event recap: cathy park hong @ sal

Hey hey!

Happy February – things have been getting a lot busier at work what with tax season and all, but I’m dead-set on still fitting in time to do things that I love (like attending SAL events and writing about them!). In late January, Seattle Arts & Lectures (“SAL”) hosted Cathy Park Hong, poet and author, famously known for her latest release, Minor Feelings, in conversation with Ijeoma Oluo.

Since Minor Feelings: an Asian American Reckoning isn’t a new release, I was able to grab an audiobook copy and listen to the essays prior the event, which helped provide so much context for the discussion Hong had with Oluo. If you’re unfamiliar, Ijeoma Oluo is an activist and author of So You Want to Talk About Race and is local in Seattle!

I really enjoyed hearing both womens’ thoughts and their discussion bounced off of one another so well. Hong started the discussion sharing about how her book was released right before the pandemic, and also her initial intentions for the book’s topics. Hong is a fairly new mother, and I loved what she said about writing a book that roots her and her daughter’s position in America and wanting life to be better for her daughter – aka controlling the narrative.

Hong is also a poet, and she explained that she wanted her legacy to open possibilities for Asian Americans to have permission to be a writer that feels true to them. I found this to be so hopeful, because as she mentioned, educational institutions, and not just Asian parents, steer Asian students away from the arts.

The Q&A portion of the discussion was so fascinating – the audience submitted amazing questions! One of the questions was, “how can Asian and Black communities evolve together?” I really appreciated Hong’s honesty here in admitting that she can’t answer that as an organizer but only in the perspective as a writer. Writers can write books about living together racially and finding moments in history, like when Frederick Douglass stood in solidarity with the Chinese during the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Another question prompted the discussion for identity being relational and how an identity shouldn’t be static. Hong feels that identity should be a verb: a loosely affiliated coalition. If we viewed identity this way, we’d be less obsessed with being boxed into an identity and thus, it creates space.

One of the last questions was really thought-provoking: “would you have added or changed anything in Minor Feelings if you had written it after the Anti-Asian hate began?” Again, I loved Hong’s honesty here: in a way, she (jokingly) felt that her book was already outdated, but she was glad she wrote it beforehand because there would’ve been too much pressure to capture all of it after. Both Hong and Oluo agreed that being writers of contemporary issues means you could write forever. Hong also made an interesting point: the word “timely,” as most reviewers and critics noted of her book regarding the topics within Minor Feelings, is a word manufactured by publishing and media and ultimately shouldn’t be used/isn’t accurate. Racism is not new, it’s always here.

Lastly, Hong dropped a few books she’s read recently and would recommend like, The Woman Warrior, Wayward Lives, and The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois.

I absolutely loved this event and felt like I learned so much. Thank you again to SAL for hosting!!

Thanks for reading,

Jen x

I review events for #SAL as part of the #SALSuperFanClub; in exchange for a free ticket, I offer my unbiased review.