The University Is Making Us Unwell
On Mimi Khúc’s dear elia
Amy R. Wong
About a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, I attended a talk featuring the Canadian poet Dionne Brand on Zoom. It was early March 2021, days before the Atlanta spa murders, and it felt like an important inflection point: in the United States, vaccines were just beginning to roll out, President Joseph Biden had been in office for a couple of months, and liberals had begun to rejoice at “boring” Uncle Joe (how dark to think what death and genocidal terror that “boringness” has unleashed today). Brand was right, that day, to warn us that it was an inflection point of a far more horrific nature. Specifically, she was already detecting a problem of innocence in the return of a “we” of a liberal order, espoused by the North American political elite, that was renormalizing and reinstitutionalizing the rhetoric and procedures that allowed the mass deaths of “our” global pandemic in the first place. The summer of global protest led by Black Lives Matter in the wake of George Floyd’s murder—which felt, to some of us, like a plausible opening into a different way of living beyond racial capitalism—was already beginning to fade in the rearview mirror. The warning that Brand was sounding was that the window for change was closing. Soon, “we” will be well, and “we” will resume the everyday project of working ourselves to death for capital.
In encountering self-proclaimed writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell Mimi Khúc’s recently published book, dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss (Duke University Press, 2024), I found myself thinking back to that moment of listening to Brand’s talk. It had felt like a suspended moment that, in all likelihood, was going to close down again into non-liberatory futures. But I remember hearing Brand’s poetry—huddled that day in a garden shed that served as an office while my then two-and-a-half-year-old played joyfully outside—and entering into a sort of reverie: maybe? what if? even if in small ways? Khúc’s book, which offers a searing indictment of the university as a gaslighting institution that demands compulsory wellness while making us unwell, also feels like a small opening into resistance and other ways of living. Drawing on her extensive experience offering workshops to grow access, care, and healing for an ailing population of Asian American college students across North America, Khúc makes the case that Asian American students exemplify “canaries in the coal mine” for diagnosing “unwellness” as the normative condition the neoliberal university produces. Khúc demonstrates that the broader mental health crisis among college students, especially in the continued wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, cannot be fully appreciated without a historical account of racialized Asian American subject formation at the intersection of model minoritization and the immigrant family. Much as Kimberlé Crenshaw’s initial work on Black women and intersectionality based itself on the notion “when they enter, we all enter,” Khúc suggests that a different university is not possible without a proper understanding of how model minoritization is at the heart of higher education’s production of “good children” with good returns.
In making this entwined intervention into Asian American studies and critical university studies, dear elia itself inhabits the academic monograph with a certain dis-ease that limns unwellness. Comprised of epistolary chapters punctuated by “interludes”—themselves roughly shaped as wellness exercises, torqued and a bit tongue-in-cheek—dear elia sets out to “break shit,” but ends up somewhere more ambivalent and gray that is psychically productive in different ways. Unlike Khúc’s earlier project, “Open in Emergency,” originally produced in 2016 then later expanded and reissued in 2019, a box that includes a hacked DSM and a deck of collaboratively designed Asian American tarot cards among other written and visual artifacts, dear elia does less disrupting and more dwelling in the morass that many of us working in higher education find ourselves in. In stitching together letters to the reader, intimates like Khúc’s partner and daughter, email exchanges with mental health professionals and administrators, social media posts, interludes, old syllabi, and class activities (annotated, with self-revisions in the marginalia), dear elia is unwell amidst institutional content and forms.
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. Lest this seem hyperbolic, as I was writing this, the New York Times published an account of Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s “unthinkable” (why unthinkable?) epidemic of five student suicides within six months during the second half of 2021 into early 2022. Students are not okay, and higher education is part of the structure that is killing them. At the time of this review’s publication, universities all over the United States are sending the police after students who are daring to say that they no longer want to be the “good children” in these institutions beholden ultimately to a ruling class of board members and political elites. In their liberated zones and declarations of People’s Universities, they are daring to say that university investments in Israel’s genocidal, apartheid regime are connected to U.S. imperialism and capitalism’s rapacious liberalism, which also underlies the ways in which the modern university does not really care for its students beyond their returns.
“Students are not okay, and higher education is part of the structure that is killing them.”
That is not to say, as Khúc clarifies, that individual staff and faculty members do not offer important forms of care and solidarity that resist the oppressive economic and ideological structures of the modern university. But the point is that the machine of higher education at its core works in a coordinated manner to produce good workers and to throw away those who cannot (or will not) meet the benchmarks of a good investment. Khúc’s own story of being summarily discarded as a contingent faculty member after years of unpaid labor building out the Asian American Studies minor at the University of Maryland offers a cautionary tale. There is nothing, therefore, to “fix” about the university, because it is continuing to operate exactly as it means to operate. It should be no wonder that our students and faculty are unwell in a time when it is so clear that these systems by which we are compelled to live and work are not working: skyrocketing inflation and cost of living, rising tuition while most faculty salaries remain absurdly low even if you’re lucky enough to be on the tenure track, not to mention the fact that most students who are in college right now spent the entirety of their adolescent years going through the collective trauma of a pandemic that is still killing about 600 people per day globally, and mass disabling millions of others into the still poorly understood condition currently known as Long COVID. It is no accident that many student protestors advocate masking for community care within the encampments.
In spite of hard facts: I get the sense that there is a refusal to really believe in the unwellness of college students, on the part of faculty colleagues and students alike. Some of this comes from tired intergenerational strife and caricatures of Gen Z fragility, but some of it also comes from the awareness that to attend college at all is a privilege. And certainly, the numbers do bear this out, in that the college enrollment rate for 18 to 24-year-olds in 2021 was a mere 38 percent, down from 41 percent in 2010. But this is not the only story that can be told, and dear elia bravely tells another tale—one that centers Asian American college students, because they are an even more specific group typically accorded even less recognition of their unwellness—in order to portend bleak futures for the North American university as a whole. (“They are not usually that resistant,” a colleague said to me once, about a Korean international student whom I knew to be deeply depressed.) Tellingly, college-aged Asian Americans actually enroll at 60 percent, compared to white students at 38 percent, Black students at 37 percent, Hispanic at 33 percent, and American Indian/Alaska Native at 28 percent. With the latest anti–affirmative action battles raging in the courts, in which rightist organizations have banked on Asian American support as cover for white supremacist agendas, to argue that Asian American college students are really not doing well is a hard lift.
Khúc barrels toward this lift with a frankness that, at times, is almost too much to bear, yet I am also entirely cheering her on. Take, for instance, this plaintive, unfilial statement from the chapter titled, “How to Save Your Asian American Life in an Hour”: “There is a kind of Asian American parental love crafted and enacted in the merciless confines of model minoritization–and it kills.” As I was reading (and I have had the same response reading erin Khuê Ninh, whose work Khúc champions throughout), I kept thinking: Did she really just say that out loud? And, will she get away with it? Because there’s a particular bind that such statements face under the conditions of liberalism in our time, even when they happen to be empirically true: to say that immigrant parents enact harm and that they do so because they are Asian is to risk being misread as essentializing about culture—or perhaps worse, as “selling out” to the white therapization of calling your parents “toxic.” Khúc, of course, means neither of these things, nor is her statement about Asian American parental love actually un-filial in any freighted, imagined-as-Confucian context. One gets the sense that Khúc remains keenly aware that to venture into a project like hers is almost certainly going to lead to misreading, but that there’s also no choice but to speak. Here’s Khúc, anticipating misreading:
So I’m sorry/not sorry to say that intergenerational conflict in Asian immigrant families does not come simply out of a cultural clash between traditional or Confucian or collectivist parents and their Americanized or individualistic children, no matter how seductive this narrative might be. And it is seductive to our community for many reasons. It allows parents to frame themselves as bastions of authenticity and tradition and as absolute cultural authorities, while their children are shameful assimilationists giving in to the depravity of their American environment. This allows parents to be critical of parts of American life, an outlet for frustration and grief and anger at the broken promise of the American Dream. For the children of immigrant parents, this narrative allows them to dismiss their parents as “backward,” “old-school,” and see themselves as progressive, modern, democratic—and thus more “American” in an America that does not ever truly allow them to be fully American, but more American than their parents.
Notice how much space clearing Khúc needs to do—it points to something about the precipitous conditions of trying to speak about the particular kind of psychic torture that “high achieving” Asian American students, many of them second generation, suffer—so that people can actually hear something of it and not to dismiss them out of hand.
What Khúc settles on in sketching out the particular contours of what drives so many Asian American college students toward suicidal ideation if not suicide itself, turns out to be the same structure that is going to wring the rest of us dry in higher education, if we do not take care to resist. Before a suicide, there is “the slow violence of model minoritization, the strangling of personhood, the endless time of constant failure.” What is operating writ large, here, is a “university ableism [that] affects everyone in the higher ed ecosystem,” but for Asian Americans, “ableism’s intersections with model minoritization are perhaps some of its deadliest manifestations.” Khúc claims: “What non Asian Americans often don’t understand about second generation Asian American mental health is how high the stakes are for failure, and what it feels like to live in perpetual near-failure.” Because of the way that power works at the intersection of the Asian immigrant family and the increasing totality of capital’s demands—now, from the East and the West alike—for the Asian American student, and perhaps more broadly the Asian diasporic student everywhere, to “fail” as an investment often means getting thrown out by society and then your family, too. Echoing other voices to which she returns repeatedly in dear elia—besides the work of erin Khuê Ninh, Eliza Noh’s brutal-to-read letter to a sister lost to suicide—Khúc takes a risk to say that if the rules of the game grant you personhood only on the terms of your achieving good returns and working yourself to death, then those terms are bad, and to die by your own hands suddenly does not look so much like a mental health crisis as a radical act of rationality when there are no other options.
“What this student understood better than I did in the moment of our exchange was that the university of our times is a transaction.”
This begins to sound a bit dramatic, but in my experience as a professor for nearly a decade, there are plenty of stories to ground what Khúc is saying. Not long ago, I encountered an Asian American student who transferred to my small, regional private university after another similar institution nearby closed. She asked for an incomplete in an English class though she hadn’t completed any work yet, and in my capacity as the department chair, I dashed off a note to explain that the criteria for granting incompletes meant that there had to be less than 25 percent of the work left. She then let me know that her sister had recently taken her life, and that her father was terminally ill, and that it was imperative that he get to see her walk—and that she couldn’t bear another semester. And could I really blame her? After the obscene amount of money she spent, and working full time, to attend a small private college mostly online, only for it to close, and for our university to then be the only one to honor her plan to finish in a single semester, how absurd would it be to ask her to get on board with some entirely unattainable and quaintly obsolete notion of a “learning experience”? What this student understood better than I did in the moment of our exchange was that the university of our times is a transaction. I was naive and frankly too privileged to see that the “college experience,” at a certain point, is something we’re mostly cosplaying.
Or, as the case may be with many a tenured professor at well-funded research universities—and here Khúc does not mince words—you look away as your adjunct colleagues work themselves to death so you can write your beautiful books. As a contingent scholar and activist whose entire career has involved labor in spite of the university and not because of it, Khúc does not exactly leave us with any call to save or reform the university. Khúc wants for us to “unlearn [the] poison and [craft] a life with others who want to revalue lives outside of meritocracy,” but hers is not—or not yet—a call for breaking, dismantling, or revolutionary world-building. Rather, drawing on her background as a disability activist and scholar, Khúc asks us to make room to dwell in the condition of unwellness that higher education produces—not, however, as some kind of bootless wallowing, but as a manner of truly feeling out and knowing the textures and the truth of this experience for what it is. This kind of work may be quiet, but it isn’t quietist. To dwell differentially in unwellness—though Khúc does not say this—is also a psychoanalytic insight. And what psychoanalysis tells us about staying with our own unwellness is that it is necessary to work through our symptoms. In times like ours when the world is one way but “our” leaders and media institutions insist that it is, in fact, this other way, becoming curious about our symptoms becomes an important political act of resisting everyday gaslighting under a liberal capitalist state that is telling us all is well. The North American university—despite what the Right would have you believe of its woke mobbishness—remains the gateway into leaving important parts of your personhood behind to become the kind of person that could belong to the “we” that insists that the way we live (work) now is the only life worth anything at all.