thenation--2020-05-18--How Does One Tell the Story of Asian America?

When I was growing up , I would try to sit as far away as possible from any other Asian girl who happened to be in the same room .
This applied largely to institutional settings—school , swim lessons—where experience had taught me that proximity was the surest path to our being confused with each other .
My sense of individualism , it seemed , hinged on the rejection of racial conflation , to say nothing of racial solidarity .
But by preemptively refusing affiliation with that other Asian girl , I had already absorbed the ambient racism of my @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not yet understand how viewing her as a generalization implicated my internalization of anti-Asian sentiments.1 Cathy Park Hong ’ s bracing new book , Minor Feelings : An Asian American Reckoning , begins with a similar anecdote about two Asian women in irreconcilable conflict .
More specifically , it begins with two Korean American women—Hong and a potential new therapist—who fail to get on .
Hong suspects it is because of their shared ethnicity .
Where likeness might enable a more productive therapeutic relationship , Hong encounters only further animosity .
After the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Hong leaves what she calls a “ long screed ” of a review on the website RateMyTherapist : “ Koreans are repressed !
Rigid !
Cold !
They should not be allowed to work in the mental health care profession !
” At an appointment with a new therapist ( this time Jewish ) , Hong spends most of the session retracing the traumas of her first .
While the new therapist affirms her feelings about the previous one ’ s unprofessionalism , she also wonders whether Hong ’ s “ personal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ first therapist ’ s , issues that she herself had not fully processed.
” 2 For Hong , the phenomenon of being “ too close ” —an overidentification that paradoxically produces alienation—is also a condition of being Asian American .
This initial episode of antagonism becomes just one of many examples for Hong of such alienation .
Disidentification is what often unites the Asian American experience , she writes ; many Asian Americans find themselves caught in what she calls “ minor ” racial conflicts ( one could call them microaggressions , except @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that arise from these racial conflicts are the subject of Hong ’ s book .
She is interested in how these minor antagonisms limit Asian American expression and representation .
To make her argument , Hong draws from literary theorist Sianne Ngai ’ s theory of “ ugly feelings ” —those weak and dysphoric emotions such as envy , irritation , and boredom that , Ngai argues , are symptomatic of late capitalism .
For Hong , they are also symptomatic of a society organized by racial inequality .
Because Asian Americans have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , invisible , their emotional vocabulary has similarly inhabited a more muted register .
They occupy , she writes , “ the racialized range of emotions that are negative , dysphoric , and therefore untelegenic.
” Not only are these minor Asian American feelings defined by a more depressive range of emotion—shame , resentment , paranoia , and melancholy—but their lack of catharsis also means they linger for a long time .
The crux of Hong ’ s book , then , is this : How does one tell an Asian American story @ @ @ @ @ @ @ minor feelings , their complexity , their pathos , their commonness , without simply lapsing into conventions of disappearance and weakness so deeply associated with being Asian American ?
4 Hong achieves this by fully attending to Asian America ’ s many weak and ugly feelings .
Rather than commit to one strong narrative , Minor Feelings embraces the contradictions at the center of her book ’ s argument .
Each essay weaves between biographical anecdotes and historical events .
An author of three poetry collections , Hong is uniquely adept at negotiating @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Empire narrates the birth of a nation—from the American frontier to a semifictional Chinese city called Shangdu to a futuristic California—by modulating across different voices .
In speculating on a shared constellation of themes , Hong ’ s poetry also contains the seeds of her new book : American exceptionalism , a mythical Asian imaginary , capitalist expansion .
And while Minor Feelings is Hong ’ s first work of nonfiction , the stylistic traces of her eclectic and episodic poetic style persist even here .
The chapters are each organized around a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ End of White Innocence ” or “ The Indebted , ” but they scatter—as does her poetry—across a range of perspectives and genres.5 In a chapter titled “ Stand Up ” that documents Hong ’ s unexpected identification with the comedian Richard Pryor , she describes her frustration with the “ conventional forms in which racial trauma is framed.
” While the confessional mode ’ s presumptions of universalism make her queasy , traditional realism also feels dubious for its claim to anthropological authenticity .
Tired of how publishers fixate on what the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ethnic “ single story ” —which shows “ a people as one thing , as only one thing , over and over again ” —Hong chooses instead to fracture that story , spilling it across multiple genres.6 Sometimes this fracturing can look like a masochistic form of comedy , as when Hong tries stand-up herself .
At other times , writing about race is a fervent “ polemic , in that we must confront the white capitalist infrastructure that has erased us.
” But it can also be , she reminds us , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ inner consciousness is knotted with contradictions.
” 7 Her book is ultimately less a definitive document of the Asian American experience than it is a document of Hong ’ s attempts ( and frequent failures ) to articulate its contradictions .
Because of Asian America ’ s relatively “ minor ” status as a racial minority , Hong seeks to make visible an underrepresented racial experience , even as she often voices the discomfort and difficulty of doing so .
Yet this ongoing discomfort is ultimately crucial to Hong ’ s articulation of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ emotions that can not be expressed except in their ambivalence , their irreconcilability.8 “ For as long as I could remember , ” Hong writes , “ I have struggled to prove myself into existence.
” With Minor Feelings , she simultaneously grapples with associated anxieties about her potential disappearance in writing on behalf of the Asian American subject .
“ I began this book as a dare to myself , ” she explains , because “ I still clung to a prejudice that writing about my racial identity was minor and non-urgent.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , this anxiety about the potential indulgence of the project can be felt .
One of the dominant minor feelings in the book is , after all , Hong ’ s guilt—a guilt only heightened in the very act of talking about it .
This book is indeed a reckoning : a willing to make oneself visible and heard .
It is also an apology.9 While Hong relishes identifying with Pryor ’ s caustic wit and rage , she demurs from overidentification .
In watching him move between the racial stereotypes around black-white @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ One minute I ’ m laughing at white people , and feeling the rage of black oppression as if it ’ s my own , until the next bit , when I realize I ’ m allied with white people.
” 10 A concern with the notion that Asian Americans are “ next in line to be white ” can be found in almost every essay in Minor Feelings .
Hong is attuned to the relationship between Asian racialization and American capitalism , as Asian American assimilation has almost always relied on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all , one of the reasons Ngai ’ s model of capitalist ugly feelings maps so well onto Hong ’ s matrix of Asian American minor feelings .
And while she often cites theorists such as Frantz Fanon and W.E.B .
Du Bois , Hong is careful to distinguish the Afro-Anglophone experience from the privileges associated with Asian American capitalist success .
Stuck between racial abjection and economic exceptionalism , she frequently finds her voice receding into a murky absence .
“ When I hear the phrase ‘ Asians are next in line @ @ @ @ @ @ @ writes , “ I replace the word ‘ white ’ with ‘ disappear.
’ ” For Hong , the specter of disappearance is inextricable from Asian America ’ s economic and cultural capital .
A professor at Rutgers University–Newark , Hong is ever conscious of how Asian America ’ s rising economic and cultural capital helps promote this notion of disappearance .
Part of the challenge in writing about Asian America ’ s minor feelings is doing so in a way that does not simply reiterate Asian American racial capitalism.11 Hong struggles with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ does it mean to write for a racial minority that must nonetheless circulate within a largely white publishing community and readership ?
Is it even possible ?
While she touches on the radical origins of “ Asian American , ” she is aware that the term has since been commodified by the publishing world .
An MFA graduate of the Iowa Writers ’ Workshop , Hong is no stranger to how literary institutions produce racial capital .
Early on , she describes an overwhelming anxiety that her graduate peers could read her only @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on her ethnicity that the younger Hong finds “ juvenile.
” Fearing that others will label her as merely an identitarian poet , she chooses instead to be a “ good student of modernism ” with its commitment to abstraction and universalism.12 When Hong starts publishing , she learns that her poetry gets read through her Asian female identity regardless of what she writes , and at readings she finds herself almost always addressing a mostly white audience .
“ There was no denying it , ” she concludes .
“ I was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people and I desperately wanted their approval.
” Although Minor Feelings seeks to reject this white approval , the specter of whiteness haunts the book .
“ Even in opposition , ” Hong explains , “ I still see my life in relation to whiteness.
” 13 Hong ’ s struggle to detach from the value system of American capitalism and its reproduction of white prestige resonated with my own experience in university settings , where the aesthetic virtues of Anglo-American modernism still tend to dominate academic inquiry .
Like Hong , I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as “ a kind of despair ” about the fact that there might be no way to write about a personal racial condition that does not lapse into a self-annihilating appeal for the approval of white people.14 Yet as one moves through Minor Feelings , one begins to see how , beside her rejection of white affirmation , there exists a more affirmative story of Asian American collectivity : A minor plot of the book , scattered across its chapters , is one of racial solidarity .
A poetry reading Hong gives at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ As the event wraps up , a Korean American student goes up to her and starts crying after describing “ how alone and alienated she felt on campus.
” They hug .
“ It is for her , ” Hong thinks , “ that I ’ m writing this book.
” 15 Hong offers another example later .
Writing about the women in Dai Sil Kim-Gibson ’ s 1993 documentary Sa-I-Gu , which features Korean American shopkeepers whose businesses were burned down during the Los Angeles riots in 1992 , Hong notes , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of recognition… .
They are like my aunts.
” For Hong , these anecdotal instances of recognition begin to add up to the major narrative impulse that drives Minor Feelings .
They are why she is writing this book.16 This minor plot necessarily emerges piecemeal .
Readers repeatedly glimpse characters like the Los Angeles shopkeepers through Hong ’ s experiences of identification and disidentification .
They are found in the personal and the anecdotal : the rejection of the Korean American therapist or the embrace of the Korean American student .
They also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , appearing across the book like a heterogeneous Asian American grouping that Hong works to make visible , however fleetingly .
Like the minor feelings that are the book ’ s named subject , their presence—and their persistence—occurs through their serial invocation , their cumulative semblances.17 A chapter titled “ Bad English ” sits at the midpoint of Minor Feelings and functions as a pivot away from the more polemical ground setting in the book ’ s first half to the more intimate interventions in its second .
Rather than advance any theses @ @ @ @ @ @ @ English ” offers a searching and introspective examination of the very language that makes Minor Feelings possible—the literary forms that enable Hong to speak to and on behalf of the contradictions of being Asian American .
The chapter ends with a series of unanswerable questions that strike me as a kind of renunciation of the more public-facing writing of the initial chapters:18 In the chapter that follows , “ An Education , ” Hong begins to answer some of these questions and in doing so produces one of the more thrilling essays of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her friendship with Erin and Helen—two other Asian female artists—as students at Oberlin College .
“ An Education ” is not only a Künstlerroman in miniature ; it also functions as a story of Asian American female friendship that I realized , upon reading , felt rare only in its literary representation .
Hong , Erin , and Helen form an obsessive bond that is both painful and necessary .
While they frequently experience conflict ( especially the mercurial Helen , who is no longer part of Hong ’ s life ) , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ just a personal but also an artistic way .
“ When I made art alone , it was a fantasy , ” Hong writes , “ but shared with Erin and Helen , art became a mission.
” 20 Throughout “ An Education , ” Hong renders their friendship—while often volatile and sometimes even violent—in a way that feels crucially vital .
It is an artistic friendship that exceeds the sum of its parts .
“ I had intended to write only about Erin , ” Hong admits toward the essay ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ spilled so many of the details and traumas of Helen ’ s life , but for Hong , her relationship with Erin was inextricable from the one she had with Helen.21 Minor Feelings begins with intraracial antagonism , but it ends by trying to envision something closer to a form of intraracial solidarity .
After “ An Education , ” Hong writes about the relatively underexamined rape and murder of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha , who is best known for writing the 1982 experimental autobiography Dictée .
While scholars have pored over Cha @ @ @ @ @ @ @ genres and languages in narrating the lives of radical women such as Joan of Arc and Yu Guan Soon , Hong wonders what is lost by overlooking the more personal details of Cha ’ s death .
While sympathetic to the concern of potentially fetishizing these events , she is baffled by “ the length to which scholars will argue how Cha is recovering the lives of Korean women silenced by historical atrocities while remaining silent about the atrocity that took Cha ’ s own life.
” Her essay seeks to reconstruct , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s life for a broader audience.22 Drawing on court records as well as interviews with Cha ’ s brother John and her friend Sandy Flitterman-Lewis , Hong tells this story through an idiosyncratic archive that is both impersonal and so intimate as to be familial .
Whereas legal documents provide only inconclusive information about Cha ’ s life and death , John offers the kind of biographical texture about her typically omitted by scholarship on Cha .
Hong weaves herself into Cha ’ s story , saying how a teacher at Oberlin , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Kim , first told her about Dictée .
“ By introducing me to Cha , my professor Kim established a direct , if modest , literary link : Cha , Kim , myself ” —a genealogy of Asian American feminist aesthetic avant-gardism that might also include Erin and Helen.23 Given Hong ’ s gesture to this personal genealogy , it is perhaps unsurprising that her final chapter ends on a note of debt , looking backward at the immigrants and political movements that now make her and her book possible .
Likewise , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ book show her indebtedness to other scholars of race—contemporary , Asian American , and otherwise .
A look at the press blurbs for Minor Feelings , which include quotes from Claudia Rankine , Alexander Chee , and Kiese Laymon , also gives the reader a sense of the contemporary literary community that enables this book .
Minor Feelings , then , stretches out along a broader network of not just racial but also intellectual circulation.24 In ending on debt , Hong expresses an important fact of Asian American solidarity .
As much as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reject other Asians as a way to affirm ourselves—our experiences are only as real as they are shared .
One ’ s own Asian American story might begin with an anecdote as well , but it is also a part of a broader history as we begin to string them together .
The very history of the term “ Asian American ” captures this dynamic—as it emerges from the radical student movements of the late 1960s , especially the Third World Liberation Front , which emphasized pan-Asian and cross-racial solidarity.25 Such an act @ @ @ @ @ @ @ given the rise of anti-Asian sentiment during the coronavirus pandemic .
Writing for The New Yorker ’ s website , the novelist Ed Park wonders if his recent racist encounter with a man on the streets of New York City merited “ minor feelings or major.
” One xenophobic encounter might feel “ not that remarkable , ” but as his piece goes on to list , a series of instances of anti-Asian discrimination suggests a different story .
What a strange time to be thinking about Asian American disappearance ; I have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it is a visibility that need not only be unwelcome .
At such a time—taking my allotted daily constitutionals , standing in line for groceries—I scan the scene , wondering if I ’ ll see anyone else who looks like me.26

This article appears in the June 1/8, 2020 issue.
When I was growing up, I would try to sit as far away as possible from any other Asian girl who happened to be in the same room. This applied largely to institutional settings—school, swim lessons—where experience had taught me that proximity was the surest path to our being confused with each other. My sense of individualism, it seemed, hinged on the rejection of racial conflation, to say nothing of racial solidarity. But by preemptively refusing affiliation with that other Asian girl, I had already absorbed the ambient racism of my white instructors and schoolmates. I did not yet understand how viewing her as a generalization implicated my internalization of anti-Asian sentiments.1 Books in Review Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning By Cathy Park Hong Buy this book
Cathy Park Hong’s bracing new book, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, begins with a similar anecdote about two Asian women in irreconcilable conflict. More specifically, it begins with two Korean American women—Hong and a potential new therapist—who fail to get on. Hong suspects it is because of their shared ethnicity. Where likeness might enable a more productive therapeutic relationship, Hong encounters only further animosity. After the therapist finally rejects her increasingly desperate overtures, Hong leaves what she calls a “long screed” of a review on the website RateMyTherapist: “Koreans are repressed! Rigid! Cold! They should not be allowed to work in the mental health care profession!” At an appointment with a new therapist (this time Jewish), Hong spends most of the session retracing the traumas of her first. While the new therapist affirms her feelings about the previous one’s unprofessionalism, she also wonders whether Hong’s “personal history was somehow too close to the first therapist’s, issues that she herself had not fully processed.”2
For Hong, the phenomenon of being “too close”—an overidentification that paradoxically produces alienation—is also a condition of being Asian American. This initial episode of antagonism becomes just one of many examples for Hong of such alienation. Disidentification is what often unites the Asian American experience, she writes; many Asian Americans find themselves caught in what she calls “minor” racial conflicts (one could call them microaggressions, except they occur intraracially).3
The feelings that arise from these racial conflicts are the subject of Hong’s book. She is interested in how these minor antagonisms limit Asian American expression and representation. To make her argument, Hong draws from literary theorist Sianne Ngai’s theory of “ugly feelings”—those weak and dysphoric emotions such as envy, irritation, and boredom that, Ngai argues, are symptomatic of late capitalism. For Hong, they are also symptomatic of a society organized by racial inequality. Because Asian Americans have historically been stereotyped as meek, recessive, invisible, their emotional vocabulary has similarly inhabited a more muted register. They occupy, she writes, “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic.” Not only are these minor Asian American feelings defined by a more depressive range of emotion—shame, resentment, paranoia, and melancholy—but their lack of catharsis also means they linger for a long time. The crux of Hong’s book, then, is this: How does one tell an Asian American story that captures the full range of these minor feelings, their complexity, their pathos, their commonness, without simply lapsing into conventions of disappearance and weakness so deeply associated with being Asian American?4 Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
Hong achieves this by fully attending to Asian America’s many weak and ugly feelings. Rather than commit to one strong narrative, Minor Feelings embraces the contradictions at the center of her book’s argument. Each essay weaves between biographical anecdotes and historical events. An author of three poetry collections, Hong is uniquely adept at negotiating rhetorical indeterminacy. Her 2012 book Engine Empire narrates the birth of a nation—from the American frontier to a semifictional Chinese city called Shangdu to a futuristic California—by modulating across different voices. In speculating on a shared constellation of themes, Hong’s poetry also contains the seeds of her new book: American exceptionalism, a mythical Asian imaginary, capitalist expansion. And while Minor Feelings is Hong’s first work of nonfiction, the stylistic traces of her eclectic and episodic poetic style persist even here. The chapters are each organized around a general theme, such as “The End of White Innocence” or “The Indebted,” but they scatter—as does her poetry—across a range of perspectives and genres.5
In a chapter titled “Stand Up” that documents Hong’s unexpected identification with the comedian Richard Pryor, she describes her frustration with the “conventional forms in which racial trauma is framed.” While the confessional mode’s presumptions of universalism make her queasy, traditional realism also feels dubious for its claim to anthropological authenticity. Tired of how publishers fixate on what the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes as the ethnic “single story”—which shows “a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again”—Hong chooses instead to fracture that story, spilling it across multiple genres.6
Sometimes this fracturing can look like a masochistic form of comedy, as when Hong tries stand-up herself. At other times, writing about race is a fervent “polemic, in that we must confront the white capitalist infrastructure that has erased us.” But it can also be, she reminds us, “a lyric, in that our inner consciousness is knotted with contradictions.”7 Current Issue View our current issue
Her book is ultimately less a definitive document of the Asian American experience than it is a document of Hong’s attempts (and frequent failures) to articulate its contradictions. Because of Asian America’s relatively “minor” status as a racial minority, Hong seeks to make visible an underrepresented racial experience, even as she often voices the discomfort and difficulty of doing so. Yet this ongoing discomfort is ultimately crucial to Hong’s articulation of Asian American minor feelings—a set of negative emotions that cannot be expressed except in their ambivalence, their irreconcilability.8
“For as long as I could remember,” Hong writes, “I have struggled to prove myself into existence.” With Minor Feelings, she simultaneously grapples with associated anxieties about her potential disappearance in writing on behalf of the Asian American subject. “I began this book as a dare to myself,” she explains, because “I still clung to a prejudice that writing about my racial identity was minor and non-urgent.” Yet even in the final product, this anxiety about the potential indulgence of the project can be felt. One of the dominant minor feelings in the book is, after all, Hong’s guilt—a guilt only heightened in the very act of talking about it. This book is indeed a reckoning: a willing to make oneself visible and heard. It is also an apology.9
While Hong relishes identifying with Pryor’s caustic wit and rage, she demurs from overidentification. In watching him move between the racial stereotypes around black-white relations, she finds herself disoriented: “One minute I’m laughing at white people, and feeling the rage of black oppression as if it’s my own, until the next bit, when I realize I’m allied with white people.”10
A concern with the notion that Asian Americans are “next in line to be white” can be found in almost every essay in Minor Feelings. Hong is attuned to the relationship between Asian racialization and American capitalism, as Asian American assimilation has almost always relied on economic advancement. It is, after all, one of the reasons Ngai’s model of capitalist ugly feelings maps so well onto Hong’s matrix of Asian American minor feelings. And while she often cites theorists such as Frantz Fanon and W.E.B. Du Bois, Hong is careful to distinguish the Afro-Anglophone experience from the privileges associated with Asian American capitalist success. Stuck between racial abjection and economic exceptionalism, she frequently finds her voice receding into a murky absence. “When I hear the phrase ‘Asians are next in line to be white,’” she writes, “I replace the word ‘white’ with ‘disappear.’” For Hong, the specter of disappearance is inextricable from Asian America’s economic and cultural capital. A professor at Rutgers University–Newark, Hong is ever conscious of how Asian America’s rising economic and cultural capital helps promote this notion of disappearance. Part of the challenge in writing about Asian America’s minor feelings is doing so in a way that does not simply reiterate Asian American racial capitalism.11 Related Article Mary Gaitskill’s Art of Loneliness Maggie Doherty
Hong struggles with this dilemma throughout Minor Feelings. What does it mean to write for a racial minority that must nonetheless circulate within a largely white publishing community and readership? Is it even possible? While she touches on the radical origins of “Asian American,” she is aware that the term has since been commodified by the publishing world. An MFA graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Hong is no stranger to how literary institutions produce racial capital. Early on, she describes an overwhelming anxiety that her graduate peers could read her only through her Asian identity—a strategy of capitalizing on her ethnicity that the younger Hong finds “juvenile.” Fearing that others will label her as merely an identitarian poet, she chooses instead to be a “good student of modernism” with its commitment to abstraction and universalism.12
When Hong starts publishing, she learns that her poetry gets read through her Asian female identity regardless of what she writes, and at readings she finds herself almost always addressing a mostly white audience. “There was no denying it,” she concludes. “I was performing for a roomful of bored white people and I desperately wanted their approval.” Although Minor Feelings seeks to reject this white approval, the specter of whiteness haunts the book. “Even in opposition,” Hong explains, “I still see my life in relation to whiteness.”13
Hong’s struggle to detach from the value system of American capitalism and its reproduction of white prestige resonated with my own experience in university settings, where the aesthetic virtues of Anglo-American modernism still tend to dominate academic inquiry. Like Hong, I too began to feel what she describes as “a kind of despair” about the fact that there might be no way to write about a personal racial condition that does not lapse into a self-annihilating appeal for the approval of white people.14
Yet as one moves through Minor Feelings, one begins to see how, beside her rejection of white affirmation, there exists a more affirmative story of Asian American collectivity: A minor plot of the book, scattered across its chapters, is one of racial solidarity. A poetry reading Hong gives at Western Michigan University is particularly illustrative. As the event wraps up, a Korean American student goes up to her and starts crying after describing “how alone and alienated she felt on campus.” They hug. “It is for her,” Hong thinks, “that I’m writing this book.”15
Hong offers another example later. Writing about the women in Dai Sil Kim-Gibson’s 1993 documentary Sa-I-Gu, which features Korean American shopkeepers whose businesses were burned down during the Los Angeles riots in 1992, Hong notes, “Interview after interview…I experienced another shock of recognition…. They are like my aunts.” For Hong, these anecdotal instances of recognition begin to add up to the major narrative impulse that drives Minor Feelings. They are why she is writing this book.16
This minor plot necessarily emerges piecemeal. Readers repeatedly glimpse characters like the Los Angeles shopkeepers through Hong’s experiences of identification and disidentification. They are found in the personal and the anecdotal: the rejection of the Korean American therapist or the embrace of the Korean American student. They also prove to be a more general theme, appearing across the book like a heterogeneous Asian American grouping that Hong works to make visible, however fleetingly. Like the minor feelings that are the book’s named subject, their presence—and their persistence—occurs through their serial invocation, their cumulative semblances.17
A chapter titled “Bad English” sits at the midpoint of Minor Feelings and functions as a pivot away from the more polemical ground setting in the book’s first half to the more intimate interventions in its second. Rather than advance any theses about contemporary Asian America, “Bad English” offers a searching and introspective examination of the very language that makes Minor Feelings possible—the literary forms that enable Hong to speak to and on behalf of the contradictions of being Asian American. The chapter ends with a series of unanswerable questions that strike me as a kind of renunciation of the more public-facing writing of the initial chapters:18
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? Where do I begin?19
In the chapter that follows, “An Education,” Hong begins to answer some of these questions and in doing so produces one of the more thrilling essays of the book. Here, she documents her friendship with Erin and Helen—two other Asian female artists—as students at Oberlin College. “An Education” is not only a Künstlerroman in miniature; it also functions as a story of Asian American female friendship that I realized, upon reading, felt rare only in its literary representation. Hong, Erin, and Helen form an obsessive bond that is both painful and necessary. While they frequently experience conflict (especially the mercurial Helen, who is no longer part of Hong’s life), the friendship is clearly formative in not just a personal but also an artistic way. “When I made art alone, it was a fantasy,” Hong writes, “but shared with Erin and Helen, art became a mission.”20
Throughout “An Education,” Hong renders their friendship—while often volatile and sometimes even violent—in a way that feels crucially vital. It is an artistic friendship that exceeds the sum of its parts. “I had intended to write only about Erin,” Hong admits toward the essay’s end, long after she’s spilled so many of the details and traumas of Helen’s life, but for Hong, her relationship with Erin was inextricable from the one she had with Helen.21
Minor Feelings begins with intraracial antagonism, but it ends by trying to envision something closer to a form of intraracial solidarity. After “An Education,” Hong writes about the relatively underexamined rape and murder of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, who is best known for writing the 1982 experimental autobiography Dictée. While scholars have pored over Cha’s avant-garde masterwork, which mixes genres and languages in narrating the lives of radical women such as Joan of Arc and Yu Guan Soon, Hong wonders what is lost by overlooking the more personal details of Cha’s death. While sympathetic to the concern of potentially fetishizing these events, she is baffled by “the length to which scholars will argue how Cha is recovering the lives of Korean women silenced by historical atrocities while remaining silent about the atrocity that took Cha’s own life.” Her essay seeks to reconstruct, if not quite popularize, Cha’s life for a broader audience.22
Drawing on court records as well as interviews with Cha’s brother John and her friend Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Hong tells this story through an idiosyncratic archive that is both impersonal and so intimate as to be familial. Whereas legal documents provide only inconclusive information about Cha’s life and death, John offers the kind of biographical texture about her typically omitted by scholarship on Cha. Hong weaves herself into Cha’s story, saying how a teacher at Oberlin, the Korean American avant-garde poet Myung Mi Kim, first told her about Dictée. “By introducing me to Cha, my professor Kim established a direct, if modest, literary link: Cha, Kim, myself”—a genealogy of Asian American feminist aesthetic avant-gardism that might also include Erin and Helen.23
Given Hong’s gesture to this personal genealogy, it is perhaps unsurprising that her final chapter ends on a note of debt, looking backward at the immigrants and political movements that now make her and her book possible. Likewise, Hong’s theoretical citations throughout the book show her indebtedness to other scholars of race—contemporary, Asian American, and otherwise. A look at the press blurbs for Minor Feelings, which include quotes from Claudia Rankine, Alexander Chee, and Kiese Laymon, also gives the reader a sense of the contemporary literary community that enables this book. Minor Feelings, then, stretches out along a broader network of not just racial but also intellectual circulation.24
In ending on debt, Hong expresses an important fact of Asian American solidarity. As much as we might wish to reject one another—to reject other Asians as a way to affirm ourselves—our experiences are only as real as they are shared. One’s own Asian American story might begin with an anecdote as well, but it is also a part of a broader history as we begin to string them together. The very history of the term “Asian American” captures this dynamic—as it emerges from the radical student movements of the late 1960s, especially the Third World Liberation Front, which emphasized pan-Asian and cross-racial solidarity.25
Such an act of collective storytelling seems increasingly necessary, given the rise of anti-Asian sentiment during the coronavirus pandemic. Writing for The New Yorker’s website, the novelist Ed Park wonders if his recent racist encounter with a man on the streets of New York City merited “minor feelings or major.” One xenophobic encounter might feel “not that remarkable,” but as his piece goes on to list, a series of instances of anti-Asian discrimination suggests a different story. What a strange time to be thinking about Asian American disappearance; I have never felt more anxiously visible. Yet it is a visibility that need not only be unwelcome. At such a time—taking my allotted daily constitutionals, standing in line for groceries—I scan the scene, wondering if I’ll see anyone else who looks like me.26


thenation--2020-05-18--Democracy Dies in Dysfunction

Democracy Dies in Dysfunction

Like many Americans , Joe Biden is skeptical about President Trump ’ s respect for democracy .
“ Mark my words : I think he is gon na try to kick back the election somehow , come up with some rationale why it can ’ t be held , ” Biden said at an online fundraiser in late April .
He ’ s right to worry but wrong about how Trump ’ s inclination toward voter suppression will manifest itself this fall .
It would take an act of Congress—including the Democratic-controlled House—to upend the federal law that requires general @ @ @ @ @ @ @ after the first Monday in November .
A Progressive Democratic Party is Possible—and Biden Needs It to Win But that does not mean Trump won ’ t try to mess with the elections , in which , polls suggest , he and Republican Senate candidates are now vulnerable .
This president thrives on chaos and fear , and the Covid-19 pandemic has created plenty of both .
The virus that led 16 states to postpone primaries this spring could resurface in time to disrupt the November elections .
In many states , that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to appeal to Trump , who recently complained that if voting was made easy , “ You ’ d never have a Republican elected in this country again.
” How far might Trump and his minions go ?
After Republicans blocked efforts to organize safe and fair Wisconsin elections on April 7 , state Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler warned of a GOP that “ remorselessly weaponizes courts , election laws , and the coronavirus itself to disenfranchise the voters who stand in its way.
” Democrats can act now to avert chaotic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial candidate who now leads the voting rights group Fair Fight , says , “ No .
1 , we have to have vote-by-mail.
” Building on existing vote-by-mail and absentee ballot rules , she says , “ We simply have to scale it so that every state can execute it at the level necessary for a country in crisis , and that is doable.
” Abrams proposes a “ toolbox ” approach , in which states make voting by mail available to all , along with safer early @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to scale it up is running out , and hard-pressed state and local governments don ’ t have the necessary resources .
The National Vote at Home Institute calculates that 42 states would need “ infrastructural changes ” to make voting by mail a readily available option .
“ Can we expand the vote-by-mail system ?
Absolutely , ” Amber McReynolds , the group ’ s CEO told BuzzFeed News in April .
“ But if this drags on for weeks and decisions are slow , it ’ s not possible.
” To @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Center says states need to pay for equipment , postal fees , and necessary changes to guarantee “ safe and sanitary in-person voting , ” urgent federal action is required .
Trump ’ s resistance to funding the Postal Service and vote-by-mail initiatives can be overcome if congressional Democrats play hardball in stimulus negotiations .
Democracy advocates must tell House Democrats that funding for safe and fair elections can not be compromised away .
Advocacy also has to ramp up in the states .
On May 8 , California Governor Gavin Newsom signed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in that state be mailed a ballot before the November elections .
All other Democratic governors and sensible Republicans should be encouraged to do the same .
In states where Trump-aligned Republicans erect barriers to statewide action , there ’ s a local option .
Prodded by the Working Families Party and voting-rights advocates , the Milwaukee Common Council voted unanimously in late April to create a SafeVote program that will send absentee ballot applications and postage-paid return envelopes to roughly 300,000 registered voters in the city .
“ The COVID-19 pandemic has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at the moment , ” council member Marina Dimitrijevic told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel , “ but with SafeVote we can make certain that all registered voters in Milwaukee can easily apply for an absentee ballot for the historic and pivotal election this fall.
” That certainty must be demanded for all voters in all states this November .

This article appears in the June 1/8, 2020 issue.
Like many Americans, Joe Biden is skeptical about President Trump’s respect for democracy. “Mark my words: I think he is gonna try to kick back the election somehow, come up with some rationale why it can’t be held,” Biden said at an online fundraiser in late April. He’s right to worry but wrong about how Trump’s inclination toward voter suppression will manifest itself this fall. It would take an act of Congress—including the Democratic-controlled House—to upend the federal law that requires general elections be held on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. More From John Nichols A GOP Debate Without Trump Is the Definition of Pointlessness August 11, 2023 A Win for Abortion Rights, a Win for Democracy: Ohio Voters Reject Issue 1 August 9, 2023 The Biggest Threat to Donald Trump Could Be the Constitution Itself August 4, 2023
But that does not mean Trump won’t try to mess with the elections, in which, polls suggest, he and Republican Senate candidates are now vulnerable. This president thrives on chaos and fear, and the Covid-19 pandemic has created plenty of both. The virus that led 16 states to postpone primaries this spring could resurface in time to disrupt the November elections. In many states, that disruption could depress turnout—a prospect that seems to appeal to Trump, who recently complained that if voting was made easy, “You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” How far might Trump and his minions go? After Republicans blocked efforts to organize safe and fair Wisconsin elections on April 7, state Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler warned of a GOP that “remorselessly weaponizes courts, election laws, and the coronavirus itself to disenfranchise the voters who stand in its way.”
Democrats can act now to avert chaotic, low-turnout fall elections. Stacey Abrams, the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial candidate who now leads the voting rights group Fair Fight, says, “No. 1, we have to have vote-by-mail.” Building on existing vote-by-mail and absentee ballot rules, she says, “We simply have to scale it so that every state can execute it at the level necessary for a country in crisis, and that is doable.” Abrams proposes a “toolbox” approach, in which states make voting by mail available to all, along with safer early and in-person voting. But the time to scale it up is running out, and hard-pressed state and local governments don’t have the necessary resources. The National Vote at Home Institute calculates that 42 states would need “infrastructural changes” to make voting by mail a readily available option. “Can we expand the vote-by-mail system? Absolutely,” Amber McReynolds, the group’s CEO told BuzzFeed News in April. “But if this drags on for weeks and decisions are slow, it’s not possible.”
To get the $4 billion the Brennan Center says states need to pay for equipment, postal fees, and necessary changes to guarantee “safe and sanitary in-person voting,” urgent federal action is required. Trump’s resistance to funding the Postal Service and vote-by-mail initiatives can be overcome if congressional Democrats play hardball in stimulus negotiations. Democracy advocates must tell House Democrats that funding for safe and fair elections cannot be compromised away. Voting and Covid Wisconsin’s In-Person Voting Threatens Health and Democracy John Nichols
Advocacy also has to ramp up in the states. On May 8, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order that every registered voter in that state be mailed a ballot before the November elections. All other Democratic governors and sensible Republicans should be encouraged to do the same.
In states where Trump-aligned Republicans erect barriers to statewide action, there’s a local option. Prodded by the Working Families Party and voting-rights advocates, the Milwaukee Common Council voted unanimously in late April to create a SafeVote program that will send absentee ballot applications and postage-paid return envelopes to roughly 300,000 registered voters in the city. “The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us that nothing is truly certain at the moment,” council member Marina Dimitrijevic told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “but with SafeVote we can make certain that all registered voters in Milwaukee can easily apply for an absentee ballot for the historic and pivotal election this fall.” That certainty must be demanded for all voters in all states this November.


thenation--2020-05-18--Puerto Rico’s Sex Workers Are Struggling to Survive

The Nation and Magnum Foundation are partnering on a visual chronicle of untold stories as the coronavirus continues to spread across the United States and the rest of the world—read more from The Invisible Front Line .
—The Editors Puerto Rico has been in economic trouble for more than a decade , with wave after wave of austerity policies stripping the territory of resources and tearing an already frayed safety net .
The scarce job opportunities became even scarcer after Hurricanes Irma and María in 2017 and the 2020 earthquakes .
The Covid-19 pandemic , therefore , comes as just @ @ @ @ @ @ @ battered island , compounding the problems that existed long before .
This photo essay was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project ( @ econhardship ) For college students and young professionals , the options that remain are slim : Leave the island to look for better jobs somewhere else , stay on the island to earn $ 7.25 an hour in a minimum wage job , or go outside the island ’ s decimated job market and try to make rent some other way .
As a queer woman coming out of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ struggle firsthand .
A freelance photojournalist in Puerto Rico , I often have to create work that appeals to US and international media outlets , since local opportunities to place my work are extremely limited .
But as I ’ ve grown into my photographic practice , I ’ ve realized that I don ’ t have to look far from my social circle to tell stories that are important to me .
That ’ s where this story comes from : In the past year , many of my friends have taken @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of income .
In normal times , most of my friends who work in sex work do so at strip clubs , while others work on the streets to find clients , but with the coronavirus closing clubs and locking down the economy , they ’ ve had to find new ways of earning their livelihood .
In a criminalized work sector , sex workers already labor without the benefits or protections other industries enjoy , and during this pandemic they also can ’ t access unemployment benefits or any of the paltry @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
As a result , while some sex workers are forced to take the risk of meeting clients , many of my friends have been moving their operations to digital platforms .
They ’ re not navigating this crisis alone , either : Groups and outlets like Espicy Nipples , Trans Tanamá , La Sombrilla Cuir , El Hangar , Todas Puerto Rico , many of which are led by women , LGBTQ+ , and nonbinary activists , are using this moment to push for the destigmatization and decriminalization of sex work and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ calls for greater economic opportunities on the island .
With Puerto Rico still under a shelter-in-place order , I reached out to my contacts in sex work and asked them how their lives have changed , the challenges of digital sex work , and the efforts they ’ re undertaking to survive this crisis together .
I ’ m especially concerned about sex workers who work on the streets and don ’ t have access to digital strategies , to digital sex work for whatever reason .
We need people and organizations to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Like , yeah , the clubs where I work at have said , “ Ohh , we ’ ll see you when we open again , ” but are they communicating with us ?
Are they looking out for our needs ?
There ’ s a lot of negligence by club management and owners .
I started around January at a strip club in Isla Verde .
Since quarantine started , I haven ’ t had any work because the club was my main income .
I am completely unemployed right now @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but that amount of money only lasts for two weeks of groceries and sometimes even less .
I ’ ve had to use some of my savings to be able to buy groceries .
Most of my savings have been used up since quarantine .
A lot of my colleagues have started selling digital content to maintain relationships with their clients and to have income , but unfortunately , because my family doesn ’ t know that I am a sex worker , that is not a possibility for me right now .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ out how to go about my work since the pandemic because I need to make money .
On an individual level , it worries me not being able to finish my studies , get my high school degree .
It worries me that there are sex workers that don ’ t have access to homes , health care , et cetera , still have to go out to the street and put themselves at risk.… We deserve a better way of doing our job .
I want to have a pension .
I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ insurance doing what I do , but I can ’ t because I don ’ t have a payroll , I don ’ t file taxes .
The lack of education , space , and security is what worries me the most .
Especially as a trans woman in this country , where there have already been five homicides of trans people in less than two months .
It scares me , I ’ m afraid of going out .
My mental health has been affected by all this…because when I work on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ necessarily know who I ’ m meeting , what kind of client this is .
I used to stand in the streets of Santurce , and now I don ’ t know how I ’ m going to do that because of how scared I am for my life .
They can just come by and shoot me , like they did with Alexa [ Negrón Luciano , a trans woman murdered in February ] .
What difference is there between Alexa and me ?
None , because like her , I am @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hate us in this country .
Some of us are working on communicating more with one another .
Talk about experiences , communicating what we need , trying to get resources for each other .
We are trying to organize a group to make collaborations and exchanges easier between the sex worker community .
I think this is what we need .
I think it ’ s going to be great .
My routine used to be going to college every day and working one to three days a week in the clubs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to make a certain amount of money a week to decide how many days I should be working to cover my debts and responsibilities .
Now I feel a lot more physically safe , but selling digital content is new to me , so I ’ m learning how best to do this .
How do I create content ?
How do I capitalize on my body ?
How do I put a price on photos or videos ?
I ’ m learning how to market my content , promote my work , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Instagram is the only platform where I promote my sex work , privately , because I have been banned before .
I ask for the money via ATH Móvil Business or PayPal and then send the images via WhatsApp .
Sometimes I ’ ll send the images through Instagram because clients are pickier about receiving messages on their phones .
I ’ ve been studying from home , which takes a lot of my time , and making digital content .
I ’ m mostly depending on my savings right now .
I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about how to gestate political actions within sex work .
I ’ m very lucky to live with someone who supports me , to have our basic needs met , to have savings , to live in a safe space , and to be able to take this time to think and rest .
These actions that I ’ m thinking about , I imagine it as a solidarity organization to find tools and resources for self-care , mutual care , resources , funding , and building support networks between people that understand @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a lot of vulnerability to have these conversations , to be willing to share your experiences as a sex worker .
Working at home gives me the liberty of doing it whenever I want without having a boss on my ass or having to stick to a work schedule .
It has its pros and cons , money flow is not the same , and a lot of people are using the situation to pesetear [ try to negotiate to pay a price lower than the value of the work ] .
That @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of more risky things .
I have a lot of friends in the sex work industry here that practice full services , not just dance , and they are being asked to do riskier stuff at the same price… .
And it ’ s like , either this or no income .
What I like about the club is the no picture policy and that you come and see me once and you forget about me , and it ’ s not even the real me you are meeting .
On the Internet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ story , because I have to promote myself , and that means they are going to have something with them , with me on it .
It can put me in vulnerable situations .
Once this is over , there ’ s going to be a lot of new girls to sex work , and this is going to be a vulnerable time for them because a lot of people might try to take advantage of them , coming new to the industry .
The people who run strip clubs in Puerto Rico @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are vulnerable .
Especially after a crisis like this where the strip club is going to be a space where a lot of fucked-up things might happen .
It worries me that there is going to be more tension at strip clubs .
I feel that the thing that is going to get us through is ourselves , us sex workers as a community .
Even in the club , where there ’ s rivalry , there ’ s still some strong bond of sisterhood .
I think that is what is really @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the bosses , not the clients , not the government , just us .

Gabriella N. Báez, The Nation, Magnum Foundation

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Nation believes that helping readers stay informed about the impact of the coronavirus crisis is a form of public service. For that reason, this article, and all of our coronavirus coverage, is now free. Please subscribe to support our writers and staff, and stay healthy.
The Nation and Magnum Foundation are partnering on a visual chronicle of untold stories as the coronavirus continues to spread across the United States and the rest of the world—read more from The Invisible Front Line. —The Editors
Puerto Rico has been in economic trouble for more than a decade, with wave after wave of austerity policies stripping the territory of resources and tearing an already frayed safety net. The scarce job opportunities became even scarcer after Hurricanes Irma and María in 2017 and the 2020 earthquakes. The Covid-19 pandemic, therefore, comes as just the latest misfortune to hit an already battered island, compounding the problems that existed long before. This photo essay was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project (@econhardship)
For college students and young professionals, the options that remain are slim: Leave the island to look for better jobs somewhere else, stay on the island to earn $7.25 an hour in a minimum wage job, or go outside the island’s decimated job market and try to make rent some other way.
As a queer woman coming out of college, I’ve experienced this struggle firsthand. A freelance photojournalist in Puerto Rico, I often have to create work that appeals to US and international media outlets, since local opportunities to place my work are extremely limited. But as I’ve grown into my photographic practice, I’ve realized that I don’t have to look far from my social circle to tell stories that are important to me.
That’s where this story comes from: In the past year, many of my friends have taken up sex work as their primary source of income. In normal times, most of my friends who work in sex work do so at strip clubs, while others work on the streets to find clients, but with the coronavirus closing clubs and locking down the economy, they’ve had to find new ways of earning their livelihood. In a criminalized work sector, sex workers already labor without the benefits or protections other industries enjoy, and during this pandemic they also can’t access unemployment benefits or any of the paltry economic assistance packages being offered right now.
The empty adult entertainment club district in Santurce, Puerto Rico, shut down due to Covid-19 shutdowns and curfew. (Gabriella N. Báez)
As a result, while some sex workers are forced to take the risk of meeting clients, many of my friends have been moving their operations to digital platforms. They’re not navigating this crisis alone, either: Groups and outlets like Espicy Nipples, Trans Tanamá, La Sombrilla Cuir, El Hangar, Todas Puerto Rico, many of which are led by women, LGBTQ+, and nonbinary activists, are using this moment to push for the destigmatization and decriminalization of sex work and solutions to gender-based violence—in addition to broader calls for greater economic opportunities on the island.
With Puerto Rico still under a shelter-in-place order, I reached out to my contacts in sex work and asked them how their lives have changed, the challenges of digital sex work, and the efforts they’re undertaking to survive this crisis together.
Nairobi (she/her), 25, from San Juan
I’m especially concerned about sex workers who work on the streets and don’t have access to digital strategies, to digital sex work for whatever reason. We need people and organizations to worry about us, to support us.
Like, yeah, the clubs where I work at have said, “Ohh, we’ll see you when we open again,” but are they communicating with us? Are they looking out for our needs? There’s a lot of negligence by club management and owners.
Gala (she/her and they/them), 24, from Bayamón
Gala. (Gabriella N. Báez)
I started around January at a strip club in Isla Verde. Since quarantine started, I haven’t had any work because the club was my main income. I am completely unemployed right now. I have monthly food assistance, but that amount of money only lasts for two weeks of groceries and sometimes even less. I’ve had to use some of my savings to be able to buy groceries. Most of my savings have been used up since quarantine.
(Gabriella N. Báez)
(Gabriella N. Báez)
(Gabriella N. Báez)
A lot of my colleagues have started selling digital content to maintain relationships with their clients and to have income, but unfortunately, because my family doesn’t know that I am a sex worker, that is not a possibility for me right now. I’ve been trying to figure out how to go about my work since the pandemic because I need to make money.
Karo (she/her), 20, from San Juan
On an individual level, it worries me not being able to finish my studies, get my high school degree. It worries me that there are sex workers that don’t have access to homes, health care, et cetera, still have to go out to the street and put themselves at risk.… We deserve a better way of doing our job. I want to have a pension. I want to be able to have life insurance doing what I do, but I can’t because I don’t have a payroll, I don’t file taxes.
The lack of education, space, and security is what worries me the most. Especially as a trans woman in this country, where there have already been five homicides of trans people in less than two months. It scares me, I’m afraid of going out. My mental health has been affected by all this…because when I work on the street, I don’t necessarily know who I’m meeting, what kind of client this is. I used to stand in the streets of Santurce, and now I don’t know how I’m going to do that because of how scared I am for my life. They can just come by and shoot me, like they did with Alexa [Negrón Luciano, a trans woman murdered in February]. What difference is there between Alexa and me? None, because like her, I am a poor transgender black woman. They hate us in this country.
Some of us are working on communicating more with one another. Talk about experiences, communicating what we need, trying to get resources for each other. We are trying to organize a group to make collaborations and exchanges easier between the sex worker community. I think this is what we need. I think it’s going to be great.
Akila (she/her), 22, from San Juan
Akila reviews her direct messages on Instagram from people and clients reacting to her posts. (Gabriella N. Báez)
My routine used to be going to college every day and working one to three days a week in the clubs. I had quotas. I had to make a certain amount of money a week to decide how many days I should be working to cover my debts and responsibilities.
Now I feel a lot more physically safe, but selling digital content is new to me, so I’m learning how best to do this. How do I create content? How do I capitalize on my body? How do I put a price on photos or videos? I’m learning how to market my content, promote my work, think of new ways to sell.
Instagram is the only platform where I promote my sex work, privately, because I have been banned before. I ask for the money via ATH Móvil Business or PayPal and then send the images via WhatsApp. Sometimes I’ll send the images through Instagram because clients are pickier about receiving messages on their phones.
I’ve been studying from home, which takes a lot of my time, and making digital content. I’m mostly depending on my savings right now. I’m using this time to think about how to gestate political actions within sex work. I’m very lucky to live with someone who supports me, to have our basic needs met, to have savings, to live in a safe space, and to be able to take this time to think and rest.
These actions that I’m thinking about, I imagine it as a solidarity organization to find tools and resources for self-care, mutual care, resources, funding, and building support networks between people that understand and live these experiences. It takes a lot of vulnerability to have these conversations, to be willing to share your experiences as a sex worker.
Tokio (they/them), 21, from San Juan
Working at home gives me the liberty of doing it whenever I want without having a boss on my ass or having to stick to a work schedule. It has its pros and cons, money flow is not the same, and a lot of people are using the situation to pesetear [try to negotiate to pay a price lower than the value of the work]. That also opens the way for a lot of more risky things. I have a lot of friends in the sex work industry here that practice full services, not just dance, and they are being asked to do riskier stuff at the same price…. And it’s like, either this or no income.
What I like about the club is the no picture policy and that you come and see me once and you forget about me, and it’s not even the real me you are meeting. On the Internet, it’s a whole other story, because I have to promote myself, and that means they are going to have something with them, with me on it. It can put me in vulnerable situations.
Once this is over, there’s going to be a lot of new girls to sex work, and this is going to be a vulnerable time for them because a lot of people might try to take advantage of them, coming new to the industry. The people who run strip clubs in Puerto Rico can be very violent to people who are vulnerable. Especially after a crisis like this where the strip club is going to be a space where a lot of fucked-up things might happen. It worries me that there is going to be more tension at strip clubs.
I feel that the thing that is going to get us through is ourselves, us sex workers as a community. Even in the club, where there’s rivalry, there’s still some strong bond of sisterhood. I think that is what is really going to get us through. Not the bosses, not the clients, not the government, just us.
Gracias, Akila, por facilitar el contacto entre trabajadorxs sexuales, por tu gesta, por tu conocimiento, por ser tu, por contarme, por ser mi amiga.
Gracias, Karo, por guiarme mientras creamos imágenes juntas y tu energía.
Gracias, Nairobi, por la honestidad y tu flow sin tapujos.
Gracias, Gala, por crear, construir y colaborar hasta llegar a una selección de imágenes que respeta tus límites y tus deseos.
Gracias, Tokio, por tu vulnerabilidad y por la confianza en este trabajo, que es tuyo, que es nuestro.