“But You Have to Do Something”: The Racialized Holding Environment of Julia Cho’s Office Hour

This article performs a psychoanalytic reading of Julia Cho’s Office Hour, a play inspired by the Virginia Tech massacre, in order to forward a method for mitigating Asian American isolation and attrition. Attending to the relationship between the play’s primary characters—a Korean American adjunct instructor and her student, a stand-in for the Virginia Tech shooter, Seung-Hui Cho—the author positions spaces of academic and theatrical encounter as potential “racialized holding environments,” environments often cultivated by coerced, feminine labor that nevertheless hold the potential to nourish minoritized subjects through a performance and provision of good-enough, racially attuned care.