Cathy Park Hong: Let’s Be Neurotic Together
In April of 2023, I had a chance to speak with Cathy Park Hong at a fundraiser. Here is the beginning of our conversation:
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.
“I did [stand-up] a handful of times. The first time I did it was at the New Museum. I had invited these amazing poets—Ronaldo Wilson, Ariana Reines, and Catherine Wagner—to come and do readings; the subject was the racialized body and the abject. I did a talk about Richard Pryor and themes of abjection in his comedy, and it occurred to me that I should do stand-up. I was so crazy. So I did 10 minutes of stand-up. And I, like, read. I wasn’t actually doing stand-up; I was reading jokes from these papers. And the people in the audience were my friends, so they were laughing their heads off. And I was like, Oh my God, I’m hilarious.”