Proving Ourselves into Existence

“I grew up with this intense fear of failure,” says Cathy Park Hong. “And in retrospect, I can understand why my parents instilled that in me—because for them, there was no safety net.” Hong is a writer, a professor at Rutgers-Newark University, and the author of Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. It’s a book about family, identity, culture, and self-worth. Hong joins us today to talk about the parts of the Asian American experience that are often left out of the mainstream. She talks about how becoming a parent forced her to reckon with her own upbringing and the complicated nature of assimilation—both what it afforded her and what it stole from her. She asks: How do we go about the messy process of deciding which parts of our culture to pull forward to keep in our lives and which to put down? (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.)

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