Mimi Khúc, PhD

Writer

Mimi Khúc, PhD, is a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell. Managing Editor of The Asian American Literary Review and guest editor of Open in Emergency: A Special Issue on Asian American Mental Health, an arts and humanities intervention that works to rethink and decolonize Asian American un/wellness, she oversees the Open in Emergency Initiative, a multi-year national project working with universities and community spaces to think together about the shape and scope of Asian American mental health. She is currently writing a book on mental health and the university, as well as co-writing a work of graphic theory/memoir on Asian American daughterhood and suicide.

This Love and Its Labors

Mimi Khúc, PhD - June 20, 2019
Image of round of homemade bread

Cooking was one of two things. For viet food, a mystery managed and magicked by the adult women in my family; for American food, an easy formula of supermarket shortcuts of pasta sauce from jars and frozen dinners. I grew up in a viet refugee family in Maryland in the ’80s and ’90s. My extended family threw weekly parties, often at my house, the central hub, food served from giant vats and trays. Women’s cackles from the kitchen accompanied the hum of sizzling food. The men lounged, smoking and drinking beer.