2026.205
On Humiliation
One pallid evening three years ago, I wrote in my notebook the details of an unconventional job interview I had at the Four Seasons Hotel in Downtown Manhattan to work for a prominent art collector. I forced my hand, literally, to retrace & write down an act of humiliation that had occurred during this job interview, which revealed I had fallen victim to the physiology of distress, becoming prey instead of everything else I’d rather be. My recollection of what did happen & did not happen was tainted, as I’ve irrevocably inserted my imagination of what could’ve happened & the disbelief of what couldn’t have. The pavement of cognition was starting to crack. I didn’t trust the way I remember my life.
The greatest impact of humiliation was my falling out of neutral— losing the ability to observe & comprehend without bias or reaction, the part of my character I preserve with an effort. It was the moment of being knocked into a state of humiliation, where the unnerving re-evaluation of my self-worth & pride kicked in. The betrayal came from an internal voice, dismantling what I used to think of as a moral code, or at least a social one. Treat others the way you want to be treated. But in life, one tends to mold her desires to the shape of what she believes she deserves. What behavior do I determine as acceptable or unacceptable? What makes me deserving of respect? Where lies the actual source of humiliation?
More often than not, humiliation grows deadly merely because we become aware that we have allowed something to humiliate us. I did not deserve to be left at the altar; I did not deserve to be fired in front of the entire company; I did not deserve to be used like that. Our inability to sequester what we believe we deserve & the ways in which others treat us becomes sharply disconcerting after the initial feeling of being humiliated. Exactly what is humiliating about the abandonment at the altar? About dismissal in the presence of your colleagues? About being taken advantage of? It is that the offender felt they could offend, humiliate, & disrespect us, & that we have somehow allowed ourselves to be the easy mark, the butt of the joke, the deer in the headlights, which haunts us in our sleep, the morning after, & years later.
The generation of my great-grandparents who had been colonized, who had undergone humiliation as a type of punishment for their ethnicity & way of life, has a specific understanding of the feeling in connection to morality. To humiliate, to commit actus reus, the colonizer’s intent to ruin, dominate, & conquer is in plain view, abundant mens rea, & the crime of humiliation is easily synonymous with evil & wrong. My grandmother used to say tsumekiri, instead of sontop-kkakki, which means nail clipper, because her mother didn’t know the word for it in Korean, as she was forbidden from using her native language during Japanese occupation. “How humiliating,” my grandmother said, “that I have to learn how to speak my own language again from my children.” This experience did not liberate the generation of colonial trauma from the instinct to utilize humiliation themselves as a tool for obedience. So long as the intent is moral, there is no evil in making your child wander the streets for a couple of hours naked because she was mouthy at home. Or forcing her to wear a diaper to school because she wet the bed. So long as to teach & discipline, for the shivering child is not evidence of ill intent. This firm belief in the goodness behind “for good reason” assuages or even eradicates any fear that one might have caused harm. & those of us who were born into a free nation, who carry the hung jury in our hearts like a cross, we are rarely victims of evil, but the conflicted children who grow up to be inevitably self-doubting, searching inwards at the face of a pejorative or obscure cruelty.
I want to tell you a story about humiliation, in the words that I put together sitting at a bar on Spring Street at 6:26 PM on a day the National Weather Service issued a tornado watch for New York City, almost exactly three years after my unconventional job interview to work for a prominent art dealer, which first took place at the Four Seasons Hotel in Downtown Manhattan, then at his Tribeca loft where he displayed some of his collection & entertained important guests.
I had paid for a cab to arrive at the Four Seasons Hotel in Downtown Manhattan from Williamsburg, because I was too inexperienced to realize that some mornings in New York the train would simply not arrive. In exchange for about 90 dollars, I arrived at the hotel’s restaurant perhaps 10 minutes late, where I found my prospective employer sitting at a table & talking on the phone. He raised his hand & gestured that I sit down & wait while he finished his call. It seemed he was talking about the Morris Museum in New Jersey. When he was done, he apologized for the wait, & I explained to him, as I tended to do when I was a bit younger, that I arrived late because the train didn’t run where I lived, that I took a cab all the way from Brooklyn hoping that I would arrive on time but the traffic. He replied I should’ve never taken a cab or worried about being late.
I ordered a bowl of oatmeal, & he a plate that included a lot of bacon, which he made me try later. At his plea that I must, I also ordered a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. The hour we spent eating our breakfast & talking about Chagall & the art market in Asia is a part of the story I cannot quite write without turning it mendacious, as I didn’t memorialize it in my notebook three years ago. In my recollection, I enjoyed this conversation very much & the oatmeal not so much.
Per his suggestion, we walked over to his Tribeca loft from the restaurant with good bacon & freshly squeezed orange juice, & when I almost got hit by a fast-driving car while crossing the street, he pulled me back. In the surreally compressed transition between the fate of Jane Doe at the Mt.Sinai Trauma Unit & the fate of a gainfully employed young woman in the arts, I found myself standing in the prominent art collector’s Tribeca loft, facing a large mimosa painting by Donald Judd, with a verdant & serious Joan Mitchell behind my back, as the man who saved my life & gave me his bacon, dropped his pants to his ankles. I recall his plaid boxers, & his middle-aged posture when he sat on the couch & started to trim his toenails. Whatever we were talking about then went on as if he still had his pants on. I left his loft with a couple of nicely made catalogues on Donald Judd after expressing my thanks for his time, the oatmeal, & the bacon. A week before this day of the tornado watch in July 2026, the prominent art collector texted & asked that I meet him for a drink to catch up, preferably in the late evening.
I would like to remind you that this is a story about humiliation. Not one of morality or women & men. While we hope our feelings & dignity matter to each other in a fundamental way, sometimes we find ourselves in the presence of those who suddenly pull their pants down just to catch us fall out of neutral, those who reveal our secrets to bring a good laugh to a mediocre conversation, kick us when we’re down to make a lesson out of it. There lies the source of humiliation– the creeping suspicion that our feelings & dignity don’t matter to each other, the poisonous suggestion that if our place in the world were different, we would have been exempt from humiliation, untouchable to those indulging a perverse heart.
Humiliation intrigues & troubles me, & slips away each time I feel closer to grasping its nature. It is an emotion so insistent on altering the optimism, conviction, & kindness I have for myself— so insistent that upon its touch, I am no more who I once was. & by some primitive instinct for survival, I am compelled to remind myself of who I am & what I believe I am capable of, which is to write even in uncertainty, whatever it takes to bring me back to neutral, which is why I am writing now my story of humiliation.