Sami Schalk, in Black Disability Politics (2022), notes “the limited scholarly work on the specific approaches to disability politics within particular racialized communities thus far” (162). Schalk explains that the lack of such scholarly work prevents her from exploring to what extent a Black disability politics overlaps with the disability politics of Indigenous and Native, Asian American, and Latinx communities. She contends that the intersectional work of tracing these connections will only be possible when future research by these various groups allows for the development and articulation of their own specific disability politics.
This essay attempts to formulate an Asian American disability politics through a consideration of Mimi Khúc’s recent book, Dear Elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss. Khúc grounds her work in the perspectives of Asian American women. In this way, she avoids the exclusion that, as Schalk and Jina B. Kim point out, has defined the work of feminist disability scholars who have failed to cite and engage with feminists of color as theorists in their own right. Khúc begins with Eliza Noh’s “A Letter to My Sister,” a letter about the suicide of Noh’s sister that crucially theorizes structural violence as the cause. Considering this letter allows Khúc to move away from the medical model of individual pathology toward a model that focuses on larger structures of unwellness. It is the conceptualization of a “pedagogy of unwellness” (5) that is Khúc’s primary contribution to an Asian American disability politics. She demonstrates, by thinking specifically about Asian American mental health, how “we are all differentially unwell” (5). Khúc wants us to understand that unwellness, which she emphasizes has come to “encompass an entire way of being,” is not an individual failure but rather the result of living in a world that “differentially abandons us” (5).
Turning to the foundational work of erin Khuê Ninh on the model minority allows Khúc to name an explicit structural cause of Asian American unwellness: the family, or more specifically filial debt. Following Ninh, she describes how Asian American children attempt to repay a perceived debt by giving their parents ownership over their very personhood. It is through this focus on parental love – the book is structured as a letter to Khúc’s daughter and Asian American children more generally in the hopes of explaining their inheritance of pain – that an intersection of Asian American and African American experience emerges. Khúc demonstrates, with reference to the works of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Camille T. Dungy, and Imani Perry, how racism distorts love into a form that kills: Coates, in Between The World And Me, details an African American parental love obsessed with protection while Khúc depicts an Asian American parental love that demands perfection. Both of these distorted forms of love emerge from the vulnerability of Black and Asian bodies in America, and the demand that these bodies survive even at the cost of unwellness, even at the cost of suicide.
If Asian American unwellness begins within the family, it blooms in the university. Khúc critiques the university from the vantage point of a disabled, unwell Asian American adjunct. She is well aware of how the “university makes us unwell while telling us that it cares” (49). It is Asian American students and BIPOC students more generally who, Khúc stresses, are most devastated by this deceit. Khúc centers students throughout her book. She considers how Esmé Weijun Wang, in The Collected Schizophrenias, describes being discarded by Yale for failing to be well: she was encouraged to take a medical leave during a mental health crisis and then not allowed to return. What Khúc learns from listening to such stories is how the stakes are higher for Asian American students. The university, as she puts it, is “both the training ground and final test for model minorities” (49), who must succeed because there is no room for failure.
While Khúc explains that this book comes out of a project of listening to the unwellness of students, she stresses that she is not simply an observer but also an “agent” who is “actively nurturing new languages of mental health” while “supporting and catalyzing student movements” (24). Khúc describes her work as “interventional” (24). Her previous special issue of The Asian American Literary Review on the topic of mental health, Open in Emergency, included a number of interventional forms: tarot cards and a “mock” Asian American edition of the DSM, to name a few. Dear Elia continues this work by intervening in the form of the academic book. It includes short interludes that enact a pedagogy of unwellness by inviting the reader to engage in activities like reflection and making that are meant to nurture mental health. Here, then, is one approach to an Asian American disability politics: Khúc has her reader dwell as deeply as possible in Asian American unwellness in order to reveal the broader structures – from race to ableism to the university – that shape that unwellness such that new understandings of what it means to care in a world that keeps us unwell can be generated. She writes her letters in the hopes that we can “figure out how to move through this world together in all of our unwellness and not feel alone” (6). Dear Elia helps the reader to feel less alone – a goal of any worthwhile politics.
Works Cited
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015.
Khúc, Mimi. Dear Elia: Letters From the Asian American Abyss. Durham: Duke University Press, 2024.
Khúc, Mimi, ed. “Open in Emergency: A Special issue on Asian American Mental Health,” The Asian American Literary Review, vol. 7, no. 2, 2016.
Noh, Eliza. “Asian American Women and Suicide: Problems of Responsibility and Healing.” Women and Therapy, vol. 30, no. 3/4, 2007, pp. 87-107.
Schalk, Sami. Black Disability Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022.
Schalk, Sami, and Jina B. Kim. “Integrating Race, Transforming Feminist Disability Studies.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 46, no. 1, 2020, pp. 31-55.
Wang, Esmé Weijun. The Collected Schizophrenias. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2019.
