Select Writing

A Pedagogy of Unwellness, an excerpt from dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss

In your hands is the only kind of scholarly book I would want to write. It is a work on mental health that draws on and intervenes in Asian American studies, a work of critical university studies from the vantage point of a disabled, unwell Asian American adjunct. It is a pedagogical treatise that reframes teaching and knowledge making as transformative care projects, a disability studies and disability justice grappling with our collective unwellness. It is also a book full of stories and feelings, both mine and yours, as you’ll see. Theory in the flesh, mine and yours, so that we find our way through this thing called Life. We plumb what we know and feel, together. This book is a plea and a prayer that we all survive. It is a letter — to you, and my partner, and my daughter, whose name graces the cover. It is a letter to Asian American students, Asian American studies, Asian American community. It is a letter to help us imagine a future worth living in. It is a call to feeling. It is grief and hope together. It is an exit strategy.

Work Will Not Save Us: An Asian American Crip Manifesto, with Mel Y. Chen and Jina B. Kim
Disability Studies Quarterly

I don't like to work. It was even difficult to work on this piece. A manifesto, even a crip one, requires work. And nobody has time for that.

At the time of this writing, we are almost two years into the pandemic. I don't know how we're all still working. I think some of my colleagues have actually increased their work during this time, a feverish, anxiety-laden burst of productivity.

I'm worried that Asian Americans don't know how to stop working.

Writing While Adjunct: A Contingent Pedagogy of Unwellness
Crip Authorship

How to write as a disabled adjunct queer woman of color and parent? Don't. No, really, don't. Prioritize your needs. Make sure your needs-physical, emotional, relational, spiritual, intellectual-are being met. Rest. Figure out what duties must absolutely be performed, especially if you have dependents, and what can wait or be off-loaded. Ask for help. Pay for help. Find joy. Invest in your own joy. And most importantly, do not feel shame-for needing help, for asking for help, for needing rest, for being "flaky" or "lazy" for prioritizing your own joy. Do not feel shame for not writing.

After all that, then maybe you can write.

Making Mental Health through Open in Emergency: A Journey in Love Letters
South Atlantic Quarterly

In these letters is the story of how my mental health project Open in Emergency came into being. It is also the story of how I’ve come into being as a person who embraces a perpetual time of unwellness and care. I have come to organize my life—my writing, my teaching, my arts practice, my parenting, my relationships—around what I call a pedagogy of unwellness: the understanding that we are all differentially unwell. By this I mean that we are unwell in different ways at different times, in relation to differentially disabling and enabling structures, and so we need differential care at all times.

This Love and Its Labors
Hyphen Magazine

I stopped cooking because it was beyond my capacity. Because it was work that became too much in light of everything else I had to do and be and survive. Because I am allowed to need, I am allowed to have structures of care. Because I want to be, and should be, more than a person who does or does not function.

Teaching to Care
Powerlines

I am asking that we make ourselves intentionally vulnerable [as teachers]. Because I think that it is one way to engage the important work of prophetic teaching and learning. Crafting the university as a space of ethical development. Teaching my students to expand their capacities to feel, to care.

Critical Feeling
Forum for Theological Education

Teaching and writing are my calling. An ethical practice that pushes both me and my audiences to cultivate deeper thought and deeper feeling. The analytical but also the affective. We think and we feel because people are dying, whole communities left choking on the shrapnel of their lives, on their own grief and rage. Life, as deeply striated by vectors of violence. The social and cultural forces we discuss matter because they reveal the conditions of life and death in this world: diminished life chances, foreclosures of possibility, the compromises we make for ourselves and on the backs of others. These are the stakes.

What It Means to Love Mothers
Briarpatch Magazine

What would a societal support system look like that truly embraces mothers, mothering, and child-raising?

It would create structures that enable mothering in all its forms, and, most of all, enable mothers to be full people. Being a full person is foundational to being a good mother; we need to see and nurture the full personhoods of mothers. We need to love mothers as much as we love children.

Living and Writing in the Face of Violence
Black Girl Dangerous

For those of us on the margins, living honestly, living vulnerably, means living dangerously. Risking, in the face of great threat. Risking precisely because of threat. Because these threats promise total annihilation in the name of a tightly, intricately constructed normal, and simply refusing that annihilation, that normal, is a monumental risk. Staring down that tempest, as it screams and whips around you, at you, through you.

There is no other way to live.

There is no other way to write.

Secrets
Black Girl Dangerous

I had almost forgotten what secrets of this magnitude were like. Secrets of my being, where the stakes are my self, all my relationships, my friends’ and family’s love and acceptance and support. Secrets that require the construction of entire closets around them, rooms in which to hide. The slow suffocation of holding one’s breath in a room that feels like it’s shrinking, faster and faster. The terror that keeps you in the shrinking box. Sometimes, we’d rather die of suffocation than step out into searing exposure, be seen in a nakedness, a vulnerability, that leaves us raw, open to the worst of woundings. Sometimes, either way is death, and we are forced to choose not whether we will die but in what way.

Living Under Siege
Black Girl Dangerous

Those of us living (and dying) under conditions of structural violence; those whose vulnerabilities are exploited to the point of premature death, as Ruth Gilmore defines racism; those whose queer bodies, queer hearts, queer lives, struggle under the brutal(izing) reign of what Dean Spade calls normal life; those who Lord(e) knows were never meant to survive — we know that we are trying to be sane in an insane world. We know that madness boils around us, seeping into our pores, our veins, the crevices of our minds, to the point where we go mad, we are gripped by madness. By despair and rage and heartbreak and fear and loss and exhaustion and exhaustion and exhaustion.

Madness is the psychic and affective life of living under siege.

Postpartum Depression: On Motherhood, Academia, and Mental Health
The Professor Is In

I found myself at the intersection of the super academic (I don’t have a body or other commitments), the happy supermom of contemporary American womanhood (I can handle everything; My baby is my greatest joy; My baby makes everything worth it), and the model minority (Just work harder; Accept obstacles and just hurdle them no matter the cost). Together, these discourses leave us no way to talk about how motherhood is hard, and that sometimes it gets too hard. And so we have no way to talk about what mothers need, what it means to live healthily as a mother, what the different forms of necessary support look like. They say it takes a village to raise a child; it takes a village to have happy, healthy mothers, too.