00:05:18.800you must equally provide it to others.
00:05:22.460I love that because I feel like we often think about self-care or even therapy or even medicine,
00:05:32.280right, as an individual kind of issue where we have an individual pathology and then we
00:05:37.420treat ourselves in some way, we take care of ourselves in some way.
00:05:40.820And I love this framing of care as reciprocal and collective.
00:05:45.960and so much of my work grounds its ideas about both wellness and unwellness in collective in
00:05:53.780the collective structures of care and interdependence meaning the ways that we
00:05:59.960lean on each other so i love that this feels actually kind of prescient uh when i read this
00:06:04.440card now yeah yeah i love how the themes that you spoke about are brought into ritual through
00:06:14.580the cards and i think that gives us space to reflect on these themes in a different way that
00:06:22.120i really appreciate because i think it's really easy to get lost in the overwhelm of what's not
00:06:31.780working and overwhelmed in how we can make things feel more healing and so i i think right because
00:06:39.840everything feels like it's on fire all the time yes yes and how do we find agency in that right
00:06:46.480when like everything is going wrong around us especially right now in this kind of acute crisis
00:06:52.960of the pandemic or this ongoing acute crisis of the pandemic how do we take care of ourselves
00:06:59.740in each other in this moment. Yeah, that brings me to wonder about the title, Open in Emergency.
00:07:12.040And I wonder if you could speak to how you came to that title for this tarot deck. And it feels
00:07:21.640like it's speaking to some of the themes you just brought up. Yeah, thank you for asking that. So
00:07:26.660Open Emergency is a, I like to call it a hybrid book arts project. It's not quite a book. It's a
00:07:34.020box with cool stuff in it, including a tarot deck that I curated. And I first published this project
00:07:40.800in 2016, and I republished a second edition in 2019, 2020. And the idea of the project was
00:07:49.780to engage mental health in new ways, to think about what are the conditions of wellness and
00:07:57.260unwellness for Asian-Americans in particular. The project focuses on Asian-American mental health.
00:08:02.980And how do we find new languages to capture what hurts, to capture all the ways that we are
00:08:10.320unwell beyond the kind of limitations of psychological and psychiatric discourse?
00:08:15.620especially how do we think about race and colonialism right and empire and other forms
00:08:24.240of structural violence that deeply shape our sense of wellness and unwellness so I curated this
00:08:30.520project with a bazillion contributors probably around 80 which I do not recommend anyone do
00:08:37.300ever it's a lot of people to corral and a lot of stuff to have to logistically handle but
00:08:43.740But people were amazing and contributed amazing things in it, like this card that we just read, in order to try to figure out with the tools that they had, how to diagnose our unwellness, how to think about ways of healing, how to think about ways of caring for each other.
00:08:59.160So I decided to name the project Open in Emergency because it was a box.
00:09:04.920And some people have called it like a self-care kit, which I like.
00:09:09.060I don't call it that, but I like that people call it that.
00:09:10.820I like that people think of it as a tool.
00:09:12.940It's a box that you open with stuff in it that's supposed to help give you language.
00:09:18.400It's supposed to help you engage in finding new language on your own as well.
00:12:36.160And I like to think that I create spaces of feeling as part of my work.
00:12:43.320So this project should elicit feeling through folks, in folks.
00:12:49.340But I also do a lot of talks and workshops, live time, and in these times on Zoom a lot, where I try to create spaces of vulnerability and feeling because I think that when we can be vulnerable, access our feelings, share our feelings collectively, that is when we're actually being honest about all the ways that we're unwell instead of pretending that we're well.
00:13:11.380There's a lot of pressure to pretend that we're okay. I call that compulsory wellness. We have to pretend we're okay, that we have our shit together, that we can do everything. Because if we don't, we think something's wrong with us. We're told that something's wrong with you if you aren't productive or aren't handling things or aren't resilient. I also hate that word, resilient.
00:13:31.380so if we allow ourselves give ourselves permission and each other to say that we're not okay
00:13:38.020that stuff is hard that we don't know what to do then we can actually start caring for those things
00:13:45.820because if we're denial that we're feeling those things we can't build the care that we need
00:13:49.880does that make sense yeah I'm thinking about the ways in which capitalism and productivity
00:13:58.620is directly connected to us needing to fake it till we make it or something like that yep yep
00:14:05.400because the dominant culture they want us to be well enough to be productive to keep the machine0.99
00:14:11.620going but they want us to be sick enough so that we are buying the shit we don't need or want yes0.99
00:14:18.120it's a it's kind of an abusive relationship oh my god yes yeah that's interesting to think about0.99
00:14:27.280that push and pull. And that push and pull works together when you privatize care,
00:14:33.940right? And individualize care. So be like you're saying, be well enough to work,
00:14:39.180define wellness through work, right? You're only sick if you can't work, apparently.
00:14:45.160But then if you need care, right? Be sick enough that you will access kind of commodified forms
00:14:52.140of care for yourself so self-care via things you can buy via programs that you can access
00:33:56.600mm-hmm yeah it's reminding me of an interview claiming unwellness that you did asian american
00:34:07.200writers workshop and i am interested in something you were saying about how you approach these cards
00:34:15.680by drawing on asian american categories and you were saying we created the refugee the migrant
00:34:22.580and the ghost and that your favorite card is the student. And I'm wondering if you could touch on
00:34:29.840these different cards and how they came to be and what was your thought process in that
00:34:37.120intersectional framework that you were creating? Yeah. So, you know, for those who are familiar
00:34:43.480with tarot, the major arcana is a list of 22 archetypes. And when I went through them in my
00:34:52.120curation process, I basically said, well, let's start backwards. If I was thinking about Asian0.99
00:35:00.120American experience, what would those archetypes be? And so I came up with my own list, and this
00:35:07.200was in conjunction with my partner, Lawrence Minboy Davis, who is the co-founder of the Asian
00:35:14.320American Literary Review and worked on this project with me. And the list that we came up with,
00:35:20.640Because both of us do Asian American studies and work in Asian American arts and community included things like the refugee. Both of us actually come out of refugee backgrounds. Our families are Vietnamese American. And it made total sense to have a card that would not only capture the refugee experience, but help us thinking about what forces shape that experience that also imbricate people who are not refugees, right?
00:35:47.040because we want people to pull these cards and use them and find meaning in them, even if you
00:35:52.500are not a refugee. And so then we had to think about, if we're talking about that card in
00:35:57.640particular, who could theorize this card? Who could write this card in a way that could capture
00:36:02.980some of that that we're looking for? And the person we came up with, oh, and I have to say that
00:36:07.980this tarot deck, my tarot deck comes with text, which is unusual. Most tarot cards do not come
00:36:13.660with text they only have an image and a archetype title but because we were renaming the archetypes
00:36:19.740it felt important to have texts that actually explain what the card means and what to do with
00:36:25.260it so the person we chose for the refugee is a scholar and artist named Mimi Ting-Wien who does
00:36:32.940critical refugee studies she's a professor at UIUC Urbana-Champaign and I had encountered her work
00:36:40.260and found that she was, in her work, discussing the refugee experience and locating it in
00:36:47.240much larger context than simply the usual ways you think of refugees as people who flee places
00:36:52.160and then go somewhere else. It's kind of the very simplistic idea about refugees.
00:36:56.800She was locating refugee experience in the context of war, empire, colonialism, but also
00:37:03.460compulsory gratitude and debt, right? The idea that refugees are supposed to be grateful
00:37:08.620for being saved even though refugees are created by conditions of war often by the places that we0.94
00:37:17.940end up going to like for instance Vietnamese Americans coming to the U.S. because U.S. was0.64
00:37:21.860involved in Vietnam right so like what the fuck are we grateful for but the language of gratitude
00:37:28.160shapes refugee experience so much so I wanted her to express all that in this card in a new language0.52
00:37:34.520that would be more accessible to folks who may never read her book, for instance, her academic
00:37:39.940book, but might read this tarot card and find some kind of connection to it. So the other cards you
00:37:45.320named, I think you might have named the, actually, I don't remember what you named, but like maybe the
00:37:51.040foreigner and the model minority and the ghost, yes, as other categories that make sense for us
00:37:58.140from coming out of Asian American experience. And then you mentioned the student card. So I
00:38:03.440definitely want to talk about the student card. So the student card is a card that we came up with
00:38:08.940in the expanded second edition, in part because we didn't have one in the first edition. And it
00:38:15.320increasingly made sense to try to capture the student experience as I was traveling around
00:38:19.680meeting students all over the country to talk about mental health. Once the first edition was
00:38:25.180published, I met probably thousands of students at this point over the last few years,
00:38:31.780talking about their own mental health experiences. Students are craving mental health resources and
00:38:36.740mental health conversations. That became very clear to me as I was getting invitations to places
00:38:41.040and facilitating these kinds of conversations. And so I wanted to capture what student unwellness
00:38:48.560and student striving and student struggle looked like for the second edition. Obviously,
00:38:55.420I am no longer a student, so I couldn't write this card. But I also didn't want to put it on
00:39:01.260one lone student to have to try to represent all student experience. So I decided, we decided,
00:39:09.500I and Lawrence decided to make this a collective card in that we actually started soliciting
00:39:17.020submissions with various prompts along my speaking tour. So at places I visited, I would
00:39:26.060ask students to write some things down, some ideas, jot some stuff down in discussions around
00:39:30.900their experiences. And then they would share them with me. And then I assembled a student
00:39:36.200editorial team to kind of go through all of that raw material and start crafting this card. And
00:39:40.560then I and Lawrence helped to finalize this card. And then since then, I've actually presented this
00:39:45.120card to students as I continue to speak in other places. And it's been really amazing to watch them
00:39:50.000engage with the card and kind of tell me, does it speak to their experience? Does it help them
00:39:56.980make sense of their experience, does it capture what it means to be a student in these times?
00:40:02.300And this card was made in 2019. And I've brought it around and showed it to students throughout
00:40:09.860the pandemic. And it's actually quite wild because I think the student experience during
00:40:14.060the pandemic has shifted a lot, but this card still somehow manages to capture some of that
00:40:19.580experience can I read the card yes yes okay okay okay so I'll give a quick visual description as
00:40:27.260well so the front of the card is a black and white ink brush image of many students kind of
00:40:34.980stacked on top of each other there's one student at the bottom bent over with other students on
00:40:39.240top of them and they're all kind of holding different kind of student paraphernalia so books
00:40:43.540laptop, graduation cap, an abacus that's falling apart. And it has the number 29 at the top and
00:40:51.960the word the student at the bottom. And then on the back of the card is white text over teal
00:40:57.020background. And I will read the card. The student is the 29th card in the major arcana,
00:41:05.420sometimes known as the lost card. The student cried the day of graduation.
00:41:10.260They play one role for the mother, another for schools, another as his daughter, another for workforces, another as the model minority, another for the state, always in the pull of the annihilating void.
00:41:25.320The student is, at essence, a note-taker.0.91
00:47:01.600And that is what ethical teaching became to me.
00:47:04.360And so I started developing my teaching along this idea of like,
00:47:07.620if students are unwell and I'm unwell, how can we be unwell together? And how can the classroom
00:47:13.800space and the relationships that we build here help us move through the world in all of that
00:47:20.580unwellness? Not necessarily cure us. I can't treat people or cure people, right? I'm not even sure
00:47:26.080that the medical world can do that, but that's definitely not my interest in the classroom
00:47:32.020space. My interest is how do we actually make space for unwellness that we're not allowed to
00:47:36.080talk about? How do we make sense of it? And then how do we care for each other in all of that
00:47:41.060unwellness, recognizing that I'm unwell, you're unwell, we're unwell in different ways sometimes,
00:47:47.060but sometimes also very similar ways. And that sort of broke down the power relationship and
00:47:54.520hierarchy between professor and student for me quite a bit in asking that they recognize my
00:47:59.640unwellness as I recognize their unwellness. And as I worked from that framework, so much for me
00:48:07.400opened up about learning more about student experience, how, you know, I thought they were
00:48:11.980unwell. Well, I learned more about how they're unwell as they were able to open up and be
00:48:16.080vulnerable and talk to me about these things. And then I had to shift and iterate my teaching
00:48:21.820more, right, to try to think, try to address these new forms of unwellness. The pandemic has really
00:48:28.440pushed me to dig deep into what a pedagogy of unwellness could and should look like and what
00:48:36.240creating access and care in response to that unwellness could and should look like because
00:48:40.640the pandemic has thrown us all right into a crisis of care that helped me better see the needs of
00:48:48.580students and make me realize that they probably needed this all along but we hadn't thought about
00:48:54.340are teaching in the before times necessarily in the same way. Like I was, I wanted to address
00:48:58.600student need, but it took the pandemic, I feel like to really, really see what basic needs look
00:49:06.900like and how that has to really be met before we can do anything else in the classroom. I feel like
00:49:12.480I learned from students so much that the relationship I have with students really
00:49:16.840informs my understanding of how people hurt because students are so earnest about their
00:49:24.440experience and so willing to examine their experiences and so brave in the work of sharing
00:49:33.000it and then calling upon change. And so I like to say that students are the canaries in the coal
00:49:38.720mine. They are the ones telling us what's up, what's happening. And they're the ones that
00:49:45.520most likely are calling for change of conditions right that care for ourselves and each other
00:49:50.580they're willing to do that work and so I look to them and their unwellness first and foremost
00:49:55.960I'm so appreciative for your care and thoughtfulness students are amazing
00:50:07.160they're amazing oh yeah well i wanted to speak to this theme that
00:50:17.460something around an opening to using magic and divination not just as metaphor but as a truly
00:50:26.360affirming practice and i know that magic and divination can trigger people it can excite
00:50:36.180people, intrigue people. Some folks feel really at home with these types of ways of knowing or being.
00:50:45.000And I want to open the floor to you with this because I feel like it can go a lot of different
00:50:49.900ways. I feel like it's such a important and sometimes challenging topic. I think you're
00:50:59.440totally right that people have all different kinds of responses. I love the words you chose,
00:51:03.640triggering and exciting, intriguing. I think that actually really does capture the range of
00:51:10.860experiences when we say magic or divination or religion and spirituality. Each of those words
00:51:16.900carries all kinds of meaning for people. I like to say, and I've actually always said that I'm a
00:51:23.500deeply religious person, but I actually don't participate in any kind of organized religion.
00:51:29.220And that feels strange to people. People tend to use the word religion when they mean organized religious practices. And then they tend to use the word spirituality when they mean not organized. But to me, they're kind of the same.
00:51:44.360And so I identify as a deeply religious, deeply spiritual person because I feel that I ask those kinds of questions of life.
00:51:54.380and I intentionally engage that kind of imagination,
00:53:33.340like it doesn't make any rational sense in the ways that we can heal ourselves and heal each
00:53:38.640other and care for each other and that to me speaks to kind of the unknowable about our lives
00:53:46.620right we strive towards it and we strive towards doing it together because that's the only way to
00:53:52.700really not be alone in this process did that make sense yeah yeah it's I think I'd like I'd like
00:54:07.140answered and not answered your question at the same time no it makes sense and I I think I want
00:54:14.040to keep following this thread with you okay because there's something I'm sensing about
00:54:20.920the loneliness and being alone in this work or this practice. And I guess
00:54:31.480my mind is spinning, but I can't slow it down enough at this moment to pull one thought out.
00:54:43.140Yeah. Well, I mean, magic, and I don't want to reduce it down too much because there's many
00:54:49.660different magical systems right there's many different ways of engaging the world but so much
00:54:54.440of it for me is about connection right connection between people between people and creatures
00:55:02.160between um the earth right between inhuman and human between different dimensions of our lives
00:55:12.700right like between our understanding of like the imminent world versus a more transcendent world
00:55:17.120And so it is a ways of trying to connect those things. And different historical systems connect different things in different ways. So I love you bringing up magic because it helps me actually articulate in another way my work.
00:55:34.840I like to, I joke that I make magic, but I actually kind of think I do, right? Because
00:55:41.020my work is about connection to each other and to new ways of being with each other.
00:55:51.880And that feels magical. That feels like creation right there.
00:55:55.640yeah i wonder especially as you are steeped in academia where magic fits into
00:56:07.940oh magic does does not fit into that institution in in very comfortable ways
00:56:15.600i mean like my religious studies background i was allowed to study religion but you don't do it
00:56:24.100you're not supposed to do the religion you're supposed to just study it the doing part is not
00:56:29.540considered academic right when I first encountered tarot it was at an academic conference but the
00:56:35.680tarot wasn't happening in the sessions it was happening at happy hour right after all the
00:56:43.160academic sessions had finished and it was happening between a lot of drinking drunk academics
00:56:49.120hanging out and wanting to connect to each other
00:56:52.040and wanting to tell stories and laugh and make meaning
00:57:07.920Make space for that kind of thinking and feeling and connection
00:57:10.920because why can't academic work also be imbued with that work?
00:57:14.880like there's something very colonialist um to think that academic has to be completely rational
00:57:21.140and unfeeling right that's like totally you know out of the enlightenment kind of european
00:57:26.640enlightenment thinking about knowledge and knowledge comes from all different sources and
00:57:32.600it's experienced in our bodies in all different kinds of ways and so now i try to do tarot during
00:57:37.880academic sessions. So I'll tell a little story. I just came back from the annual Association for
00:57:45.980Asian American Studies conference. It was in Denver last week. And it's the first time we've
00:57:50.980had an in-person conference since 2019, right? Since before the pandemic. So there were definitely
00:57:56.180like academics gone wild. People were very excited to see each other. Lots of squealing and hugging,
00:58:01.400masked squealing and hugging, which I participated in enthusiastically. But one thing that I did
00:58:07.880that is probably quite different for an academic conference is that I organized a session on
00:58:13.700collective tarot making. So similarly to the student card that was created collectively,
00:58:20.620I and my partner Lawrence organized a session to create two new tarot cards with the participants
00:58:27.080there a live time around two new books that Friends of Ours published in order to capture
00:58:33.960those ideas in those books and create another form that those books could live in, in the tarot
00:58:38.800card that also accesses feeling, right? And personhood and ways of being in the world
00:58:45.520differently. And that doesn't seem like an academic thing, but it's totally an academic thing.
00:58:51.000And it was such a powerful experience to bring feeling into a space that we don't normally think
00:58:57.100should have feeling or should have magic or should have connection in those ways. So I'm trying,
00:59:02.280trying to shake it up i appreciate you doing that that feels really refreshing and true
00:59:11.860there's something authentic about that to not compartmentalize our humanity and our feeling
00:59:19.740senses from our rational work because i don't think we can ever be truly objective we're bringing our
00:59:29.620experiences to everything we do. We are molded by our belief systems and our childhoods. And so I
00:59:40.160think it's kind of ridiculous to imagine that we can be these purely rational beings at times
00:59:47.500and not bring everything else with us. Yeah. And it's a really limited, I think,
00:59:52.560a limited way of understanding humanity right human experience like it's it's we are not
01:00:00.640reducible down to rational thinking we have many other elements of our human experience in human
01:00:06.500life and so how do you do knowledge production that actually accesses all of those realms of
01:00:13.060your experience that actually captures a full humanity instead of just this one sliver that
01:00:19.160we think is rigorous. Rigor. Rigor is the word that I also hate. In academia, the idea that
01:00:25.920it's only rigorous, work is only rigorous if it engages, like you're saying, objective rationality.
01:00:34.060But I want to argue that there is something called emotional rigor, right? That there is
01:00:39.820hard emotional work that has to happen and can happen and should happen in academic spaces.
01:00:45.780there's thinking work yes but there's feeling work as well and there's kind of um the fancy
01:00:52.900academic word would be like ontological meaning like ways of being right there's being work
01:00:57.740that can happen and that can be really hard and rigorous as well it just doesn't look the way that
01:01:02.080we think rigor is supposed to look so i want to expand our ideas about rigor and not limit it
01:01:07.400simply to to that kind of rationality and supposed objectivity that you mentioned
01:01:13.880and on this thread of magic and academia I also wonder what your
01:01:23.200thoughts are around the intersection of magic and science and I think to some people this could
01:01:31.540make a lot of sense and I think to others they would think it's blasphemy that those two things
01:01:36.900do not go hand in hand or they're they don't touch each other okay I love I love this question
01:01:42.380great I love it but also I think what you just said really points to the truth of the matter
01:01:49.160you said it's blasphemy to put those two things together and I want to say who is it blasphemous
01:01:54.400to I actually think it's probably more blasphemous to the scientists which then reveals to us that
01:02:00.380science is also a knowledge system and a system of making sense of the world and therefore it is
01:02:05.460also a religion and this is actually so i used to teach an intro intro to religious studies course
01:02:12.500many years ago and that was one of the big questions like what counts as a religion what
01:02:17.980is a religion and is science a religion and we'd come back to that question over and over again
01:02:24.240throughout the semester and at first students were like of course not science is the opposite
01:02:28.400of religion my atheist students would definitely say that and then by the end of the semester it
01:02:32.680is not so clear-cut anymore if religion is a way of making sense of the world with particular
01:02:40.340rules. And science has very particular rules, but there are constructed rules about how we
01:02:46.400understand the world, how we create knowledge, how we access knowledge, how we find it. And so
01:02:51.580I think magic and science, for me, are two systems of making sense of the world that just use very
01:02:58.140different roles and very different ways of understanding where knowledge comes from and
01:03:03.520how we access it and who are kind of agents in that process. I'm not saying I don't believe in
01:03:08.200science, especially not in this moment. We have like, you know, a lot of science deniers in this
01:03:15.220moment. But I do think that we need to think of science as a system of knowledge making.
01:03:23.600just like we think of other forms of religion as systems of knowledge making and meaning making
01:03:31.280i really like the way you said that systems of knowledge making i'm gonna ruminate on that
01:03:38.760i guess these conversations of infiltrating academia and science and pulling apart these
01:03:47.280systems that are very firm or tight in their in their structure yeah and their boundaries right
01:03:58.540rigid in their boundaries yes rigid yeah that's a great way to say it and i'm thinking of you
01:04:04.140speaking a lot of hacking and even yeah hacking the dsm and how that open an emergency is a type
01:04:16.040of hacking. And so I just want to kind of explore that a little bit because I was reading that or I
01:04:22.000was listening to interviews. You had used that word and it excited me to be a little subversive
01:04:29.360and to be a bit trickster in the ways we are playing with these systems of knowledge.
01:04:36.860And so maybe you could start by talking to your thoughts on hacking the DSM.
01:04:42.400Yeah, yeah. So I do want to say there's like a whole, I think, field of inquiry that theorizes hacking that I am not accessing and not a very good scholar in that way. But besides that, I will say that my approach to hacking is actually exactly what you're saying.
01:04:59.440It's like thinking about kind of received systems of knowledge and questioning them,