Club Friday Q&A: Writer Kai Cheng Thom on Radical Hopefulness
By Arpita Quadir
Image: Courtesy of Kai Cheng Thom
Not to start this Q&A on a dark note, but lately, I have been grappling with feelings of uncertainty about the world. Between Israel’s ongoing mass displacement and genocide of Palestinians, the widespread rolling back of women’s rights and dramatic financial inequality that’s making just living so much harder for so many of us, it can seem like there are too many problems and so few solutions. Like a lot of people, I sometimes feel extremely hopeless. So, I reached out to author Kai Cheng Thom to talk about hopefulness. A cultural worker, performer and author whose latest book, Falling Back in Love With Being Human, came out last year, she has written extensively about feeling a similar loss of hope, and how she was able to find her way back to a sense of optimism. Read on for our chat about how we can hold on to hope when all seems lost—and how we can continue to believe in a better future, which is something I think we all need a bit of right now. — Arpita Quadir
What inspired you to start thinking about self-acceptance, self-love and forgiveness?
I’ve been in contemplation around what it means to embody love, compassion, and forgiveness for a long time—over a decade now—and the process keeps on evolving. A few major inspirations for me were, in roughly chronological order: first, being assigned male at birth as a person whose femininity (at the time, they called it “effeminacy”) was extremely obvious from early childhood, in an environment where this was extremely taboo. Like many queer children, this was my first and deepest introduction to shame and the longing for self-love.
Later, as a young adult, I found social justice culture and political activism, which were empowering for a time (and still feel important now), but the activist communities I came up in could also be extremely shaming in their way, and I found myself asking many questions about how we could work towards a better world while also being kinder and more forgiving to one another.
Lastly, in my early 20s, I experienced a life-altering personal and spiritual crisis that shook me to my core and made me question everything I believed in. This crystallized my desire and devotion to the exploration of self-love and self-forgiveness, along with Transformative Justice and love-based social change.
What did it feel like to realize that your belief in the values you had built in your life around—justice, hope, love and healing—was wavering?
It was terrible and terrifying. It felt like dying—like falling into a void I thought that I’d escaped. To feel myself transforming into a person full of rage, bitterness and hatred, and worse, a person who was no longer curious about other people, was one of the worst experiences I’ve had in my life. Yet I believe this had a purpose, and while I can’t say I’d want to do it again, I am glad to know that it’s possible to find my way back from something like that.
Since you wrote Falling Back in Love With Being Human, it feels like the world has gotten even worse, in a way. Do you have practical advice for how people can continue practicing the type of self-reflection you talk about, especially in regards to loving others and yourself?
Well, I first want to say that sometimes, we must take action as a spiritual practice—action towards ending the atrocities that are happening at this moment. There are millions of people, including children and elders, being bombed and starved to death right now in Gaza, and we are all implicated in this. We should all ask ourselves what are the actions we can take, even if they are small, to preserve and honour life in this situation? We must be brave, we must embrace our better selves, and this is what self-love in practice looks like.
On a more contemplative level, I would suggest that we do the work of examining the parts of ourselves that we see as bad or monstrous and uncovering the ways that we project these qualities onto others. In-depth psychology, this process is called “shadow integration” and it is a powerful practice of self-love—we find similar practices in spiritual traditions such as Tibetan Buddhism, which encourages us to make contact with our inner demons. When we can observe and connect deeply with the parts of ourselves that we fear, it allows us to transform our relationship with those parts in dramatic and sometimes unexpected ways, helping us, for example, to notice more consciously how our behaviours harm others even when we think that we are helping them.
With all of the violence and oppression that surround us at this moment in time, how do you hold on to hope and find a sense of justice in all of the injustice?
It is extremely challenging. Like many Transformative Justice practitioners, I define justice as working towards changing the conditions that enable and lead to harm. This is not my definition; I learned it from the Transformative Justice thinkers and activists who developed the theory, including (but not limited to) Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Staci Haines, Adrienne Maree Brown, Mariame Kaba and Mia Mingus, who themselves are drawing from ideas based in ancient Indigenous forms of governance. Something I find helpful and profound about the Transformative Justice lineage is that we do not define justice as punishment or even as making the impact of harm and violence go away. You cannot make the impact of harm and violence go away, because it has already happened. What we can do is reduce the amount of violence that may happen in the future, and that is what I hold onto as my hope.
In an interview with Shondaland, you talked about writing what would become the first open letter in the book addressed to JK Rowling after she released a statement about having sympathy for trans women but considered that advancing trans rights would pose a safety risk to cis women. What was it about the open letter format that felt right to you?
I have always loved the deeply personal quality of the open letter, or more broadly, the epistolary style of writing both fiction and non-fiction. An open letter is intended to be read by a broad audience, but it can be addressed to a single person, and it is this interweaving of profound intimacy with a public witness that I think makes it so powerful. Emotional intimacy invites our humanity forward, and this is a huge part of what makes real dialogue possible.
In that same interview, you said, “I started writing these letters mostly as a way to try to retrieve faith in a social justice movement, and I think also just human beings in general.” Why was it so necessary for you to revive your faith in those things?
I needed to retrieve my faith in social justice movements and human beings because I love them and cannot live without them! I’m a trans woman of colour, and because of that, my quality of life is intrinsically intertwined with the outcomes of the great struggles over justice and inequality at the core of our society—though of course, you could say the same thing about most people with marginalized identities and class experiences. We are all affected by the struggle for a better world, and the day we stop believing that a better world is possible is the day we lose the struggle forever. That is why we need faith.
I totally agree that maintaining radical hopefulness is important—but how do we keep ourselves from descending into toxic positivity?
Toxic positivity is in essence the practice of cutting oneself off from the world. It is about dissociating from reality to cope with suffering by pretending that suffering is not real. As a result, toxic positivity can result in greater harm to ourselves and others, because it prevents us from engaging in real transformation or feeling real empathy with others. Radical hopefulness, on the other hand, is about finding a way to stay in connection with the world. It is about engaging with suffering without being poisoned or drowned by it.
Radical hopefulness requires us to develop greater skill and capacity to be with our pain and the pain of others—and when we do, we start to understand how healing can occur. One way to think about it is using the metaphor of a house on fire. Toxic positivity is like that meme where the dog is in a burning house and says, “This is fine.” It’s not fine; the house is on fire and if we are toxically positive about it, then we pretend it’s not happening, which means that we will probably die and possibly even cause the deaths of others through inaction. Radical hopefulness is noticing that the house is on fire and we are all in danger, which means that it’s time to try and douse the flames.
How do you think the world that we have to navigate encourages us to lose touch with our humanity?
We live in a world dominated by the structures and demands of imperialism, colonization, and capitalism. These are systems that were explicitly created to exploit the bodies of the many to service the whims of a few. To keep us trapped within the system, we are taught that we must compete with and dehumanize one another—we are turned against one another to prevent us from building strong social movements that would force the ruling class to make real changes. For example, the working class in North America has been consistently bombarded with messages by conservative politicians that immigrants are to blame for bad economic conditions when it's really the rich who are responsible for that. Poor white people are taught to be afraid of Black and Indigenous people and people of colour so that they’ll support police overreach and the prison industry. We are being played against one another so that we will remain vulnerable and easily controlled.
Keeping that in mind, why is it so important to remember our humanity?
We have to remember our own humanity so that we will remember the humanity in others. When we are immersed in shame, we get lost in our injuries and self-interest. We lose the capacity to relate authentically with people different from us. We have to heal ourselves so that we can help to heal the world—and we have to help to heal the world to heal ourselves. Healing the individual and healing the collective is a single, unified process.
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