dear elia
Letters from the Asian American Abyss
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In dear elia Mimi Khúc revolutionizes how we understand mental health. Khúc traces the contemporary Asian American mental health crisis from the university into the maw of the COVID-19 pandemic, reenvisioning mental health through a pedagogy of unwellness--the recognition that we are all differentially unwell. In an intimate series of letters, she bears witness to Asian American unwellness up close and invites readers to recognize in it the shapes and sources of their own unwellness. Khúc draws linkages between student experience, the Asian immigrant family, the adjunctification of the university, and teaching methods pre- and post-COVID-19 to illuminate hidden roots of our collective unwellness: shared investments in compulsory wellness and meritocracy. She reveals the university as a central node and engine of unwellness and argues that we can no longer do Asian American studies without Asian American mental health--and vice versa. Interspersed throughout the book are reflective activities, including original tarot cards, that enact the very pedagogy Khúc advances, offering readers alternative ways of being that divest from structures of unwellness and open new possibilities for collective care.
About this Author
Mimi Khúc is a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell. She is the creator of Open in Emergency and the Asian American Tarot.
Reviews
"Though it is focused on Asian American studies, this book is an indispensable read for anyone entering academia, for those already entrenched in it, and for all needing a reminder of the precarity and unwellness facing students and academics alike."
"What Khúc illuminates about higher education now is, in some ways, deceptively simple: from the cordoning off of 'wellness' as the sole purview--or perhaps more accurately, mandate--of campus counseling centers to the normalization of contingent faculty as a perpetual laboring underclass, the university is a place that kills."
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