In Leonard Chang’s 1996 novel The Fruit 'N Food, Tom, a Korean American who comes to work at a convenience store, functions as a kind of conduit through which many of the tensions of New York City pass. The novel is used to develop how anger arises: out of tension. The concept of tension is important because it functions as a way to understand how different people, ideas, and cultures come into contact with each other. Chang’s novel is taken as a key text because of the way that anger is the threshold that internal tensions interact with external ones. Developing the relationship between tension and anger is important because tension is often seen as the answer to a question rather than the beginning of an inquiry. In order to further develop some of the ways that tension can be used and misused, Hye Young Hang’s poem “A Dry Cleaner Ironing the Pacific Ocean” is seen to delineate some of the ways to foreground tension rather than smooth over it, illustrating how tension is one of the channels through which different aspects of the world interact with each other, and the concept of collective tension is developed to account for this.