In “Model Minority,” Suji Kwock Kim riffs on the racial slur “chink.” “I chink, therefore I am” is not just a clever, nervy line. It makes us reflect on the way being called a “chink” because of the color of your skin might shape your sense of identity. As a rewriting of a founding precept of Western rationalism, the line is a critique of the bodiless mind Descartes supposes when he declares, Cogito, ergo sum. Kim’s speaker absorbs the hatred that the slur expresses and turns the negative feeling around by using it to affirm personal pride and resilience, in the same spirit that “queer” has been claimed and redefined. The poem’s language grates and is meant to. By forcing readers to confront the verbal racism with which Asian Americans have been confronted historically, Kim exposes the history of violence behind a cliché like “model minority.” At the same time, her poem playfully defuses the power of the slur.
Although it is only four lines, “Model Minority” is packed with allusion and wordplay. If “O Wall” rings a faint bell for you, there’s a reason. Kim’s phrase recalls what must be the most famous “chink” in English literature. Remember the Mechanicals’ play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Bottom, in the role of Pyramus, is separated from his lover Thisbe by a wall (played by Snout, the tinker), and yet he can see her through a crack in it. Bottom’s apostrophe to the wall is delightfully ludicrous: “O wall, O sweet and lovely wall, / Show me thy chink to blink through with mine eyene.” What are we to make of the Shakespearean echo? Kim doesn’t say, but the word histories she provides point up something funny about language: that the same word means very different things to different people at different times.
The poems that follow “Model Minority” are concerned with our ways of seeing and naming disability, in addition to race. There is an implication that, from the perspective of the dominant culture, a minority racial identity is like a disability, and the disabled are like a racial minority—an exception to the norm, against which the norm is defined. In the word histories Kim tracks in her notes, fears and fantasies about disability and racial difference at times cross and connect. Did you know that “blind” shares an Indo-European root with “blemish” and “black”?
The form of these poems is striking. Think of the verse at the top of the page, the notes below, and the white space between them as equal elements of the poem. Writing in verse, Kim experiments with different ways of representing experiences of hearing loss, speechlessness, blindness, and other types of disability. In their cool, impersonal way, the footnotes unpack the history of words that have structured the perception of disability over time: words like “deaf,” “dumb,” “handicap,” “cripple,” and “disability” itself. The white space meanwhile suggests the gap between these two perspectives and the difficulty of joining them. But that space is itself expressive and a part of what is being said, and not mute.
