The book opens with Mimi Khúc stating she doesn’t write books. Rather, she makes items that meet a need, one might even say as a panacea to the pain she’s encountered through her career, to which she says, “theorize pain, but make it fun, and healing.” Khúc takes great lengths to say that this is not an academic book—but rather, employs the job of one as it opines to a very real phenomenon. 

Khúc employs various tools to communicate with her audience, whether it be multimodal, textual, or convening with one’s own personal narrative. It is not, of course, the only time in which Khúc bounces between genres, academic norms, or expectations. Rather, her writing and voice attenuate to how she wants to address the reader, bringing us in to pay witness to not only her story, but to the thousands of other stories she too has paid witness to and can now share. Khú’s workshop participants are also speaking to us; they show up in notes that Khúc takes during a meeting or when the students were asked to self-reflect. The author begins each chapter with an alternating recipient, “Dear anh,” “Dear reader,” “Dear second-gen Asian Americans,” “Dear colleagues,” and with each one, signals to her readers that hopefully, she is speaking to you. In so doing, Khúc demonstrates a vulnerability in her writing, one she shared with her students, her colleagues, and with us, her readers. Her attention to her audience then, culminates to Khúc’s central argument: we are all unwell, all in different ways, but how can we hope to address it if we first don’t acknowledge it?

Interspersed within these chapters are interludes, such as: an interactive Mad Libs that asks readers to fill in the blank of “The Professor fears_____” or “A Good Professor always_____;” a Google Form that she had sent out to students as they transitioned to online teaching to gauge course access; and a moment of reflection where readers are encouraged to pick a word from a table and to reflect on said word with a peer (the words include: failure, dream, family, shame, guilt). The one example that starkly stands out are Tarot cards. Texturally, the pages are glossy and colored as opposed to the black and white fibers of the other pages. There are four in total: The Hangman, The Student, The Pandemic, and Suicide. Each card represents a known entity that Asian Americans are experiencing whether in or outside the university, providing to them what Tarot cards are often used for: a glimpse of the future and of times past. 

In Chapter One, “a pedagogy of unwellness,” Khúc establishes that within a pedagogy of unwellness, we are all unwell, but that should not be counted as a failure. The chapter also outlines the work that set the foreground for Open in Emergency (OiE), a hybrid text and workshop meant to understand wellness and unwellness in Asian American communities.

In Chapter Two, “touring the abyss” Khúc goes into more detail about what each workshop entailed. Namely, the purpose of OiE is to allow Asian American students across the country at various universities the opportunity to speak on their mental health, the structures at play affecting it, and what they could do now that they recognize them. Ultimately, Khúc asks her workshop participants to write down an answer to a simple question, “What does unwellness look and feel like to you?” Khúc then asks, “What does ‘mental health’ mean to you?” and as students offer their insight, an interesting unraveling occurs. Here, we see Khúc’s continued gesture to her student participants, providing photocopied notes she’s taken during these workshops: lists of what mental health encompasses and the definitions of unwellness. How the university measures mental health, as evidenced by the World Health Organization’s working definition, does so in a way that aligns with one’s productivity, not so much their actual wellness. The chapter then transitions to how it is the university that crafts and feeds the neoliberal machine that generates the model minority characterization. Thus, the author states, “it is not simply that the university doesn’t provide enough care; it is that the university is an unwellness engine for Asian Americans.” How, then, do we stop it? 

In Chapter Three, “how to save your asian american life in an hour” Khúc extrapolates on Ninh’s “a sustained commitment to injury.” Namely, that once Asian American students reckon with the knowledge that not only is the university, but also potentially family dynamics, contributing to their unwellness, how does one alleviate it? This question of alleviation ties closely with the known effect of how minorities feel there is a “conditional belonging” for being in the United States, that one’s worth is severely tied to their productivity. Thus, to find relief from these sites of unwellness students should set hard boundaries with their parents. In this way, students can potentially mitigate their relationship with their families, just like how they can also attend to the university’s commitment to harm. 

In Chapters Four and Five “the professor is ill,” and “teaching in pandemic times,” Khúc traverses across different points of subjectivity to encompass the swathe of time it takes to be a professor. From adjunct to graduate student, her writing entails how it is that the university does not care, nor take responsibility, for the unwellness it engenders. In addition, the author takes a self-reflexive approach to take careful consideration of not only the university’s response to the sudden and rapid circumstances that led to the Covid-19 pandemic, but also her own teaching style. In a move that once more showcases vulnerability, Khúc performs an “accessibility audit,” on her own ENGL270 syllabus and the changes it underwent as the world suddenly went into lockdown. With many, if not all, universities transitioning to online teaching, many instructors had to reassess their own modes of teaching and assessment. Thus, nearing the end of Chapter Five, the author notes that for all that the pandemic afforded, or in some instances forced, an intense amount of self-reflection at the university level, it should not end there. Khúc offers, “build in radical flexibility, and be ready to iterate again and again. The crisis is never over,” for educators, the uphill battle for accessibility and equity never truly stops. 

Overall, this book offers our first glimpse at the ongoing crisis of unwellness and to offer readers the first instance to hopefully address it. Khúc attends to elements that a “regular” academic text never would. To that I say: Good. 

My reaction stems from the fact that I am also a second-generation Asian American graduate student, having faced and seen the same tribulations Khúc lays out in her book. Khúc’s ability to present the strife brought on by the pandemic, to both instructors and students and still holding space for Asian American students to take focus on themselves, all while sharing her own pain and strife, makes this so much more than any other ‘academic text.’ Often, when one thinks of an academic text, or at least the ones I’ve encountered, there’s a distance to them. Of course these books offer insight but the stakes for the author seem to be obscured—that is not at all true for dear elia. Khúc’s approach to her story, her students, and their combined future shows an attentiveness that I found startling and heartbreaking.