I suppose, then, a history lesson is called for, a quick rundown of how the Chinese

were first bought in as coolies to replace slaves in the plantation fields after the
Civil War or how they drilled dynamite and laid out the tracks for the
transcontinental railroad until they were blown up by dynamite or buried by
snowstorms. Three Chinese laborers died for every two miles of track built to
make Manifest Destiny a reality, but when the celebratory photo of the Golden
Spike was taken, not a single Chinese man was welcome to pose with the other—
white—railway workers.
— Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian-American Reckoning
John Gast, American Progress, 1872
US Canada
• 1863-1869 building of • 1881-1885 building of
the first Canadian Pacific Railway
transcontinental railroad • Chinese Head Tax 1885-
• Chinese Exclusion Act 1923
1882 (banned Chinese • Chinese Immigration Act
labourers for 10 years) 1923 (repealed in 1947)
• Hawaii annexed in 1898
• Immigration Act
(Oriental Exclusion Act)
1924
Chinese railroad workers in Canada
In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status: not
white enough nor black enough; distrusted by African Americans, ignored by
whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down. We are the
carpenter ants of the service industry, the apparatchiks of the corporate world. We
are math-crunching middle managers who keep the corporate wheels greased but
who never get promoted since we don’t have the right ‘face’ for leadership. We have
a content problem. They think we have no inner resources. But while I may look
impassive, I am frantically paddling my feet underwater, always compensating to
hide my devouring feelings of inadequacy. (Hong 9)
[minor feelings consist of] the racialized range of emotions that are
negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments
of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception
of reality constantly questioned or dismissed. Minor feelings arise, for
instance, upon hearing a slight, knowing it’s racial, and being told, Oh,
that’s all in your head. (Hong 55)
• Professor and Chancellor’s
Research Chair at the
University of Winnipeg
• Teaches critical race studies
and American literature
• Co-editor of Adoption &
Multiculturalism
• Her memoir, Older Sister.
Not Necessarily Related won
a Writer’s Trust Prize for
Non-Fiction in 2019
Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related
• Memoir: a form of life writing that recounts a
particular moment or theme of a person’s life;
can be episodic in nature, or just focus on a
particular period of life

• Different from autobiography / biography,

which captures the entirety of a life
Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related
• Themes & Topics:
• Korean transnational adoption / transnationalism
• Multiculturalism
• Identity / fragmentation of identity
• Family
• Food
• Culture
Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related
”I like to keep parts of myself buried deep. I’ve learned to hold
myself hard and intact. But those adoption agencies, they feed
on sentiment, get off on the spectacle of reunion, even though
they are perpetrators of our conditions in the first place.
Maybe perpetrators isn’t the right word. How about profiteers?
Anyhow, if and when we decide to search, they make us fill out
a form with what we think is our name, our parents’ names,
our birthdate. We put all our faith in those make-believe things
and hand ourselves over because we have no choice.” (10)
Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related

•What are the feelings, moods, tones,

expressed in the book?
•How are they expressed?
•What are some formal qualities of the
memoir that make it remarkable?
Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related

•If a memoir is supposed to be a kind of

account of a life, or part of a life, how
does Wills’s grapple with the inability to
account for her own life because of her
circumstances (transnational adoption,
cultural alienation, family loss)?
Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related

•How does Wills challenge the memoir

genre?
•What and how might Wills represent
minor feelings?
“Early on, I was scrubbed until my skin turned pink. I was programmed to speak
English, then French, and to place my fork and knife side by side on my plate
when I had finished eating. I disappeared into a life of cream-of-mushroom
casseroles, Irish setters, and patent leather Sunday school shoes. I was buried
under Bach concertos, feathered bangs, and maple sugar candy until my own
mother wouldn’t have recognized me.
But of course I couldn’t stay missing forever, and around 2009, I was reborn
somewhere in the dusky November mountains of Seoul. I came back to life with
a long wooden spoon in one hand and flat silver chopsticks in the other. I came
back when my Korean father called me by my name, when my Korean mother
called me daughter. When my younger sister called me unni, older sister, and I
understood what that meant.” (4)
”The mosquitoes in Korea were different, smaller and darker and
louder. Their bites burned and swelled hard pebbles under my skin. I
still have scars on my arms and legs from that first trip, when my blood
was as novel to them as their viciousness was to me. Every room of the
guesthouse, especially where people slept, had plug-in repellents
wafting chemical steam into the air. But they didn’t work, so each night
the lights would be abruptly flashed on whenever the humming grew
unbearable and adoptees from around the world, assigned bunk beds
with strangers, would stomp around the room, swearing in French and
German and English and Norwegian, swinging electric bug zappers like
tennis rackets.” (41)
”In the letter she’d sent before I came to Korea, Bora listed the things she wanted to do
together once I arrived. Tell secrets. Watch a film. She described how jealous she’d
been of friends who had older sisters. We saw each other every few weeks, meeting to
eat ice cream or drink coffee, even though she was busy with her many jobs and her
studies. She had also started English language classes but back then she didn’t want
anyone to know. Bora always chose restaurants she thought I’d like: Mexican, Italian,
Indian, American. One night, after she ate too much dairy, she was sick in the public
restroom of a state-of-the-art shopping mall. She let me rub her back. Hold. Her hair. I
brought her ginger candy and brought her water.
We met often and spent time, without talking, discovered each other through the
slightest expressions. We developed an intimacy without the burden of words. Bora
always insisted on paying and I later discovered that Ummah gave her money so that
her two daughters could build a connection. So we could learn to be sisters.” (44-45)