#aalr

i’m very excited to be part of this fantastic project: Asian American Tarot: A Mental Health Project and Open in Emergency: A Special Issue on Asian American Mental Health by The Asian American Literary Review. 

please donate to the kickstarter if you can!

An updated excerpt of Sick Woman Theory will be published in Open in Emergency, in January 2017, alongside these fierce pieces:

a foldout testimonial tapestry—a collectively woven tapestry of written and visual testimonials, a process-oriented art piece that reimagines community care & healing;

a “hacked” mock DSM: Asian American Edition—a new catalog of “definitions”/reflections, with alternate understandings of un/wellness and critiques of Psychology as field, discourse, and industry;

performance artist/comedian Kristina Wong reflecting on her decade of art and activism on Asian American women's suicide;

scholar Jigna Desai on neurodiversity, disability, and race;

a queer mixed race WOC self-care package by artist/scholar Genevieve Erin O'Brien;

prose work rethinking mental health by Johanna Hedva, Karen Tei Yamashita, David Mura, Sejal Shah, Kai Cheng Thom, erin Khue Ninh, Eliza Noh, Laura Uba, Aileen Duldulao, James Kyung-jin Lee, Kathleen Yep, Cynthia Wu, David Kyuman Kim, Chad Shomura, Peggy Lee, Shawna Yang Ryan, and Paisley Rekdal;

Bhanu Kapil on the psychic legacies of Partition;

"Keanu wellness memes" by Mimi Thi Nguyen;

an excerpt from Saymoukda Vongsay's play Kung Fu Zombies vs. Shaman Warriorexamining conceptions of mental illness as demonic possession in Lao communities;

an art piece by Gerald Maa exploring linkages between CIA torture and the American Psychological Association;

a photography series on fear by Julie Thi Underhill;

a “treated” pamphlet on postpartum depression—a redaction/erasure/annotation of existing postpartum depression info-literature that centers lived experience of Asian American mothers, by Audrey Wu Clark, Sharline Chiang, and Pooja Makhijani; and

a stack of daughter-to-mother letters—handwritten letters tracing intergenerational intimacies and violences by, among others, novelist Joy Kogawa, novelist le thi diem thuy, poet (and adoptee) Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, queer and trans poet Kit Yan, poet Tarfia Faizullah, and trans activist and writer Ryka Aoki.

Here’s the full lineup of major arcana cards, visual artists, and writers who made Asian American Tarot: A Mental Health Project:

Tarot Cards

Death • the Scholar • the Migrant • the Lovers • the Mother • the Patient • the Foreigner • the Fool • the Ancestor • the Farmer • the Shopkeeper • the Adoptee • the Lecher • the Survivor • the Daughter • the Model Minority • the Refugee • the Prisoner • the Desecrated Temple • the Deportee • the Hangman • the Devil

Writers

Shawna Yang Ryan • Long Bui • Sueyeun Juliette Lee • Rajiv Mohabir • Wo Chan • Maya Soetoro-Ng • Jennifer Ho • Konrad Ng • Tanwi Nandini Islam • Gerald Maa • Simi Kang • Brandon Som • Matthew Salesses • Mimi Khúc & Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis • Tanwi Nandini Islam • Aimee Nezhukumatathil • David Kyuman Kim • Mimi Thi Nguyen Margaret Rhee • Anida Yoeu Ali • James Kyung-Jin Lee • Sharon Suh

Artists

Monica Ong • Monica Ramos • Simi Kang • Camille Chew

“In the spirit of fortune-telling practices so prevalent in our communities, we’re creating a new deck of tarot cards, featuring original art and text that work to reveal the hidden contours of our Asian American emotional, psychic, and spiritual lives, as well as the systems of violence that bear down upon them. Replacing the 22 archetypes of the traditional major arcana (e.g., the Empress, the Hierophant, the Wheel of Fortune, etc.) are figures drawn directly from Asian American life--the Migrant, the Foreigner, the Shopkeeper, the Adoptee, the Model Minority, the Desecrated Temple--that we’ve asked some of our communities’ most exciting artists, poets, and writers to reinterpret.

“Because Asian American wellness fundamentally depends upon anti-racism, our deck is an anti-racist hack for the traditional deck: take out the existing major arcana, insert ours, and voila! An Asian American mental health tarot, a little self-care magic.”

in resilience,