dear elia
dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss (Duke University Press, March 2024) revolutionizes how we understand mental health. It is a creative-critical book exploring mental health through a pedagogy of unwellness: the recognition that we are all differentially unwell. We are all unwell in different ways at different times in relation to differentially disabling and enabling structures. And this means we need and deserve differential care at all times.
A hybrid work—part scholarship, part memoir, part workbook—dear elia traces the Asian American mental health crisis across college campuses and into the maw of the COVID-19 pandemic.
It is my story of doing arts-based mental health work throughout the country—a direct accounting of what Asian American unwellness looks like up close at the intersections of compulsory wellness and model minoritization.
It is a travelogue sharing lessons learned while meeting thousands of students across the country over the last decade.
It is an unrelenting eye turned toward the Asian American immigrant family and the forces that nurture a kind of love that kills.
It is an examination of the university as a devastating structure of unwellness, not only for students but also for faculty—especially the contingent.
It is a reflection on what it has meant to teach and try to nurture access in the classroom during the COVID-19 pandemic, a guide for an access-centered and care-centered pedagogy.
It is an epistolary series, letters from me inviting you to recognize the shapes and sources of your own unwellness alongside Asian Americans’. It is an offering of ways to move through all our unwellness together.
Want to speak into the Abyss together? Share what unwellness feels like for you in our living archive of unwellness.