Hannah

“To other English is to make audible the imperial power sewn into the language, to slit English open so its dark histories slide out.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“My mother’s English has remained rudimentary during her forty-plus years living in the United States. When she speaks Korean, my mother speaks her mind. She is sharp, witty, and judgmental, if rather self-preening. But her English is a crush of piano keys that used to make me cringe whenever she spoke to a white person. As my mother spoke, I watched the white person, oftentimes a woman, put on a fright mask of strained tolerance: wide eyes frozen in trapped patience, smile widened in condescension. As she began responding to my mother in a voice reserved for toddlers, I stepped in. From a young age, I learned to speak for my mother as authoritatively as I could. Not only did I want to dispel the derision I saw behind that woman’s eyes, I wanted to shame her with my sobering fluency for thinking what she was thinking. I have been partly drawn to writing, I realize, to judge those who have unfairly judged my family; to prove that I’ve been watching this whole time.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“Artistic othering has to do with innovation, invention, and change, upon which cultural health and diversity depend and thrive. Social othering has to do with power, exclusion, and privilege, the centralizing of a noun against which otherness is measured, meted out, marginalized. My focus is the practice of the former by people subjected to the latter.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning