baboon."
"Shame gives me the ability to split myself into the first and third person."
"To grow up Asian in America is to witness the humiliation of authority figures like your parents."
"One characteristic of racism is that children are treated like adults and adults are treated like children."
"A white couple opened the glass doors to enter as we were leaving. I assumed the man was opening the door for us."
"The hoarding of resources has been so disproportionate, the racial project of whiteness is, in effect, an oligarchy."
"To assume that just because of someone’s age and gender that they don’t pose a threat would be misguided and wrong."
"But our shared root is not the opportunity this nation has given us."
"White Americans, if they hadn’t before, now felt marked for their skin color, and their reaction for being exposed as such was to feel—shame."
"Wu Tsang is a half-Chinese trans artist who has a long, feminine face and warm brown empathic eyes."
"In his book White Flights, the writer Jess Row says that 'America’s great and possibly catastrophic failure is its failure to imagine what it means to live together.'"
"Art movements have been built on the bromances of bad white boys."
"The avant-garde genealogy could be tracked through stories of bad-boy white artists who "got away with it," beginning with Duchamp signing a urinal and calling it art."
"I felt happy. I felt flooded with relief. This is all that matters in writing, I thought, to move someone like this."
"If she’s known at all, she’s known as this tragic unknowable subaltern subject."
"The indebted Asian American is therefore the ideal neoliberal subject."
"Indebtedness is not the same thing as gratitude."
"I accept that the burden of history is solely on my shoulders."
"I have rebelled against all that. As a result, I have developed the worst human trait: I am ungrateful."
"Kochiyama had a compulsion to help others, and was adamant that she not be the center of attention."
"What I can say is look back to that lost blade of history when activists like Kochiyama offered an alternate model of mutual aid and alliance."