Dear Mimi Khúc,
I remember the first time I left my first Ph.D. program. I was indeed hysterical, but despite the constant crying I never lost sight of my insistence that the academy was an unsupportive place that sought submission. I had been complaining to the chair when I was left without a supervisor and was unable to secure another person in time for my comprehensive exams. I was forced to delay my own comps, not because I was unable to do my work despite my health problems but because there was no professor who wanted to support me.
The chair framed this as my failure, not theirs nor the department’s.
And this chair, too, said I was too fragile to teach my own class. Yet I was not too fragile to TA for an adjunct professor. There were inconsistent demarcations of health and labor. Self-designed classes were, for a Ph.D. candidate, a hierarchical honor.
My illness was always used against me, by a so-called feminist professor in the department who claimed that all her colleagues were supportive and kind. I had other administrators tell me they believed the department was a caring one.
They didn’t say it, but I could tell what they weren’t saying. It was on their faces.
I was the problem.
I’ve been unwell since I left my first Ph.D. program. I’ve left two others. I know all of those university administrators, professors, fellow students, presidents, and deans deem me as the problem. A pattern of leaving indicates that I cannot make it. This is the individualized prescription, one that causes intense friction when I tell them it’s the university structures rife with systemic barriers that prevented me from completing my studies.
***
The university operates on a wellness program when the reality is that many of us have become unwell because of it. So begins the first entry of your monograph, dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss, a letter addressed to your child. The letter accompanies a box to be opened in an emergency, which you describe as an archive of unwellness and your attempts to move through that unwellness. Wellness is not antithetical to unwellness; from the outset, you tell Elia “a central lesson of the box is that wellness is a lie; this book explores the breadth and depth of that lie as I’ve traveled across its vast domain, and then shows us that the only way to survive is to be unwell together.” This frank admission is a refreshing take on non-ideal theory as the late Charles W. Mills might say. Writing against conventional moral ideals, Mills argues that ideal theory does not robustly capture specificities of the non-dominant group’s experiences. The university is ideal in popular discourse and in theory, but it is simply not in reality.
The acceptance that the university is an unwell institution permeates how you approach your book, which is published in an academic press. You insist dear elia is “a book that pretends to be an academic book,” clarifying “it does what an academic book should do: intervene in academic discourse, evaluate received knowledges, critically assess knowledge production, revolutionize higher ed pedagogy.” Importantly, you address the complicity of the academy “itself as a central site of that knowledge production — and the important work of decolonizing mental health.” The creative labor of the book itself might be academically unconventional. Theoretical renderings are embedded in a series of letters to Elia, editors, anh, and readers; there is a “hacked” Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for Asian Americans; there are readings of a tarot deck designed to reflect Asian American experiences; and there are workbook activities that cleverly interrupt your labor and makes your reader actively rethink mental health through what you call a pedagogy of unwellness. The irony of the university’s major contribution to unwellness is its insistence on the facade of a caring institution that emphasizes wellness.
We are all struggling is something I hear very often in university spaces. It’s quite tautological and used to displace questions of power. Professors, tenured and untenured, will struggle while simultaneously asserting their authority over a student.
I once sent an email to a supervisor, asking to meet with him in person to discuss our differences. I felt that he was delaying my comprehensives and that he didn’t understand my research. The supervisor forwarded this email to the person assigned to chair my comps and the department head. Somewhere and somehow, he read that I called him incapable and wanted to punish me. The person assigned to chair my comps replied that I was arrogant and I needed to readjust my attitude. This professor had not yet received tenure. She would a few years later.
The department chair later admitted she found the other chair’s email inappropriate but forced me to consider a small break. I resisted, and the chair became agitated with me, saying I was asking for the wrong thing. She said I wanted the professors to be punished. I didn’t care about their punishment but expressed hope for some kind of justice. Not just for myself, but for other students. I never think my treatment is the exception. My treatment was a pattern of structural unwellness.
Instead, I had to comply with their demand that I seek a voluntary break. The chair, in an unsurprising nod to collegial allegiance, revealed to me she wanted to maintain control over students.
And this is what triggered another health crisis, in which the administrator advised that I seek help with the campus therapist. I protested, telling the well-intended administrator that I just needed someone to help me through the program. But I went to see the therapist anyway. He was fine. He performed his duties as a therapist. He nodded, he barely spoke, he gave me tissues, sometimes he’d ask me questions, and he kept an eye on the time.
I went knowing the therapist could not change what I needed. The university had to change.
Discourse and language have the ability to travel outside of academic institutions and academic-specific monographs. Since reading dear elia, I’ve noticed that many of my own friends have adopted a particular kind of wellness language tinged with vaguely conceptual language. Whenever I discuss my most recent academic misadventure in Germany to friends, my chest constricts, and I tear up. Friends have told me to consider seeking the help of another therapist. Such has become a common solution. Wellness talk has become part of our everyday, a default language that attempts to express care.
***
Mimi, your analysis is quite frank and you immediately follow-up with a warning to the reader: “you may think you know what mental health is, but I’m here to tell you what we’ve thought mental health is all along is actually killing us.” And it is this knowledge, formed from the mental health industry and the scholarly field of mental health, that contributes to the continual harm. Students and scholars whose research interests include disability studies and mental health actively contribute to the blame placed on individuals for their perceived failures. I remember a fellow Ph.D. student said there are some people who are not cut out to be in doctoral programs. She was reciting eugenics logic to contrast her strong will versus those who had major complaints about the department.
Your structural critique is one that many of us know. Any and all systems of power are designed to isolate us, despite this refrain of “community-oriented” and to keep us productive members of the university. We, all students and professors, are forced to be hyper-productive via untenable teaching loads, applying for grants, writing articles for citational metrics, all for a tenured portfolio. And somewhere in that hyper-productivity, many scholars promise to themselves and to others on social media that they will actively try to change the university.
But this is all very circular. The university thrives on submission, not differences, as you write. Wellness can be positively measured; unwellness cannot be spoken as it projects a bad image for the university. After re-exposing the problem, you propose an emancipatory solution; we collectively “need to move away from the medical model of individual pathology toward a model focusing on larger structures of unwellness.” Scientized language has become an ontology of self-understanding based on scientific consensus and has been used by the university for exploitative purposes. And so you attempt to hack the DSM to create a different DSM, to offer pluralistic languages that can account for suffering and new models of care. Because categories become categories for universalisms and because social contexts and identities impact how we experience unwellness, you consider how a functioning DSM should be able to account for marginalized epistemologies, ontologies, and temporalities, and non-normative time.
There is a gracious reciprocal generosity you offer. Not only do you ask your readers to reflect on their own unwellness, but you also reflect on your pedagogy and experiences, tracking an old syllabus and annotating some punitive language. You also express regret at your own contribution for Karen Kelsky’s blog on “The Professor Is In” while finishing your Ph.D. You describe cringing “at all the advice on her blog that blurs the line between strategic essentialism and internalized racialized ableism.” Advice itself is a popular genre on social media, and you note most may be “well intentioned, seemingly helpful, or even crucially necessary” but there is a subtext “that there are right ways and wrong ways to be an academic, and that all those things are within your control.” This is what the university wants us all to think. We are in control, not the university.
What you are saying in dear elia is not inherently radical, especially if one deems themselves an anticolonial and anti-racist scholar. For the university to completely change is to let it fall. There is no other way. This means that we, following your proposal, are to question our reliance and use of the language of science, psychology, psychiatry, and general popular discourses of wellness and self-care, all of which are failing us. There is a nefarious reason why universities offer services for students with disabilities and counseling centers. They are not places of care but are places that are structured to mitigate liabilities by emphasizing individual suffering.
***
I read dear elia as someone who is both a graduate student at a low-residency MFA program and an instructor. I read it as I prepped for my fall semester courses at the community college, where I am an adjunct. You, yourself an adjunct instructor, note that the university is especially unkind to “an underclass of workers it has created.” I marveled at this concise statement primarily because I’ve been applying to adjunct positions in preparation for another move. I recently cold emailed a low-residency MFA program, inquiring about teaching opportunities. Low-res programs were created in contrast to a conventional MFA program, and perhaps as such there are not many opportunities for teaching opportunities and scholarships.
I received a kind email from the director. Because I didn’t have specific teaching in creative writing, I wouldn’t be considered. Based on such a response, I assumed that many of the instructors may not have been graduates of a low-res program.
The point I am making is not that I think I deserve a position; rather, I wish to gesture to the irony of these programs which are designed to fashion themselves as against traditional programs yet have adopted conventional metrics of ability and capability, or who is deserving to be an instructor or faculty versus who can only become a possible adjunct instructor. The low-res program created this binary, this impossibility, modeled on an existing structure.
***
Mimi Khúc, all of my solidarity to you. Thank you for the important and vital book, one that I wish will not merely become another citation on a reading list or book club hosted by a university. Such an act would be another betrayal of your labor and work.
With immense gratitude,
Anna
dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss
by Mimi Khúc
Duke University Press
Anna Nguyen had been a displaced PhD student for many years, in many different programs and departments at many different universities in many different countries. She decided to rewrite her dissertation in the form of creative non-fiction as an MFA student at Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine, which blends her theoretical training in literary analysis, science and technology studies, and social theory to reflect on institutions, language, expertise, the role of citations, and food. She also hosts a podcast, Critical Literary Consumption, which features authors, poets, and scholars discussing their written work and their thoughts on reading and writing practices.
