Ari’s Reviews > Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning > Status Update

Can I write about it without resorting to some facile vision of multicultural oneness or the sterilizing language of virtue signaling? Can I write honestly? Not only about how much I've been hurt but how I have hurt others! And can I do it without steeping myself in guilt, since guilt demands absolution and is therefore self-serving? In other words, can I apologize without demanding your forgiveness?

I never directly addressed my audience except to thank them and reassure them I only had two poems left to read, an embarrassed gesture most poets make to concede that they know their reading is a tedious burden.

Whatever power struggle your nation had with other Asian nations-most of it the fallout of Western imperialism and the Cold Waris steamrolled flat by Americans who don't know the difference.

Three Chinese laborers died for every two miles of track built to make Manifest Destiny a reality, but when the celebratory photo of the Golden Spike was taken, not a single Chinese man was welcome to pose with the other—whiterailway workers.

Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way the 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.