Hong’s Tic Symbol Analysis

Cathy Park Hong uses her tics—both a real one in her twenties and an imagined one in her thirties—to represent how racism insidiously affects Asian Americans, afflicting them with minor feelings and leading them to undermine themselves. Hong’s original tic starts in graduate school: part of her face involuntarily spasms from time to time, until a surgeon solves the problem by separating the nerves that have twisted together near her ear. This happens during a period when she is struggling with the role that her identity should play in her writing—her graduate school classmates believe that poetry should be race-neutral, meaning that it should read as though it were written by a white person, and they consider poets who deviate from this norm to be “unintellectual identitarian[s].” Yet if Hong accepted this norm, it would mean deviating from her true self. Hong’s tic represents how these competing demands complicate her quest to find and write in her own voice. Literally, they twist up her nerves, depriving her of control over her own face (or identity).

Seven years later, Hong suddenly convinces herself that her tic has come back, even though it actually hasn’t. She opens the book with the tale of this experience, which served as a prelude to a serious bout of depression. Hong connects this depression to the sense of shame, invisibility, and inadequacy that she associates with being an Asian American—and, above all, an Asian American poet expected to write for a white audience. In turn, her imaginary tic is subtle but unmistakable trace of the fact at the center of her book: American racism gets under Asian Americans’ skin and affects their sense of self at a deep, enduring level.