Dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss
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| Author | Mimi Khúc |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Non-fiction, Asian American studies, disability studies |
| Publisher | Duke University Press |
Publication date | March 2024 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Pages | 272 |
| Awards | The Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) 2026 Book Award for Outstanding Contribution in the Interdisciplinary/Multidisciplinary category |
| ISBN | 978-1-4780-2567-2 |
| Website | www |
dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss is a 2024 non-fiction book by writer and scholar Mimi Khúc. Khúc combines memoir, critical university studies, and disability studies to develop a new approach to mental health, with a special focus on Asian American communities. Structured as a series of letters addressed to various audiences including the author's daughter, Elia, as well as to students and colleagues, the book critiques psychiatric frameworks that treat mental illness as individual pathology and instead positions unwellness as an inevitable response to structural conditions.[1] The book won the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) 2026 Book Award for Outstanding Contribution in the Interdisciplinary/Multidisciplinary category.[2]
Khúc is a Vietnamese American scholar, writer, and adjunct professor. In dear elia and in many talks since its publication. She explained that the book grew out of her earlier mental health project, Open in Emergency, a hybrid book-arts project she co-created with her partner Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis in 2016, which included original tarot cards and other materials designed to address Asian American mental health through arts and humanities approaches rather than traditional medical models. Khúc described how her experiences as an adjunct professor teaching Asian American studies, combined with her own struggles with postpartum depression and her identity as a daughter of Vietnamese refugees, shaped her understanding that structural forces—rather than individual pathology—create unwellness. Her national speaking tour over seven years, during which she conducted workshops with thousands of students, revealed consistent patterns of student suffering and institutional failure to provide meaningful care, which became central material for the book.[3]
Summary
Khúc blends memoir, critical university studies, and disability justice to interrogate traditional approaches to mental health, with a focus on the mental health crisis within Asian American communities. Framed as letters to the author's daughter, students, and colleagues, dear elia rejects psychiatric models that treat mental illness as individual pathology. Khúc proposes instead a "pedagogy of unwellness," asserting that “we are all unwell” unwellness is a natural and ongoing response to structural violence, In turn, "wellness" as typically defined by productivity and made compulsory is itself a harmful construct.
The book begins with a behind the scenes making of the author's previous curatorial project Open in Emergency, which generated new languages for mental health through formally innovative arts-based tools like a hacked Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and an Asian American Tarot deck. Khúc then investigates the university environment based on her extensive tour of American colleges. She contrasts administrative definitions of wellness and unwellness with the lived realities of students. She argues that higher education operates as an "unwellness engine" where the pressure to succeed functions as slow dying.
Then her analysis narrows to the specific contours of Asian American suffering within the immigrant family. Based on the scholarship of erin Khuê Ninh, Khúc dissects "filial debt," the sense of debt children of immigrants feel toward their parents for their parents’ sacrifices, and locates its origins in immigrant struggle, not just cultural expectations. She frames this debt as a mechanism of control that demands the sacrifice of personhood to become the model minority. Understanding this becomes a lifesaving intervention, and she offers "ingratitude" as necessary for second-generation survival. This framing positions high rates of suicidal ideation among Asian American youth as responses to unlivable conditions of model minority racialization rather than simply biological disorders or intergenerational cultural conflict.
Based on a detailed account of her own expulsion from a university program she helped build as a contingent faculty member, Khúc illustrates how universities rely upon narratives of meritocracy based in ableism that demand hyper-productivity at the expense of health: "We live and work in a machine that makes us unwell while not allowing us to be unwell and punishes us for being unwell." She critiques the "Good Professor" archetype and professionalization industries for how they perpetuate unwellness, most evident in the experiences of adjuncts and contingent faculty who are second-class members of the professoriate.
In the final chapter of the book, Khúc deals with the classroom, advocating for radical pedagogical restructuring that centers access and care. She details her shift toward "access-centered" teaching during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, prioritizing student survival over traditional rigor and surveillance, and offers sample contrasting syllabi to show new strategies she developed and why. Interspersed between chapters are "Interludes" featuring Tarot reflections and interactive exercises that invite the reader to participate in the book's diagnostic and healing processes. She concludes the book by redefining Georgetown University's mission of cura personalis not as institutional slogan but as commitment to recognizing that "we are all differentially unwell" and deserving of care regardless of achievement.[1]
