Dance Dance Revolution by Cathy Park Hong

I ransack my mind for what I could have done, could have said. It’s like being ghosted, I suppose, where, deprived of all social cues, I have no relational gauge for my own behavior. Our race has nothing to do with this country, even, which is why we’re often listed as “Other” in polls and why we’re hard to find in racial breakdowns on reported rape or workplace discrimination or domestic abuse. This country insists that our racial identity is beside the point, that it has nothing to do with being bullied, or passed over for promotion, or cut off every time we talk. We will not be the power but become absorbed by power, not share the power of whites but be stooges to a white ideology that exploited our ancestors. We are reputed to be so accomplished, and so law-abiding, we will disappear into this country’s amnesiac fog. “When I hear the phrase “Asians are next in line to be white,” I replace the word “white” with “disappear.” Asians are next in line to disappear. She is the poetry editor of the New Republic and is a professor at Rutgers-Newark University.more Her poems have been published in Poetry, A Public Space, Paris Review, McSweeney's, Baffler, Yale Review, The Nation, and other journals.

Hong is the recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Norton, Dance Dance Revolution, chosen by Adrienne Rich for the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Translating Mo'um. She is also the author of poetry collections Engine Empire, published in 2012 by W.W. Cathy Park Hong’s book of creative nonfiction, Minor Feelings, was published in Spring 2020 by One World/Random House (US) and Profile Books (UK). She is the poetry editor of the New Republic and is a professor at Rutgers-Newark University.

Dance Dance Revolution by Cathy Park Hong