Cathy Park Hong: Let's Be Neurotic Together

Back in April, I had a chance to speak with Cathy Park Hong at our fundraiser--published now to drum up interest in the next Luminary Dinner where Charles Yu will be in conversation with George Saunders.

Is there a kind of solidarity to be found in just sharing the arsenal of complexes? Isn’t our neurosis the same? I don’t have to be part of the same affinity group. I think affinity groups are important, but there is another kind of affinity that maybe comes through the world of letters in a different way. Let’s just be neurotic together.

I love that. That should be a sign on a T-shirt: Let’s be neurotic together. I will say, my community are writers and artists, and a lot of the writers and artists are Asian American and BIPOC. And I think most of the time we’re being neurotic together. There’s not that sort of reductive binary of belonging and not belonging. Sara Ahmed talks about belonging a lot in a couple of her books, and I was really influenced by her and her discontentedness about the rhetoric of belonging.

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