— “Chinatown Poem” is a cento poem written using language taken from billboards, commercial shop signs, advertisements, and other elements of the linguistic landscape of Boston’s Chinatown neighborhood. The poem explores Chinatown as both a site of diasporic cultural production and a space where racist tropes and stereotypes about Asian people circulate and…
Author: Jonathan Chou
Jonathan C Chou is a poet, educator, and psychiatrist. He received his MS in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University and his MD from the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. He completed his adult psychiatry residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and McLean Hospital. Clinically, he is interested in cultural psychiatry, minority mental health, and university mental health. His work has appeared in Asymptote, Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal, The Healing Muse, and the Journal of Medical Humanities. His poetry chapbook, Pomes, was selected as a semifinalist for the 2022 Snowbound Chapbook Award. His debut collection, Resemblance/與, won the 2023 Alma Book Award and was published by Saturnalia Books in 2024. In 2025, he was selected by the National Museum of Taiwan Literature to be a writer-in-residence at the Taiwan Literature Base. He teaches in the MS in Narrative Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.
The Changing Narrative Medicine Workshop: Finding New Uses for and New Ways to Use Narrative Medicine
The Changing Narrative Medicine Workshop: Finding New Uses for and New Ways to Use Narrative Medicine The narrative medicine workshop, as a structure and method, differentiates narrative medicine as an applied discipline within the larger field of the health humanities. In the narrative medicine Master’s programs at Columbia University and the University of Southern…
Grief, Denial, and Racial Violence in the COVID-19 Pandemic (Part III)
Grief, Denial, and Racial Violence in the COVID-19 Pandemic (Part III) For Part I: I become inscrutable to myself For Part II: No sacrifice is excessive III. Finding a relational home In the previous section, I argued that the war metaphor engenders a derealizing self and other relation that precludes the realization of…
Grief, Denial, and Racial Violence in the COVID-19 Pandemic (Part II)
Grief, Denial, and Racial Violence in the COVID-19 Pandemic (Part II) For Part I: I become inscrutable to myself For Part III: Finding a relational home II. No sacrifice is excessive If we are to demand that grief be made into a resource for politics, we must demand to be allowed to feel…
Grief, Denial, and Racial Violence in the COVID-19 Pandemic (Part I)
Grief, Denial, and Racial Violence in the COVID-19 Pandemic (Part I) This article in three parts is adapted from a critical theory essay that I wrote in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020. It is clear to me now that in many ways this essay was my attempt to grieve,…
His Wife (No. 8847)
Jonathan Chou // His Wife (No. 8847) History from wife. The water came in through painted rain pipes. It was not paint but a daub of lard on his wife’s dress. She didn’t remove it after all.1 Things didn’t go smoothly. Furniture had to be wiped off. Elix. Iron Phos. Quin. & Strych. Smash the…