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Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Best Nonfiction (2020)Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose the truth of racialized consciousness in America. Binding these essays together is Hong's theory of "minor feelings."
As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity.
Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and artmaking, and to family and female friendship in a search to both uncover and speak the truth.
As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity.
Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and artmaking, and to family and female friendship in a search to both uncover and speak the truth.
344 pages, ebook
First published February 25, 2020
About the author
Cathy Park Hong
10 books844 followersCathy Park Hong’s book of creative nonfiction, Minor Feelings, was published in Spring 2020 by One World/Random House (US) and Profile Books (UK). She is also the author of poetry collections Engine Empire, published in 2012 by W.W. Norton, Dance Dance Revolution, chosen by Adrienne Rich for the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Translating Mo'um. Hong is the recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in Poetry, A Public Space, Paris Review, McSweeney's, Baffler, Yale Review, The Nation, and other journals. She is the poetry editor of the New Republic and is a professor at Rutgers-Newark University.
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November 29, 2020
3.5 stars. I really enjoyed the beginning of the book when Hong talks broadly about how the Asian-American experience fits in the minority conversation, the way being an invisible minority makes you question the validity of your issues, and the intersectionality of black people’s experience with racism. She also makes great points about how Asian artists (like many other POC) have to craft stories that are large and racially traumatic enough of a spectacle for others to consume, as well as the expectation that our identity now must be required as part of the work (it’s not just “a story”, it’s “an Asian story” now). Her concept of “minor feelings” resonated with me a lot as someone who frequently gaslights themselves into how much of my experiences are truly discrimination or not that severe as others. This book provides a strong starting point in how we might understand the Asian American identity, but isn’t as expansive as I would like, especially since her essays in the 2nd half of the book deviate to other topics from her personal life and intimate details about her friend, which feel out of place and did not seem to have the same level of reflection to apply broadly to what the title aims for.
Still, there are some great pieces here, and here are some quotes that resonated with me. They do a great job at articulating the frustrations that I feel in having my issues as an Asian-American not be understood by other white Americans and even other people of color because of our invisible minority status and the way our oppression is more insidious and subtle.
“When I hear the phrase “Asians are next in line to be white,” I replace the word “white” with “disappear.” Asians are next in line to disappear. We are reputed to be so accomplished, and so law-abiding, we will disappear into this country’s amnesiac fog. We will not be the power but become absorbed by power, not share the power of whites but be stooges to a white ideology that exploited our ancestors. This country insists that our racial identity is beside the point, that it has nothing to do with being bullied, or passed over for promotion, or cut off every time we talk. Our race has nothing to do with this country, even, which is why we’re often listed as “Other” in polls and why we’re hard to find in racial breakdowns on reported rape or workplace discrimination or domestic abuse.”
“We keep our heads down and work hard, believing that our diligence will reward us with our dignity, but our diligence will only make us disappear. By not speaking up, we perpetuate the myth that our shame is caused by our repressive culture and the country we fled, whereas America has given us nothing but opportunity. The lie that Asians have it good is so insidious that even now as I write, I’m shadowed by doubt that I didn’t have it bad compared to others. But racial trauma is not a competitive sport. The problem is not that my childhood was exceptionally traumatic but that it was in fact rather typical. Most white Americans can only understand racial trauma as a spectacle.”
“Minor feelings occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance. You are told, "Things are so much better," while you think, Things are the same. You are told, "Asian Americans are so successful," while you feel like a failure. This optimism sets up false expectations that increase these feelings of dysphoria.”
“Minor feelings are also the emotions we are accused of having when we decide to be difficult—in other words, when we decide to be honest. When minor feelings are finally externalized, they are interpreted as hostile, ungrateful, jealous, depressing, and belligerent, affects ascribed to racialized behavior that whites consider out of line. Our feelings are overreactions because our lived experiences of structural inequity are not commensurate with their deluded reality.”
“Asians lack presence. Asians take up apologetic space. We don’t even have enough presence to be considered real minorities. We’re not racial enough to be token. We’re so post-racial we’re silicon. “
“Our feelings are overreactions because our lived experiences of structural inequity are not commensurate with their deluded reality.”
“What if my cannibalizing ego is not a racial phenomenon but my own damn problem?”
“The curse of anyone nonwhite is that you are so busy arguing what you're not that you never arrive at what you are.”
“I'd rather be indebted than be the kind of white man who thinks the world owes him, because to live an ethical life is to be held accountable to history.”
Still, there are some great pieces here, and here are some quotes that resonated with me. They do a great job at articulating the frustrations that I feel in having my issues as an Asian-American not be understood by other white Americans and even other people of color because of our invisible minority status and the way our oppression is more insidious and subtle.
“When I hear the phrase “Asians are next in line to be white,” I replace the word “white” with “disappear.” Asians are next in line to disappear. We are reputed to be so accomplished, and so law-abiding, we will disappear into this country’s amnesiac fog. We will not be the power but become absorbed by power, not share the power of whites but be stooges to a white ideology that exploited our ancestors. This country insists that our racial identity is beside the point, that it has nothing to do with being bullied, or passed over for promotion, or cut off every time we talk. Our race has nothing to do with this country, even, which is why we’re often listed as “Other” in polls and why we’re hard to find in racial breakdowns on reported rape or workplace discrimination or domestic abuse.”
“We keep our heads down and work hard, believing that our diligence will reward us with our dignity, but our diligence will only make us disappear. By not speaking up, we perpetuate the myth that our shame is caused by our repressive culture and the country we fled, whereas America has given us nothing but opportunity. The lie that Asians have it good is so insidious that even now as I write, I’m shadowed by doubt that I didn’t have it bad compared to others. But racial trauma is not a competitive sport. The problem is not that my childhood was exceptionally traumatic but that it was in fact rather typical. Most white Americans can only understand racial trauma as a spectacle.”
“Minor feelings occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance. You are told, "Things are so much better," while you think, Things are the same. You are told, "Asian Americans are so successful," while you feel like a failure. This optimism sets up false expectations that increase these feelings of dysphoria.”
“Minor feelings are also the emotions we are accused of having when we decide to be difficult—in other words, when we decide to be honest. When minor feelings are finally externalized, they are interpreted as hostile, ungrateful, jealous, depressing, and belligerent, affects ascribed to racialized behavior that whites consider out of line. Our feelings are overreactions because our lived experiences of structural inequity are not commensurate with their deluded reality.”
“Asians lack presence. Asians take up apologetic space. We don’t even have enough presence to be considered real minorities. We’re not racial enough to be token. We’re so post-racial we’re silicon. “
“Our feelings are overreactions because our lived experiences of structural inequity are not commensurate with their deluded reality.”
“What if my cannibalizing ego is not a racial phenomenon but my own damn problem?”
“The curse of anyone nonwhite is that you are so busy arguing what you're not that you never arrive at what you are.”
“I'd rather be indebted than be the kind of white man who thinks the world owes him, because to live an ethical life is to be held accountable to history.”
March 15, 2020
This book blew me the heck away, definitely one of the top five essay collections I have ever read. In Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, Cathy Park Hong delves into Asian American identity through the lens of history, psychology, and her own lived experience as a Korean American daughter of immigrants. This collection feels so necessary because Asian Americans receive such one-dimensional characterization in the United States: we’re math whizzes, we have wild tiger parents, we’re crazy rich, or now, we’re the ones who started Coronavirus. Hong eviscerates these reductionist stereotypes and explores Asian American complexity by sharing our history rife with colonization, the intergenerational trauma faced by our parents and passed down to us, and the ways in which we either resist whiteness or get subsumed by it. The most powerful part of this collection revolves around Hong’s capacity to connect the historical to the personal, such as this reflection on United Airline’s brutal treatment of David Dao Duy Anh, a Vietnamese American passenger:
“In 1975, Saigon had fallen. His home was no longer his home. Dao was forced to flee as a refugee, and he and his wife raised their family of five kids in Kentucky, a new home that… had its own share of absurd hardships. Dao was caught trafficking prescription drugs for sex and lost his medical license, after which he earned his income as a poker player. While I agree with his defenders that his rap sheet is irrelevant to the United Airlines incident, it’s relevant to me, since it helps us see Dao in a more complex, realistic light. Dao is not a criminal nor is he some industrious automaton who could escape the devastation of his homeland and, through a miraculous arc of resilience, become an upstanding doctor whose kids are also doctors. For many immigrants, if you move here with trauma, you’re going to do what it takes to get by. You cheat. You beat your wife. You gamble. You’re a survivor and, like most survivors, you’re a god-awful parent. Watching Dao, I thought of my father watching his own father being dragged out of his own home. I thought of Asians throughout history being dragged against their will, driven or chased out of their native homes, out of their adopted homes, out of their native country, out of their adopted country: ejected, evicted, exiled.”
Though some of Hong’s commentary and analyses may tread familiar ground for those already immersed in Asian American issues, I felt that she injected new depth to the conversation about Asian Americans in the United States. For example, I saw the publishing industry more clearly through Hong’s analysis of Jhumpa Lahiri’s work and how Lahiri’s preeminence in the literary sphere has forced the Asian American narrative to assimilate to a standard, comforting trope for the white gaze. Toward the end of the book, Hong drops – in the middle of a stunning self-analysis – a piercing truth about how Koreans’ fixation with double eyelid surgery stems from Dr. Ralph Millard, an American surgeon who tested the surgery on Korean sex workers to make them more appealing to GIs during the Korean War. As a somewhat big K-Pop fan (love me some Itzy and BlackPink) I have always found the Korean obsession with plastic surgery odd and superficial; Hong’s ability to link that obsession back to colonization and the imperialism of whiteness helped me see the truth, just like how many truths about Asian American identity and history have been erased or hidden from our view.
The personal components of this essay collection shine as well. Hong’s background as a poet comes as no surprise given how the scenes from her personal life felt so well-written, like you could imagine yourself experiencing her past with her. I literally cringed when she described a moment from her childhood when she watched a group of white kids make fun of her grandmother’s English, kick her onto the ground, and then laugh at her – it reminded me of my own grandmother and I just pulsated with hurt and anger reading that scene. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I felt such a sense of pride and camaraderie when Hong detailed her intense, magnetic friendship during her undergraduate years with Erin and Helen, two other Asian women artists, and how their friendship with one another both hurt at times while also pushed them all to a place of artistic self-confidence that transcended white male expectations. Hong invests her whole heart and mind into Minor Feelings, which shows through the major connections she makes between Asian Americans’ political placement in the United States and her personal experience as an artist, daughter, friend, and more. Here’s another passage that stood out to me, about Asian Americans needing to reckon with whiteness:
“I have to address whiteness because Asian Americans have yet to truly reckon with where we stand in the capitalist white supremacist hierarchy of this country. We are so far from reckoning with it that some Asians think that race has no bearing on their lives, that it doesn’t’ “come up,” which is as misguided as white people saying the same thing about themselves, not only because of discrimination we have faced but because of the entitlements we’ve been granted due to our racial identity. These Asians are my cousins; my ex-boyfriend; these Asians are myself, cocooned in Brooklyn, caught unawares on a nice warm day, thinking I don’t have to be affected by race; I only choose to think about it. I could live only for myself, for my immediate family, following the expectations of my parents, whose survivor instincts align with this country’s neoliberal ethos, which is to get ahead at the expense of anyone else while burying the shame that binds us. To varying degrees, all Asians who have grown up in the United States know intimately the same I have described; have felt its oily flame.”
Overall, I would highly recommend this book to everyone, though it may resonate most personally with East Asians who are 1.5 or 2nd generation living in the United States. I reflected a lot on my own parents and Asian American identity while reading Minor Feelings, and I feel more motivated to honor my parents’ complex experiences despite the difficulties in our relationship. I also feel, as I’ve shared about in several of my recent blog posts, more determined to dismantle white supremacy through being a loud and proud Vietnamese American who protests racism even when it makes white people uncomfortable. Hong acknowledges that this collection does not encompass the enormity or entirety of the Asian American experience, which I agree with. I hope this book can act as another launching point for further reflection and activism that includes and centers South Asians, queer Asian Americans, and more. For now, I feel grateful for this book’s existence and hope that it gains great traction in 2020 and beyond.
“In 1975, Saigon had fallen. His home was no longer his home. Dao was forced to flee as a refugee, and he and his wife raised their family of five kids in Kentucky, a new home that… had its own share of absurd hardships. Dao was caught trafficking prescription drugs for sex and lost his medical license, after which he earned his income as a poker player. While I agree with his defenders that his rap sheet is irrelevant to the United Airlines incident, it’s relevant to me, since it helps us see Dao in a more complex, realistic light. Dao is not a criminal nor is he some industrious automaton who could escape the devastation of his homeland and, through a miraculous arc of resilience, become an upstanding doctor whose kids are also doctors. For many immigrants, if you move here with trauma, you’re going to do what it takes to get by. You cheat. You beat your wife. You gamble. You’re a survivor and, like most survivors, you’re a god-awful parent. Watching Dao, I thought of my father watching his own father being dragged out of his own home. I thought of Asians throughout history being dragged against their will, driven or chased out of their native homes, out of their adopted homes, out of their native country, out of their adopted country: ejected, evicted, exiled.”
Though some of Hong’s commentary and analyses may tread familiar ground for those already immersed in Asian American issues, I felt that she injected new depth to the conversation about Asian Americans in the United States. For example, I saw the publishing industry more clearly through Hong’s analysis of Jhumpa Lahiri’s work and how Lahiri’s preeminence in the literary sphere has forced the Asian American narrative to assimilate to a standard, comforting trope for the white gaze. Toward the end of the book, Hong drops – in the middle of a stunning self-analysis – a piercing truth about how Koreans’ fixation with double eyelid surgery stems from Dr. Ralph Millard, an American surgeon who tested the surgery on Korean sex workers to make them more appealing to GIs during the Korean War. As a somewhat big K-Pop fan (love me some Itzy and BlackPink) I have always found the Korean obsession with plastic surgery odd and superficial; Hong’s ability to link that obsession back to colonization and the imperialism of whiteness helped me see the truth, just like how many truths about Asian American identity and history have been erased or hidden from our view.
The personal components of this essay collection shine as well. Hong’s background as a poet comes as no surprise given how the scenes from her personal life felt so well-written, like you could imagine yourself experiencing her past with her. I literally cringed when she described a moment from her childhood when she watched a group of white kids make fun of her grandmother’s English, kick her onto the ground, and then laugh at her – it reminded me of my own grandmother and I just pulsated with hurt and anger reading that scene. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I felt such a sense of pride and camaraderie when Hong detailed her intense, magnetic friendship during her undergraduate years with Erin and Helen, two other Asian women artists, and how their friendship with one another both hurt at times while also pushed them all to a place of artistic self-confidence that transcended white male expectations. Hong invests her whole heart and mind into Minor Feelings, which shows through the major connections she makes between Asian Americans’ political placement in the United States and her personal experience as an artist, daughter, friend, and more. Here’s another passage that stood out to me, about Asian Americans needing to reckon with whiteness:
“I have to address whiteness because Asian Americans have yet to truly reckon with where we stand in the capitalist white supremacist hierarchy of this country. We are so far from reckoning with it that some Asians think that race has no bearing on their lives, that it doesn’t’ “come up,” which is as misguided as white people saying the same thing about themselves, not only because of discrimination we have faced but because of the entitlements we’ve been granted due to our racial identity. These Asians are my cousins; my ex-boyfriend; these Asians are myself, cocooned in Brooklyn, caught unawares on a nice warm day, thinking I don’t have to be affected by race; I only choose to think about it. I could live only for myself, for my immediate family, following the expectations of my parents, whose survivor instincts align with this country’s neoliberal ethos, which is to get ahead at the expense of anyone else while burying the shame that binds us. To varying degrees, all Asians who have grown up in the United States know intimately the same I have described; have felt its oily flame.”
Overall, I would highly recommend this book to everyone, though it may resonate most personally with East Asians who are 1.5 or 2nd generation living in the United States. I reflected a lot on my own parents and Asian American identity while reading Minor Feelings, and I feel more motivated to honor my parents’ complex experiences despite the difficulties in our relationship. I also feel, as I’ve shared about in several of my recent blog posts, more determined to dismantle white supremacy through being a loud and proud Vietnamese American who protests racism even when it makes white people uncomfortable. Hong acknowledges that this collection does not encompass the enormity or entirety of the Asian American experience, which I agree with. I hope this book can act as another launching point for further reflection and activism that includes and centers South Asians, queer Asian Americans, and more. For now, I feel grateful for this book’s existence and hope that it gains great traction in 2020 and beyond.
February 12, 2020
I have never felt so seen, have never been able to put into words—much less effectively emote to others—feelings such as being gaslighted since childhood of my own experiences of racism as an Asian American and being made to feel like they’re not worthy of validation. I don’t think it was until I started working for an AAPI advocacy organization that I truly started my journey toward racial consciousness, precisely because of this phenomenon Hong calls “minor feelings”.
There are so many moments in the book where I had never seen a particular emotional experience written down and speaking to me before: from watching your parents as a child being humiliated by white adults because of their struggles with English to the ways in which a post-2016 election world has triggered the trauma of racial bullying during childhood, or rather “the stress of its anticipation”. And yet it’s so much more complex than that. Throughout the whole book I kept taking photos of the pages as I read so that I could come back to those passages whenever. As a result my camera roll is just a bunch of snapshots of text.
There are certain chapters where I felt like it veered from the main thesis of the book (though still fantastic and compelling and gripping stories), and yet, I think Cathy Park Hong was doing what she mentioned is what writers should strive to do: show, not tell. These stories showed you what being invisibilized and fighting the forces that convince you you are invisible FEELS like. And it was effective.
The writing was so beautiful and flowy, but punchy, not the kind where it is so flowery that it was hard to read. She could pack so much gut and feeling in so few words (she is after all a poet).
I can see how this book may not resonate as strongly with all Asian Americans, particularly those who aren’t East Asian, women, cisgender, or 1.5/second generation, and people who have other overlapping and intersecting identities that may make the idea of “minor feelings” less comprehensive or complex enough in holistically capturing their experiences. But Hong does address this, and I think more than anything she meant it as a starting point in thinking about our Asian American identity, and not an end all be all concept.
Thank you Goodreads for this advanced readers copy! I am still shocked that of the dozens of books for which I have entered Goodreads giveaways, the one I finally won is the book I feel like I have waited my whole life for.
There are so many moments in the book where I had never seen a particular emotional experience written down and speaking to me before: from watching your parents as a child being humiliated by white adults because of their struggles with English to the ways in which a post-2016 election world has triggered the trauma of racial bullying during childhood, or rather “the stress of its anticipation”. And yet it’s so much more complex than that. Throughout the whole book I kept taking photos of the pages as I read so that I could come back to those passages whenever. As a result my camera roll is just a bunch of snapshots of text.
There are certain chapters where I felt like it veered from the main thesis of the book (though still fantastic and compelling and gripping stories), and yet, I think Cathy Park Hong was doing what she mentioned is what writers should strive to do: show, not tell. These stories showed you what being invisibilized and fighting the forces that convince you you are invisible FEELS like. And it was effective.
The writing was so beautiful and flowy, but punchy, not the kind where it is so flowery that it was hard to read. She could pack so much gut and feeling in so few words (she is after all a poet).
I can see how this book may not resonate as strongly with all Asian Americans, particularly those who aren’t East Asian, women, cisgender, or 1.5/second generation, and people who have other overlapping and intersecting identities that may make the idea of “minor feelings” less comprehensive or complex enough in holistically capturing their experiences. But Hong does address this, and I think more than anything she meant it as a starting point in thinking about our Asian American identity, and not an end all be all concept.
Thank you Goodreads for this advanced readers copy! I am still shocked that of the dozens of books for which I have entered Goodreads giveaways, the one I finally won is the book I feel like I have waited my whole life for.
May 12, 2024
‘I have struggled to prove myself into existence’
Poet Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings is a brillant, revelatory memoir that sews personal experience together with social, class and racial discourse. Inclusive and broad sweeping, her accounts and insights on the Asian American experience stand strongly in solidarity with the struggles of other marginalized people making this one of the best books on racial struggles I’ve read these past few years. In a year when anti-Asian hate crimes have been increasingly frequent and deadly news, this book should become essential reading. The problem isn’t new and much attention is given in this book to the historical context of anti-Asian aggression (I learned here that the largest mass lynching in the US was of Chinese immigrants in 1871 L.A.) and the ways Asian American struggles have been silenced or diminished or how murders of women barely make the news, such as that of poet and artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha as Hong dedicates an entire chapter to. As a poet, her writing is absolutely incredible and she navigates complex ideas with such grace and eloquence as to make them fully understandable. I’ve never underlined as many passages in any book as I have with this one. Covering an incredible range of topics such as family, immigration, art movements and social justice, Cathy Park Hong’s memoir is a masterpiece that shines a spotlight into the troubled realities of American life.
‘minor feelings: the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.’
Central to the memoir is the concept of ‘Minor Feelings’, an term Hong says is indebted to theorists Sianne Ngai’s works on negative feelings. ‘Minor feelings occur when American optimism is enforced upon you,’ she writes, ‘which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance.’
Much has been written on the issues of having to argue for your own existence as a human for those not a member of the cis white hegemony and Hong delicately addresses the many forms of racial or LGBT struggles, misogynoir and other intersections alongside her cognitive disonance in a capitalist America that profits off oppression.’Racial trauma is not a competitive sport,’ she reminds us, and stands in solidarity with others, spending a lot of time discussing anti-Black racism as well in her discourse on white supremacy. To tell one’s truth as someone non-white, she says, is to be considered attacking whiteness. Our current sociopolitial discourse frequently revolves around the idea of some resisting telling the truths about history, or violently resisting inclusivity not only society but even in the language we use.
The idea that speaking truths of her own discomfort is an act of aggression, or to be told she simply is wrong about her own experience, is core to the concept of ‘minor feelings’. I have found that passage to be a very good key to decoding a lot of the absurd push-backs by white society.
‘Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it’s more than a chat about race. It’s ontological. It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it’s even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don’t exist.’
‘Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy,’ she says and addresses the ways in which the social orders and popular imaginations about Asian people are a major part of the cognitive dissonance because ‘how I am perceived inheres to who I am.’ She talks about how perceptions of Asians as rich, or always involved in tech, is problematic as ‘in reality, this is the most economically divided group in the country, a tenuous alliance of people with roots from South Asia to East Asia to the Pacific Islands,’ and falls into every social class.
This coincides with Hong’s reflections on being an immigrant from South Korea, growing up poor and watching white children mock her parents for their accents. This segues perfectly into her historical context on Asian Americans, such as how the immigration ban was only lifted in the 60s to make the US look better when Russia was quick to highlight the ills of America as part of a ideological marketing Cold War. However, this created the concept of the Model Minority:
One of the most informative sections of the book examines the ways that proximity to power does not mean power. She shows that the idea of assimilations means to flatten everyone into whiteness, and through stories of women of color who achieved high levels of employment only to immediately be abused and vilified as a form of white gatekeeping. ‘[A]ssimilation must not be mistaken for power, because once you have acquired power, you are exposed, and your model minority qualifications that helped you in the past can be used against you, since you are no longer invisible.’
While race is central to this memoir, it does cover a broad range of topics. There is an incredible section on the comedy of Richard Pryor and the context of identity which is explored through her own reflections on trying to be a stand-up comedian. As a poet myself, I personally loved her reflections on poetry and art, and her notions on language such as ‘othering’ English: ‘To other English is to make audible the imperial power sewn into the language, to slit English open so its dark histories slide out.’ She points out, however, that whitness is the nexus of power in artistic circles and any non-white writer is made to submit their identity in a way that is palatable to white folk in order to achieve anything. 'I've been raised and educated to please white people,' she writes, 'and this desire to please has become ingrained in my consciousness.' Which is another 'minor feeling', that your truth can only be accepted if it is presented in a way that pleases whiteness, never on its own terms. There is also a particularly effective criticism of Wes Anderson and, most specifically, Moonrise Kingdom as white nostalgia fantasy that erases racial discourse while being set in a time when this was everywhere in America. Calling Anderson someone who is a collector, she notes that what he specifically fails to collect speaks the loudest in his films.
‘I was so privileged I was acquiring the most useless graduate degree imaginable. ’
Perhaps my favorite section of the book, however, was her reflections of her artistic journey and time spent at Oberlin. She describes the fraught relationship with two friends, both Asian American women as well, and the whole story is wild and completely engrossing. I’d watch a film of this chapter. It really allows her to aim her fiery rhetoric at the art world too.
She makes you consider that Duchamp’s toilet piece wouldn’t have been a hip art moment had he not been a white man thereby making it safe art comparative to anything anyone not a white male creates due to the shielding of privilege, and, damn, shots fired that is something to think about and I am here for that kind of discourse.
Her story of Oberlin shows a culture very much threatened by strong, opinionated women of color, but also shows how toxic the male artist culture can be, such as the toxic sad, nice guy persona because ‘men who feign helplessness—which Oberlin specialized in—can be just as manipulative as alpha males because they use their incompetence to free themselves of menial tasks that are then saddled onto women’. She also looks at the ways fetishization of Asian women is problematic, pointing out that the often heard joke when a man would be into her that he ‘has a thing for Asians’. She discussed how this is dehumanizing as--particularly in a white culture that complains everyone else makes things about race--it dismisses any part of who she is beyond her race.
This book is absolutely incredible and one of the best discourses I’ve read. The prose is so unbelievably good that it is nearly impossible to put this book down and I’ve found myself referencing back to it frequently in the past few weeks. This is certainly a must-read.
5/5
'Artistic othering has to do with innovation, invention, and change, upon which cultural health and diversity depend and thrive. Social othering has to do with power, exclusion, and privilege, the centralizing of a noun against which otherness is measured, meted out, marginalized. My focus is the practice of the former by people subjected to the latter.'
Poet Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings is a brillant, revelatory memoir that sews personal experience together with social, class and racial discourse. Inclusive and broad sweeping, her accounts and insights on the Asian American experience stand strongly in solidarity with the struggles of other marginalized people making this one of the best books on racial struggles I’ve read these past few years. In a year when anti-Asian hate crimes have been increasingly frequent and deadly news, this book should become essential reading. The problem isn’t new and much attention is given in this book to the historical context of anti-Asian aggression (I learned here that the largest mass lynching in the US was of Chinese immigrants in 1871 L.A.) and the ways Asian American struggles have been silenced or diminished or how murders of women barely make the news, such as that of poet and artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha as Hong dedicates an entire chapter to. As a poet, her writing is absolutely incredible and she navigates complex ideas with such grace and eloquence as to make them fully understandable. I’ve never underlined as many passages in any book as I have with this one. Covering an incredible range of topics such as family, immigration, art movements and social justice, Cathy Park Hong’s memoir is a masterpiece that shines a spotlight into the troubled realities of American life.
‘minor feelings: the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.’
Central to the memoir is the concept of ‘Minor Feelings’, an term Hong says is indebted to theorists Sianne Ngai’s works on negative feelings. ‘Minor feelings occur when American optimism is enforced upon you,’ she writes, ‘which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance.’
’Minor feelings are also the emotions we are accused of having when we decide to be difficult—in other words, when we decide to be honest. When minor feelings are finally externalized, they are interpreted as hostile, ungrateful, jealous, depressing, and belligerent, affects ascribed to racialized behavior that whites consider out of line. Our feelings are overreactions because our lived experiences of structural inequity are not commensurate with their deluded reality.’
Much has been written on the issues of having to argue for your own existence as a human for those not a member of the cis white hegemony and Hong delicately addresses the many forms of racial or LGBT struggles, misogynoir and other intersections alongside her cognitive disonance in a capitalist America that profits off oppression.’Racial trauma is not a competitive sport,’ she reminds us, and stands in solidarity with others, spending a lot of time discussing anti-Black racism as well in her discourse on white supremacy. To tell one’s truth as someone non-white, she says, is to be considered attacking whiteness. Our current sociopolitial discourse frequently revolves around the idea of some resisting telling the truths about history, or violently resisting inclusivity not only society but even in the language we use.
‘Suddenly Americans feel self-conscious of their white identity and this self-consciousness misleads them into thinking their identity is under threat. In feeling wrong, they feel wronged. In being asked to be made aware of racial oppression, they feel oppressed.’
The idea that speaking truths of her own discomfort is an act of aggression, or to be told she simply is wrong about her own experience, is core to the concept of ‘minor feelings’. I have found that passage to be a very good key to decoding a lot of the absurd push-backs by white society.
‘Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it’s more than a chat about race. It’s ontological. It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it’s even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don’t exist.’
‘Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy,’ she says and addresses the ways in which the social orders and popular imaginations about Asian people are a major part of the cognitive dissonance because ‘how I am perceived inheres to who I am.’ She talks about how perceptions of Asians as rich, or always involved in tech, is problematic as ‘in reality, this is the most economically divided group in the country, a tenuous alliance of people with roots from South Asia to East Asia to the Pacific Islands,’ and falls into every social class.
’“When I hear the phrase “Asians are next in line to be white,” I replace the word “white” with “disappear.” Asians are next in line to disappear. We are reputed to be so accomplished, and so law-abiding, we will disappear into this country’s amnesiac fog. We will not be the power but become absorbed by power, not share the power of whites but be stooges to a white ideology that exploited our ancestors. This country insists that our racial identity is beside the point’
This coincides with Hong’s reflections on being an immigrant from South Korea, growing up poor and watching white children mock her parents for their accents. This segues perfectly into her historical context on Asian Americans, such as how the immigration ban was only lifted in the 60s to make the US look better when Russia was quick to highlight the ills of America as part of a ideological marketing Cold War. However, this created the concept of the Model Minority:
’Back then, only select professionals from Asia were granted visas to the United States: doctors, engineers, and mechanics. This screening process, by the way, is how the whole model minority quackery began: the U.S. government only allowed the most educated and highly trained Asians in and then took all the credit for their success. See! Anyone can live the American Dream! they’d say about a doctor who came into the country already a doctor.’
One of the most informative sections of the book examines the ways that proximity to power does not mean power. She shows that the idea of assimilations means to flatten everyone into whiteness, and through stories of women of color who achieved high levels of employment only to immediately be abused and vilified as a form of white gatekeeping. ‘[A]ssimilation must not be mistaken for power, because once you have acquired power, you are exposed, and your model minority qualifications that helped you in the past can be used against you, since you are no longer invisible.’
While race is central to this memoir, it does cover a broad range of topics. There is an incredible section on the comedy of Richard Pryor and the context of identity which is explored through her own reflections on trying to be a stand-up comedian. As a poet myself, I personally loved her reflections on poetry and art, and her notions on language such as ‘othering’ English: ‘To other English is to make audible the imperial power sewn into the language, to slit English open so its dark histories slide out.’ She points out, however, that whitness is the nexus of power in artistic circles and any non-white writer is made to submit their identity in a way that is palatable to white folk in order to achieve anything. 'I've been raised and educated to please white people,' she writes, 'and this desire to please has become ingrained in my consciousness.' Which is another 'minor feeling', that your truth can only be accepted if it is presented in a way that pleases whiteness, never on its own terms. There is also a particularly effective criticism of Wes Anderson and, most specifically, Moonrise Kingdom as white nostalgia fantasy that erases racial discourse while being set in a time when this was everywhere in America. Calling Anderson someone who is a collector, she notes that what he specifically fails to collect speaks the loudest in his films.
‘I was so privileged I was acquiring the most useless graduate degree imaginable. ’
Perhaps my favorite section of the book, however, was her reflections of her artistic journey and time spent at Oberlin. She describes the fraught relationship with two friends, both Asian American women as well, and the whole story is wild and completely engrossing. I’d watch a film of this chapter. It really allows her to aim her fiery rhetoric at the art world too.
‘The avant-garde genealogy could be tracked through stories of bad-boy white artists who “got away with it...The problem is that history has to recognize the artist’s transgressions as “art,” which is then dependent on the artist’s access to power. A female artist rarely “gets away with it.” A black artist rarely “gets away with it.”...The bad-boy artist can do whatever he wants because of who he is. Transgressive bad-boy art is, in fact, the most risk-averse, an endless loop of warmed-over stunts for an audience of one: the banker collector.’
She makes you consider that Duchamp’s toilet piece wouldn’t have been a hip art moment had he not been a white man thereby making it safe art comparative to anything anyone not a white male creates due to the shielding of privilege, and, damn, shots fired that is something to think about and I am here for that kind of discourse.
Her story of Oberlin shows a culture very much threatened by strong, opinionated women of color, but also shows how toxic the male artist culture can be, such as the toxic sad, nice guy persona because ‘men who feign helplessness—which Oberlin specialized in—can be just as manipulative as alpha males because they use their incompetence to free themselves of menial tasks that are then saddled onto women’. She also looks at the ways fetishization of Asian women is problematic, pointing out that the often heard joke when a man would be into her that he ‘has a thing for Asians’. She discussed how this is dehumanizing as--particularly in a white culture that complains everyone else makes things about race--it dismisses any part of who she is beyond her race.
This book is absolutely incredible and one of the best discourses I’ve read. The prose is so unbelievably good that it is nearly impossible to put this book down and I’ve found myself referencing back to it frequently in the past few weeks. This is certainly a must-read.
5/5
'Artistic othering has to do with innovation, invention, and change, upon which cultural health and diversity depend and thrive. Social othering has to do with power, exclusion, and privilege, the centralizing of a noun against which otherness is measured, meted out, marginalized. My focus is the practice of the former by people subjected to the latter.'
March 2, 2021
It takes reading this to realize two things:
1) There might not be any book quite like this one.
2) That's a sad thing.
Asian Americans have been underrepresented in both the increase in societal discussion of race, and in my literary attempts to respond to it. I've been attempting to remedy that this year in picking up more works by Asian authors, and I found this - half-memoir, half-antiracist manifesto with an acerbic, compulsively readable voice - to be an excellent way to start.
Sometimes our narrator is hard to like, an odd thing for a book of this kind, and the ethical questions surrounding how she sometimes presents those closest to her undermined the good intentions of this at times.
But overall, this was a brilliant and one of a kind book, one that made me Google and made me uncomfortable and made me learn and made me, well, reckon with a lot.
Those are all good things.
Bottom line: More of this!
-----------------
"It’s like being ghosted, I suppose, where, deprived of all social cues, I have no relational gauge for my own behavior. I ransack my mind for what I could have done, could have said. I stop trusting what I see, what I hear. My ego is in free fall while my superego is boundless, railing that my existence is not enough, never enough, so I become compulsive in my efforts to do better, be better, blindly following this country’s gospel of self-interest, proving my individual worth by expanding my net worth, until I vanish."
1) There might not be any book quite like this one.
2) That's a sad thing.
Asian Americans have been underrepresented in both the increase in societal discussion of race, and in my literary attempts to respond to it. I've been attempting to remedy that this year in picking up more works by Asian authors, and I found this - half-memoir, half-antiracist manifesto with an acerbic, compulsively readable voice - to be an excellent way to start.
Sometimes our narrator is hard to like, an odd thing for a book of this kind, and the ethical questions surrounding how she sometimes presents those closest to her undermined the good intentions of this at times.
But overall, this was a brilliant and one of a kind book, one that made me Google and made me uncomfortable and made me learn and made me, well, reckon with a lot.
Those are all good things.
Bottom line: More of this!
-----------------
"It’s like being ghosted, I suppose, where, deprived of all social cues, I have no relational gauge for my own behavior. I ransack my mind for what I could have done, could have said. I stop trusting what I see, what I hear. My ego is in free fall while my superego is boundless, railing that my existence is not enough, never enough, so I become compulsive in my efforts to do better, be better, blindly following this country’s gospel of self-interest, proving my individual worth by expanding my net worth, until I vanish."
March 7, 2020
2.5 stars
In the first essay of this collection, Cathy Park Hong describes searching for a Korean therapist, falsely believing that their shared Koreanness will lead to a kinship that will make therapy more productive for her. Hong does find a Korean therapist, but the therapist turns her down without saying why, and Hong begins a jilted lover routine before finally realizing she needs a non-Korean therapist so her depression can get examined objectively, and so she can stop thinking her depression is a result of culture. Picking up this book, I was like Hong and she was the Korean therapist - because we're both Korean, because we're Asian American, this series of essays about that Asian American experience has to apply to me because we're a part of this shared universal culture. Obviously, that's not true, and maybe it's my fault for having this dumb mindset going into this book, but I related to almost nothing Hong wrote about. I'm Korean; I'm Asian American, but Hong and I don't have any shared experiences (except maybe experiencing racism), and that did make this book a let down.
There are a couple of reasons why I can't relate to Hong's "Asian American Reckoning," first and foremost is probably because I'm an adoptee and didn't grow up in an Asian household or with Asian culture, and I am younger than her, so the world has changed in some ways. Despite how readily I can identify why Hong's experiences aren't universal, Hong writes in a way that generalizes Asian American experience and I didn't understand why.
It may be petty of me, but Hong's personality really turned me off. In the essays about her life in academia, Hong talks a lot about her arrogance - and this sense of self-importance really permeated a lot of her essays. Personally, this is a personality trait I dislike in anyone, and so being confronted by this personality trait made this reading experience more unpleasant. I also felt like she projected a lot of her identity issues onto others - the prime example being her experience at the nail salon being tended to by a teenage Vietnamese boy and Hong figuring their terse encounter was a result of both of them struggling with their self-hatred over being Asian. That essay made me scratch my head and wonder, "do I still hate myself for being Asian? I used to, when I was young and surrounded by racist non-Asian peers, but not anymore, I don't think." Maybe I still equate self-hatred with being young, so I thought this whole exchange was immature on Hong's part. I don't know. Maybe Hong would say I think this way because I still hate myself for being Asian.
I think I couldn't enjoy this book because my mindset and worldview just clash too much with Hong's, and I don't think her generalizations about Asian American experience characterize my experiences at all. I also came to the conclusion that I do not like essays on cultural criticism because I do not actually care about other people's hot takes.
In the first essay of this collection, Cathy Park Hong describes searching for a Korean therapist, falsely believing that their shared Koreanness will lead to a kinship that will make therapy more productive for her. Hong does find a Korean therapist, but the therapist turns her down without saying why, and Hong begins a jilted lover routine before finally realizing she needs a non-Korean therapist so her depression can get examined objectively, and so she can stop thinking her depression is a result of culture. Picking up this book, I was like Hong and she was the Korean therapist - because we're both Korean, because we're Asian American, this series of essays about that Asian American experience has to apply to me because we're a part of this shared universal culture. Obviously, that's not true, and maybe it's my fault for having this dumb mindset going into this book, but I related to almost nothing Hong wrote about. I'm Korean; I'm Asian American, but Hong and I don't have any shared experiences (except maybe experiencing racism), and that did make this book a let down.
There are a couple of reasons why I can't relate to Hong's "Asian American Reckoning," first and foremost is probably because I'm an adoptee and didn't grow up in an Asian household or with Asian culture, and I am younger than her, so the world has changed in some ways. Despite how readily I can identify why Hong's experiences aren't universal, Hong writes in a way that generalizes Asian American experience and I didn't understand why.
It may be petty of me, but Hong's personality really turned me off. In the essays about her life in academia, Hong talks a lot about her arrogance - and this sense of self-importance really permeated a lot of her essays. Personally, this is a personality trait I dislike in anyone, and so being confronted by this personality trait made this reading experience more unpleasant. I also felt like she projected a lot of her identity issues onto others - the prime example being her experience at the nail salon being tended to by a teenage Vietnamese boy and Hong figuring their terse encounter was a result of both of them struggling with their self-hatred over being Asian. That essay made me scratch my head and wonder, "do I still hate myself for being Asian? I used to, when I was young and surrounded by racist non-Asian peers, but not anymore, I don't think." Maybe I still equate self-hatred with being young, so I thought this whole exchange was immature on Hong's part. I don't know. Maybe Hong would say I think this way because I still hate myself for being Asian.
I think I couldn't enjoy this book because my mindset and worldview just clash too much with Hong's, and I don't think her generalizations about Asian American experience characterize my experiences at all. I also came to the conclusion that I do not like essays on cultural criticism because I do not actually care about other people's hot takes.
July 30, 2020
Devoured it - especially loved "An Education," about college friendships, and "Portrait of an Artist", a look at the horrendous killling of the great Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Cathy Park Hong is an excellent writer, and she provoked me in the best way - I thought, I adjusted, I saw the world differently
February 22, 2020
3.5 stars
Upon finishing Cathy Park Hong’s book of essays entitled Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning , I have to admit that I feel a bit conflicted. As an Asian American woman who is close in age to Hong and also grew up in the Los Angeles area like she did, there were many experiences she described in her essays that were absolutely familiar to me – for example, struggling with identity and belonging, being discriminated against due to my race, feeling like I oftentimes have to explain my heritage to people due to preconceived biases stemming from ignorance – the list goes on and on. Because of these shared experiences, I am able to understand wholeheartedly where Hong is coming from in her essays, even though culturally, we are from completely different backgrounds (Hong is Korean American, I’m Chinese American).
Overall, I found Hong’s essay collection to be an insightful read and very different from a lot of what is typically written about identity and race, especially from an Asian American perspective. The basic premise that binds all of Hong’s essays together is the concept of “minor feelings,” which Hong describes as “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.” In essence, it is the recognition that the negative emotions many Asian Americans (and other minority groups) have to deal with on a daily basis – feelings of shame, self-doubt, paranoia, suspicion, melancholy, etc. – can be traced back to America’s history of imperialism and colonization of Asian nations, a history that resulted in the creation of an inherently racist capitalistic system that will constantly be in conflict with the reality of our racial identity. Amongst other things, Hong writes about the “weight of indebtedness” that is a constant presence in her life as well as the lives of most immigrants regardless of background, with the context of this “indebtedness” correlating to a “gratitude” of sorts for being able to make a life for ourselves in this country. All of Hong’s essays are infused with a raw honesty that is at the same time perceptive and intelligent, but also easy to grasp and understand.
With all that said however, going back to why I felt conflicted after reading this book -- while there is definitely much truth to what Hong wrote and several aspects of it did actually resonate with me, there was also a large portion that I felt strayed too far from my own personal reality. I’m not an activist and in fact, most of the time, I try to steer as clear away from politics as I possibly can. I also don’t spend every waking moment of my life thinking about race, identity, and/or how I fit into this world as an Asian American – not because I don’t care or that I’m okay with being complacent about the racial circumstances in our society or whatnot – but rather, the practical realities of my life don’t afford me the “luxury” of constantly dwelling on identity politics and race. Don’t get me wrong though – this doesn’t mean that if I see an injustice occurring, that I stand idly by instead of speaking up and fighting…if the circumstances warrant it, I will do what is necessary and also within my power to do. But by the same token, it would also be “unjust” in my opinion to judge those who choose not to fight, who choose not to rock the boat, who choose the path of least resistant because they are content with living an ordinary, peaceful existence, even if it means being largely invisible and/or complacent from an identity perspective. Forcing oneself to see everything through the lens of race and identity is exhausting and for me personally, that has never been how I want to go about my life. At the end of the day, the most important thing, for me at least, is respecting each other’s viewpoints and choices, especially if they are different from our own.
While my viewpoint may differ from Hong’s in many areas, I respect the fact that these essays reflect her personal thoughts and experiences and she doesn’t try to impose those onto us as readers. I also appreciate Hong’s unflinching honesty as well as her willingness to so candidly voice her feelings. Regardless, we definitely need more books like this one, where we get to hear different voices tell their stories – it takes a lot of courage to do so and that alone is already deserving of respect! Definitely a recommended read, though of course with the understanding that this is Hong’s personal perspective as an Asian American living in the United States and by no means does it represent all Asian Americans.
Received ARC from One World (Random House) via NetGalley.
Upon finishing Cathy Park Hong’s book of essays entitled Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning , I have to admit that I feel a bit conflicted. As an Asian American woman who is close in age to Hong and also grew up in the Los Angeles area like she did, there were many experiences she described in her essays that were absolutely familiar to me – for example, struggling with identity and belonging, being discriminated against due to my race, feeling like I oftentimes have to explain my heritage to people due to preconceived biases stemming from ignorance – the list goes on and on. Because of these shared experiences, I am able to understand wholeheartedly where Hong is coming from in her essays, even though culturally, we are from completely different backgrounds (Hong is Korean American, I’m Chinese American).
Overall, I found Hong’s essay collection to be an insightful read and very different from a lot of what is typically written about identity and race, especially from an Asian American perspective. The basic premise that binds all of Hong’s essays together is the concept of “minor feelings,” which Hong describes as “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.” In essence, it is the recognition that the negative emotions many Asian Americans (and other minority groups) have to deal with on a daily basis – feelings of shame, self-doubt, paranoia, suspicion, melancholy, etc. – can be traced back to America’s history of imperialism and colonization of Asian nations, a history that resulted in the creation of an inherently racist capitalistic system that will constantly be in conflict with the reality of our racial identity. Amongst other things, Hong writes about the “weight of indebtedness” that is a constant presence in her life as well as the lives of most immigrants regardless of background, with the context of this “indebtedness” correlating to a “gratitude” of sorts for being able to make a life for ourselves in this country. All of Hong’s essays are infused with a raw honesty that is at the same time perceptive and intelligent, but also easy to grasp and understand.
With all that said however, going back to why I felt conflicted after reading this book -- while there is definitely much truth to what Hong wrote and several aspects of it did actually resonate with me, there was also a large portion that I felt strayed too far from my own personal reality. I’m not an activist and in fact, most of the time, I try to steer as clear away from politics as I possibly can. I also don’t spend every waking moment of my life thinking about race, identity, and/or how I fit into this world as an Asian American – not because I don’t care or that I’m okay with being complacent about the racial circumstances in our society or whatnot – but rather, the practical realities of my life don’t afford me the “luxury” of constantly dwelling on identity politics and race. Don’t get me wrong though – this doesn’t mean that if I see an injustice occurring, that I stand idly by instead of speaking up and fighting…if the circumstances warrant it, I will do what is necessary and also within my power to do. But by the same token, it would also be “unjust” in my opinion to judge those who choose not to fight, who choose not to rock the boat, who choose the path of least resistant because they are content with living an ordinary, peaceful existence, even if it means being largely invisible and/or complacent from an identity perspective. Forcing oneself to see everything through the lens of race and identity is exhausting and for me personally, that has never been how I want to go about my life. At the end of the day, the most important thing, for me at least, is respecting each other’s viewpoints and choices, especially if they are different from our own.
While my viewpoint may differ from Hong’s in many areas, I respect the fact that these essays reflect her personal thoughts and experiences and she doesn’t try to impose those onto us as readers. I also appreciate Hong’s unflinching honesty as well as her willingness to so candidly voice her feelings. Regardless, we definitely need more books like this one, where we get to hear different voices tell their stories – it takes a lot of courage to do so and that alone is already deserving of respect! Definitely a recommended read, though of course with the understanding that this is Hong’s personal perspective as an Asian American living in the United States and by no means does it represent all Asian Americans.
Received ARC from One World (Random House) via NetGalley.
October 8, 2020
Can I write honestly? Not only about how much I’ve been hurt but how I have hurt others? And can I do it without steeping myself in guilt, since guilt demands absolution and is therefore self-serving? In other words, can I apologize without demanding your forgiveness? Where do I begin?
Minor Feelings marks my 150th book of 2020, and it’s a good one for a milestone! These essays, conveyed through discursive fragments, are written with such clever, powerful eloquence. I adored its intersectional interweaving of history, poetry, theory, and experience—of Black and brown people, queer people, women of colour—alongside the eponymous Asian American reckoning.
I think if I’d read this a few years ago it would’ve blown me far and away. But as it stands today, Hong’s writing didn't catalyze any radical shifts in my thinking—though she does capture long-held thoughts and insecurities of mine with utmost precision and self-deprecating elegance. She has the ability to frame familiar issues in new and nuanced lights, and she wields this well. For example, Hong writes:
White boys will always be boys but black boys are ten times more likely to be tried as adults and sentenced to life without parole.
I’m ashamed to admit that up until now, I hadn't considered the fact that “boys will be boys”—beyond being infuriatingly sexist—is also racist as hell. What people mean when they say this is that WHITE boys will be boys—a justification for violence against women and people of colour by the Brock Turners and Kyle Rittenhouses of the world.
In another instance, Hong criticizes monolithic nonwhite stories in the publishing industry, imbuing the works of Jhumpa Lahiri with a decidedly critical slant. I studied Lahiri in a first-year English course and found her prose poignant, precise—and now I cannot help but see Hong’s criticisms in the short stories of Interpreter of Maladies: Lahiri holds her characters at a deliberate distance, allowing (predominantly white) readers to fill this vacuum of consciousness.
◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️
I also liked the moments in which Hong discusses feeling humbled and self-reflexive (which, I think, betrays more than a little of my own—self-flagellating—psyche). She assumes that a Vietnamese boy working at his family’s beauty salon shares her own Asian-hating self-abhorrence; she confronts white adjacency when watching Richard Pryor’s standup routines or writing about the L.A. riots of 1992. Hong is a phenomenal storyteller, and though the majority of the book was quite compelling, I found myself favouring her personal anecdotes over the more openly theoretical and critical components.
When I heard that Helen drank a bottle of whiskey and shaved off all her hair, I thought, This is it. She’s going to kill herself. But of course I underestimated Helen. Stronger than her will to die was her will to endure, especially when she thought she was being tested. This was the most Korean trait about her, her intense desire to die and survive at the same time, drives that didn’t cancel each other out but stood in confluence, which made her hell to be around, lashing out at Erin and me, saying how this was God’s design telling her she shouldn’t be an artist.
As several reviewers have mentioned, reading Hong’s interiority was a really affirming experience for me, a fellow member of the Asian diaspora. Hailing from Canada, I don’t identify exactly as Asian American, but I absolutely saw myself in the emotions and anecdotes she shares. Sometimes, I saw myself too clearly.
My shame is not cultural but political. It is being painfully aware of the power dynamic that pulls at the levers of social interactions and the cringing indignity of where I am in that order either as the afflicted—or as the afflicter. I am a dog cone of shame. I am a urinal cake of shame. This feeling eats away at my identity until my body is hollowed out and I am nothing but pure incinerating shame.
I seriously wish the academic readings I have to do for school read like Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings. If they did, I’d tear through my syllabi within a week instead of procrastinating until literally the hour before class.
Bottom line: Though not wholly radical for me personally, Minor Feelings is executed with razor-sharp lyricism: its nuances make it utterly, compulsively readable.
May 28, 2021
When I heard about this book and received an Advanced Readers' Copy, I was drawn to the title and the author. I read it in a span of a week, because I wanted to thoroughly absorb, understand and really read Cathy Park Hong's words in this collection of incredibly powerful and raw essays that spoke to me as an Asian American woman. I felt that for once, someone put into words what I have felt all along but I never really had the courage to speak out loud or acknowledge, and Hong explains why, beautifully in this book.
Some of the things that struck me in her book is Hong's mention of the "new racial awareness mediator" when you have to explain your race to someone, and that "Most Americans know nothing about Asian Americans. They think Chinese is synecdoche for Asians same way as Kleenex is for tissues". I definitely related to this when I am constantly explaining myself and my heritage to someone.
The essays come well researched as well and I loved learning about the history of our country's Manifest Destiny where Hong mentions on how three Chinese laborers died for every two miles of track for the transcontinental railroad, and at the completion of the railroad, not one photo was taken of a Chinese man in the celebratory photos.
Hong explores these minor feelings which she describes are the range of emotions mostly negative from everyday feelings of being slighted with racial undertones that others may conjure your own feelings as though made up or being overly sensitive.
Hong's mention of the 1992 LA Riots really resonated with me as I personally experienced this first hand being a witness to how my parents were so affected by this incident - having to come back to our business after looters have destroyed our family business. I didn't understand what was happening then but Hong was able to explain it well in the book.
I cannot recommend this book enough. Hong wrote this book with courage and all her heart - exposing her feelings with honesty and wit. Her writing is incredible and this is a true masterpiece. A dissertation to the Asian American experience. Required reading and a must read!
Brava! A standing ovation!
Some of the things that struck me in her book is Hong's mention of the "new racial awareness mediator" when you have to explain your race to someone, and that "Most Americans know nothing about Asian Americans. They think Chinese is synecdoche for Asians same way as Kleenex is for tissues". I definitely related to this when I am constantly explaining myself and my heritage to someone.
The essays come well researched as well and I loved learning about the history of our country's Manifest Destiny where Hong mentions on how three Chinese laborers died for every two miles of track for the transcontinental railroad, and at the completion of the railroad, not one photo was taken of a Chinese man in the celebratory photos.
Hong explores these minor feelings which she describes are the range of emotions mostly negative from everyday feelings of being slighted with racial undertones that others may conjure your own feelings as though made up or being overly sensitive.
Hong's mention of the 1992 LA Riots really resonated with me as I personally experienced this first hand being a witness to how my parents were so affected by this incident - having to come back to our business after looters have destroyed our family business. I didn't understand what was happening then but Hong was able to explain it well in the book.
I cannot recommend this book enough. Hong wrote this book with courage and all her heart - exposing her feelings with honesty and wit. Her writing is incredible and this is a true masterpiece. A dissertation to the Asian American experience. Required reading and a must read!
Brava! A standing ovation!
March 25, 2021
Minor Feelings is a timely collection of essays and part memoir by poet Cathy Park Hong. She boldly shares her intelligent, thought-provoking arguments and insightful thoughts on race and gender from her perspective as a Korean American woman. She uses her life's experiences, cultural criticism, history and events to give a voice to a wider Asian American experience. She explores her relationship to the English language, her feeling of shame and depression, her poetry and art making, her relationship with family and friends in a search to both uncover and speak the truth. The essays where she shared her female friendships did lose me and I didn’t it as interesting as the rest of the essays.
She packs in a lot here, and at times, it felt a little heavy-handed, and it took me a bit of work to understand and take it all in. I took pages of notes and then had to go back and reread a few parts to understand what she was saying, and I still feel a bit went over my head. However, I think I got out enough to see Cathy Park Hong has "some scores to settle first with this country, with how we have been scripted" and to consider the effects of racism against Asian Americans. To challenge those stereotyped scripted lies, white people use to dismiss "minor feelings" and spare ourselves from tears (white tears).
Minor feelings "the radicalized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one's perception of reality constantly questioned and dismissed."
Things Cathy Park Hong challenges that stood out for me
How Asian Americans are put in a stereotyped box created by a white-dominant society and argues that many see themselves through the lens of whiteness and believing the lies told about their own racial identity.
"The lie that Asians have it good is so insidious that even now as I write, I'm shadowed by the thought that I didn't have it bad compared to others. But racial trauma is not a competitive sport."
The fear of the white reign of terror felt by Asian Americans that "can be invisible and cumulative, chipping at one's worth until there is nothing left" When" minor feelings" are shown, they are "interpreted as hostile, ungrateful… belligerent." and make white people feel uncomfortable.
How those scripted thoughts "they have it good" and stereotypes add feelings of shame.
"The flip side of innocence is shame."
"It's a neurotic, self-inflicting wound."
White tears - "emotional fragility a white person experiences when they find racial stress so intolerable they become hypersensitive and defensive focusing the stress back to their own bruised ego" .
I highly recommend it, especially now to end "white innocence," check our “white tears” and see the pain of Asian American.
She packs in a lot here, and at times, it felt a little heavy-handed, and it took me a bit of work to understand and take it all in. I took pages of notes and then had to go back and reread a few parts to understand what she was saying, and I still feel a bit went over my head. However, I think I got out enough to see Cathy Park Hong has "some scores to settle first with this country, with how we have been scripted" and to consider the effects of racism against Asian Americans. To challenge those stereotyped scripted lies, white people use to dismiss "minor feelings" and spare ourselves from tears (white tears).
Minor feelings "the radicalized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one's perception of reality constantly questioned and dismissed."
Things Cathy Park Hong challenges that stood out for me
How Asian Americans are put in a stereotyped box created by a white-dominant society and argues that many see themselves through the lens of whiteness and believing the lies told about their own racial identity.
"The lie that Asians have it good is so insidious that even now as I write, I'm shadowed by the thought that I didn't have it bad compared to others. But racial trauma is not a competitive sport."
The fear of the white reign of terror felt by Asian Americans that "can be invisible and cumulative, chipping at one's worth until there is nothing left" When" minor feelings" are shown, they are "interpreted as hostile, ungrateful… belligerent." and make white people feel uncomfortable.
How those scripted thoughts "they have it good" and stereotypes add feelings of shame.
"The flip side of innocence is shame."
"It's a neurotic, self-inflicting wound."
White tears - "emotional fragility a white person experiences when they find racial stress so intolerable they become hypersensitive and defensive focusing the stress back to their own bruised ego" .
I highly recommend it, especially now to end "white innocence," check our “white tears” and see the pain of Asian American.
May 22, 2022
4.5 ☆
Minor Feelings is part memoir, part quest. Hong tried to determine - where does a American-born child of Korean immigrants fit in US society? From her familial experience, she sees herself as Korean American, and from her personal expression, she's a poet. Like others of her ethnicity who have been part of the post-1965 immigration wave, she's been shaped by the US' past military and political involvement in her parents' country of origin. In 1945, two clueless US military officers had arbitrarily divided Korea, exacting a painful and permanent toll as this separated Korean families. Hong felt that her experience differentiated her perspective from those of other "Asian Americans."
Through her essays, she repeatedly circled back to the issue of assuming the "Asian American" identity as Hong wrestled with this unwieldy nomenclature. Via her ontological investigation in her essays, Hong unpacked the multiple connotations of the label "Asian American."
Hong examined various Asian experiences in America. She touched upon the long history of persecution that Chinese migrants had encountered, of which the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the most blatant symbol. For those of Japanese decent, the internment during WWII was their bleakest period. Given the breadth and vastness of Asia, earth's largest continent, the "Asian American" moniker also includes people from India. These South Asian Americans are currently the most populous ethnicity of Asian ancestry. Many of them are instead choosing to self-identify as "brown" in response to how they are treated by Americans.
As a poet, Hong's essays in Minor Feelings are not linear but elliptical. She interwove memories plucked from different points in her lifetime alongside her parents' history in Korea. Hong wrote about major sources of influence in shaping her identity. She did not shirk from an honest appraisal during her self-reflection. She had a major epiphany about her writing after examining Richard Pryor's performances.
Minor Feelings raised many other topics, including female friendship, mental illness, and the art world. But the touchstone was racial identity. Hong didn't portray herself in the most flattering light, and her raw vulnerability imbued this book with power. A Korean American student in a Michigan university had wanted a hug from Hong because she had felt so alone and alienated; it is for her, Hong thought, that had written this book. Hong challenged all Asian Americans with a key existential concern.
Minor Feelings was published in February 2020, before the Covid-19 pandemic really began to take hold in the US and a certain POTUS spewed his racial hate. The repercussions are still rolling. As I write this review in May which is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, there is mobilization in order to stop the hate and violence targeting the AAPI community. But the reckoning process, I would say, is far from complete, even for Hong, who I felt had stayed silent on some issues.
"America's great and possibly catastrophic failure is its failure to imagine what it means to live together." - Jess Row
Minor Feelings is part memoir, part quest. Hong tried to determine - where does a American-born child of Korean immigrants fit in US society? From her familial experience, she sees herself as Korean American, and from her personal expression, she's a poet. Like others of her ethnicity who have been part of the post-1965 immigration wave, she's been shaped by the US' past military and political involvement in her parents' country of origin. In 1945, two clueless US military officers had arbitrarily divided Korea, exacting a painful and permanent toll as this separated Korean families. Hong felt that her experience differentiated her perspective from those of other "Asian Americans."
Through her essays, she repeatedly circled back to the issue of assuming the "Asian American" identity as Hong wrestled with this unwieldy nomenclature. Via her ontological investigation in her essays, Hong unpacked the multiple connotations of the label "Asian American."
Rather than "speaking about" a culture outside of your experience, the filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha suggests we "speak nearby" ... in other words, to leave the space of representation open so that, although you're very close to your subject, you're also not committed to speaking on their behalf, in their place or on top of them.
Hong examined various Asian experiences in America. She touched upon the long history of persecution that Chinese migrants had encountered, of which the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the most blatant symbol. For those of Japanese decent, the internment during WWII was their bleakest period. Given the breadth and vastness of Asia, earth's largest continent, the "Asian American" moniker also includes people from India. These South Asian Americans are currently the most populous ethnicity of Asian ancestry. Many of them are instead choosing to self-identify as "brown" in response to how they are treated by Americans.
Since the late sixties, when Asian American activists protested with the Black Panthers, there hasn't been a mass movement we can call our own. Will "we," a pronoun I use cautiously, solidify into a common collective, or will we remain splintered, so that some of us remain "foreign" or "brown" while others, through wealth or intermarriage, "pass" into whiteness?
As a poet, Hong's essays in Minor Feelings are not linear but elliptical. She interwove memories plucked from different points in her lifetime alongside her parents' history in Korea. Hong wrote about major sources of influence in shaping her identity. She did not shirk from an honest appraisal during her self-reflection. She had a major epiphany about her writing after examining Richard Pryor's performances.
I was so privileged I was acquiring the most useless graduate degree imaginable. ... the poet's audience is the [academic] institution. ... I've been raised and educated to please white people and this desire to please had become ingrained into my consciousness.
Minor Feelings raised many other topics, including female friendship, mental illness, and the art world. But the touchstone was racial identity. Hong didn't portray herself in the most flattering light, and her raw vulnerability imbued this book with power. A Korean American student in a Michigan university had wanted a hug from Hong because she had felt so alone and alienated; it is for her, Hong thought, that had written this book. Hong challenged all Asian Americans with a key existential concern.
I have to address whiteness because Asian Americans have yet to truly reckon with where we stand in the capitalist white supremacist hierarchy of this country. We are so far from reckoning with it that some Asians think that race has no bearing on their lives, that it doesn't "come up," which is as misguided as white people saying the same thing about themselves, not only because of discrimination we have faced but because of the entitlements we've been granted due to our racial identity.
Minor Feelings was published in February 2020, before the Covid-19 pandemic really began to take hold in the US and a certain POTUS spewed his racial hate. The repercussions are still rolling. As I write this review in May which is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, there is mobilization in order to stop the hate and violence targeting the AAPI community. But the reckoning process, I would say, is far from complete, even for Hong, who I felt had stayed silent on some issues.
November 21, 2021
Upon revisiting Minor Feelings a year and a half after first book clubbing it, I'm trying to understand: why did I think highly of this collection in the first place? Minor Feelings fails as "an Asian American reckoning." Rather, it is an incoherent collection tied together by a series of personal grievances grasping to pass as expedient political revelations.
As a poet, Hong deftly navigates the realm of affect, tapping into the anxious interiority and neuroses of a certain kind of second generation upwardly mobile East Asian audience. Minor Feelings went beyond tired, shallow lunchbox moment and basic model minority discourse, attempting to call forth serious topics such as intergenerational trauma and interracial minority conflict. It was a "raw, angry, and complicated portrait of being Asian in America" that many of us had been starved for, and it could not have come at a more perfect political moment.
The "minor feelings" that the book explores come from a place of racial dislocation within the American racial binary, a diagnosis that Hong ultimately arrives at. However, while these feelings are shared by many Asian diaspora in the West, they are far from universal.
The author tries to universalize her white-adjacent angst as an inherent feature of Asian American identity. However, it is irresponsible to imply that all Asian Americans are all inherently self-hating and miserable as a function of their racial identity. Hong's essays are rife with self-indulgence and projection, leading her to equate interpersonal discomfort as equivalent to evidence of racial trauma.
Aside from her unhinged harassment of the Korean American therapist after she declined to take her on as a client, she projects her identity anxieties onto the Vietnamese nail salon workers, concluding that they were clearly self-hating because of the terse way they treated her. I was also troubled by Hong's comments about Indian Americans: remarking on her exasperation with the call center "Indian accent," admonishing Jhumpa Lahiri to "behave better," claiming that Indian Americans self-identifying as "brown" have "downgraded" themselves in the racial hierarchy.
I found CPH's tendency to attach sweeping historical narratives of inherited racial trauma to her minor feelings to be dubious, if not outright callous. Intergeneration racial trauma is worth discussing, but Hong invokes such histories of racial trauma in a manner that cheapens these legacies, doing a disservice to historical victims in centering her own "minor feelings." Hong evokes graphic, gruesome images of mistreated Chinese railroad workers and prostitutes, but for what? She professes a voyeuristic desire to travel back in time to watch them suffer in lurid detail to compensate for her own inability to relate to that history as a Korean American.
Along the same lines, the graphic manner in which Hong describes Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's sexual assault and murder, as well as her college friend Helen's mental illness without her consent, was downright exploitative. What, and to whom, was she trying to prove, if not to shock a well-meaning white liberal audience into momentarily caring about violence against Asian women (secondary trauma to readers be damned)?
The point of bringing up intergeneration racial trauma should be to interrogate it, to break and heal from it. CPH's insistence on wallowing in it as a fixed trait of being Asian is self-defeating and unproductive. Why must we enact public accountings of racial pain and trauma to "prove" our POC-ness, our Asian-ness? What the hell are we doing when we take these real, horrific events that happened to other Asian people and make it all about microaggressions we've received?
In general, the minor feelings CPH describes are more akin to discomfort in response to microaggressions along with depressive logic stemming from racial dysphoria (as explored in Eng and Han's Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation). These minor feelings are nonetheless real and valid, but it is irresponsible and harmful to pass them off as equivalent to racial trauma. I don't completely blame the author though: the word "trauma" has become overused, a convenient label that stretches how clinical professionals such as Bessel van der Kolk would conceive of the term. We simply do not have the popular language or social infrastructure to talk about bad experiences and uncomfortable feelings that don't fall under the umbrella of trauma. Minor Feelings attempts to neatly label these racialized feelings, but simply mapping them to racial trauma is imprecise and lacking in rigor.
Her essay on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, with above caveats, remains the highlight of the collection. I enjoyed her interrogation of Richard Pryor, but it was remiss to not mention Pryor's staple standup routine that mocks a stuttering Chinese accent. It may have been a classic of his at the time, but it did not age well. Neither has this book in the time since I first read it.
P.S. Recommend reading E. Tammy Kim's retrospective on Minor Feelings in the London Review of Books.
As a poet, Hong deftly navigates the realm of affect, tapping into the anxious interiority and neuroses of a certain kind of second generation upwardly mobile East Asian audience. Minor Feelings went beyond tired, shallow lunchbox moment and basic model minority discourse, attempting to call forth serious topics such as intergenerational trauma and interracial minority conflict. It was a "raw, angry, and complicated portrait of being Asian in America" that many of us had been starved for, and it could not have come at a more perfect political moment.
The "minor feelings" that the book explores come from a place of racial dislocation within the American racial binary, a diagnosis that Hong ultimately arrives at. However, while these feelings are shared by many Asian diaspora in the West, they are far from universal.
The author tries to universalize her white-adjacent angst as an inherent feature of Asian American identity. However, it is irresponsible to imply that all Asian Americans are all inherently self-hating and miserable as a function of their racial identity. Hong's essays are rife with self-indulgence and projection, leading her to equate interpersonal discomfort as equivalent to evidence of racial trauma.
Aside from her unhinged harassment of the Korean American therapist after she declined to take her on as a client, she projects her identity anxieties onto the Vietnamese nail salon workers, concluding that they were clearly self-hating because of the terse way they treated her. I was also troubled by Hong's comments about Indian Americans: remarking on her exasperation with the call center "Indian accent," admonishing Jhumpa Lahiri to "behave better," claiming that Indian Americans self-identifying as "brown" have "downgraded" themselves in the racial hierarchy.
I found CPH's tendency to attach sweeping historical narratives of inherited racial trauma to her minor feelings to be dubious, if not outright callous. Intergeneration racial trauma is worth discussing, but Hong invokes such histories of racial trauma in a manner that cheapens these legacies, doing a disservice to historical victims in centering her own "minor feelings." Hong evokes graphic, gruesome images of mistreated Chinese railroad workers and prostitutes, but for what? She professes a voyeuristic desire to travel back in time to watch them suffer in lurid detail to compensate for her own inability to relate to that history as a Korean American.
Along the same lines, the graphic manner in which Hong describes Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's sexual assault and murder, as well as her college friend Helen's mental illness without her consent, was downright exploitative. What, and to whom, was she trying to prove, if not to shock a well-meaning white liberal audience into momentarily caring about violence against Asian women (secondary trauma to readers be damned)?
The point of bringing up intergeneration racial trauma should be to interrogate it, to break and heal from it. CPH's insistence on wallowing in it as a fixed trait of being Asian is self-defeating and unproductive. Why must we enact public accountings of racial pain and trauma to "prove" our POC-ness, our Asian-ness? What the hell are we doing when we take these real, horrific events that happened to other Asian people and make it all about microaggressions we've received?
In general, the minor feelings CPH describes are more akin to discomfort in response to microaggressions along with depressive logic stemming from racial dysphoria (as explored in Eng and Han's Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation). These minor feelings are nonetheless real and valid, but it is irresponsible and harmful to pass them off as equivalent to racial trauma. I don't completely blame the author though: the word "trauma" has become overused, a convenient label that stretches how clinical professionals such as Bessel van der Kolk would conceive of the term. We simply do not have the popular language or social infrastructure to talk about bad experiences and uncomfortable feelings that don't fall under the umbrella of trauma. Minor Feelings attempts to neatly label these racialized feelings, but simply mapping them to racial trauma is imprecise and lacking in rigor.
Her essay on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, with above caveats, remains the highlight of the collection. I enjoyed her interrogation of Richard Pryor, but it was remiss to not mention Pryor's staple standup routine that mocks a stuttering Chinese accent. It may have been a classic of his at the time, but it did not age well. Neither has this book in the time since I first read it.
P.S. Recommend reading E. Tammy Kim's retrospective on Minor Feelings in the London Review of Books.
February 29, 2020
Wow. All the things I felt growing up put into a book and hearing my voice is at once disturbing and freeing at the same time. These essays at once give you history along with how Asian Americans feel in this world. Not white. Not black. Denied by both. Accepted by none.
"Asians lack presence. Asians take up apologetic space."
I have SO many things I want to say here and there are SO MANY quotes within this book. I remember in a literature class in college, we were reading a book that had an Asian person as one of the characters and it touched on the tradition of taking off your shoes at the entry of the house. I remember one person saying Asians must be lazy and not wanting to clean and that's why they make people take off their shoes. Um, what? There will never be a house cleaner than my mom or my aunt's. I guarantee you that.
"Racial self hatred is seeing yourself the way whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy."
I went on a date in high school with a white guy and I remember him telling me he didn't believe in interracial relationships. I stood, dumbfounded because I'm a product of such relationship. But he said it wasn't the same because even though my mother is Korean, she still has white skin. No, she doesn't. Obviously we didn't go on another date but I was stunned. There is truth that is touched on within the book about how Asians are perceived as the "next white". No, we most definitely are not. While we are neither white, nor black, we are almost invisible at times - until it suits some other race's platform for us to be around.
"Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it's more than a chat about race. It's ontological. It's like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it's even trickier than that. Because the person has all of western history, politics, literature and mass culture on their side, proving you don't exist."
As being only half Korean, I dealt with not being able to fit in anywhere. In the US, I'm just another Asian girl.. in Korea, I'm that American with the bug bites all over my face (freckles). My cousin being full Korean had her own issues to deal with and we've discussed how our experiences were different because of that.
I could go on an on and on but really, if you're Asian American, read this and feel seen. If you're not, read this and understand a bit please.
"Asians lack presence. Asians take up apologetic space."
I have SO many things I want to say here and there are SO MANY quotes within this book. I remember in a literature class in college, we were reading a book that had an Asian person as one of the characters and it touched on the tradition of taking off your shoes at the entry of the house. I remember one person saying Asians must be lazy and not wanting to clean and that's why they make people take off their shoes. Um, what? There will never be a house cleaner than my mom or my aunt's. I guarantee you that.
"Racial self hatred is seeing yourself the way whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy."
I went on a date in high school with a white guy and I remember him telling me he didn't believe in interracial relationships. I stood, dumbfounded because I'm a product of such relationship. But he said it wasn't the same because even though my mother is Korean, she still has white skin. No, she doesn't. Obviously we didn't go on another date but I was stunned. There is truth that is touched on within the book about how Asians are perceived as the "next white". No, we most definitely are not. While we are neither white, nor black, we are almost invisible at times - until it suits some other race's platform for us to be around.
"Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it's more than a chat about race. It's ontological. It's like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it's even trickier than that. Because the person has all of western history, politics, literature and mass culture on their side, proving you don't exist."
As being only half Korean, I dealt with not being able to fit in anywhere. In the US, I'm just another Asian girl.. in Korea, I'm that American with the bug bites all over my face (freckles). My cousin being full Korean had her own issues to deal with and we've discussed how our experiences were different because of that.
I could go on an on and on but really, if you're Asian American, read this and feel seen. If you're not, read this and understand a bit please.
September 8, 2020
In this collection of essays Cathy Park Hong examines her racial identity as an Asian, cis female, professional, atheist living in the United States. Immediately she's struck by how minor and non-urgent this feels. Compared to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and the shooting of Jacob Blake her specific griefs can feel small. She wrestles with this and the presumptuousness to think she could invoke any sort of Asian we.
These minor feelings in response to micro-aggressions are easily dismissed. We're the model minority, the next in line to be white as she puts it. Asians don't take up space, we're still relatively non-existent in the political and cultural discourse. We're an emergency relief valve when things get too hot to resort to anti-black sentiment.
But Hong, tired of writing for an imagined white audience of academia, poetry prize panels and fellowships, decides to lay it bare, acknowledging her racial identity and playing it personal - giving some credit to Richard Pryor and stand-up comedy in the process.
Hits and misses in this collection of essays but when it hits, it packs a punch. Acknowledging her Asian-American identity and exploring what it means to inhabit that space in this moment - this is what it feels like to be seen in such a specific way. It's not something that I'm used to. That alone is a revelation and worthy of a read and I'm sure subsequent re-reads.
These minor feelings in response to micro-aggressions are easily dismissed. We're the model minority, the next in line to be white as she puts it. Asians don't take up space, we're still relatively non-existent in the political and cultural discourse. We're an emergency relief valve when things get too hot to resort to anti-black sentiment.
But Hong, tired of writing for an imagined white audience of academia, poetry prize panels and fellowships, decides to lay it bare, acknowledging her racial identity and playing it personal - giving some credit to Richard Pryor and stand-up comedy in the process.
Hits and misses in this collection of essays but when it hits, it packs a punch. Acknowledging her Asian-American identity and exploring what it means to inhabit that space in this moment - this is what it feels like to be seen in such a specific way. It's not something that I'm used to. That alone is a revelation and worthy of a read and I'm sure subsequent re-reads.
April 14, 2020
I found this book at times riveting and personal (in that the author shares some private moments that completely captivate the reader), and at other times distancing and more like a historical text (neither of those are bad things). It balances this place of analysis and memoir unlike most non-fiction I read which leans to either side but doesn't find that middle ground.
She reckons with her identity as an Asian American while exploring larger themes of unity, art, friendship, mental health and much more. Her poeticism comes through in the beautiful writing which I admired.
My only issue with this was its organization. I didn't feel like there was a through-line to follow from chapter to chapter. It didn't have the traditional memoir structure of a linear timeline or reflection on one certain period of her life to keep me grounded. For me it felt more like seven good essays packaged together but they did not always connect or lead logically into the next topic.
It's not the best essay collection I've ever read but I'd still recommend it to those interested. And I'm interested to read her poetry next!
She reckons with her identity as an Asian American while exploring larger themes of unity, art, friendship, mental health and much more. Her poeticism comes through in the beautiful writing which I admired.
My only issue with this was its organization. I didn't feel like there was a through-line to follow from chapter to chapter. It didn't have the traditional memoir structure of a linear timeline or reflection on one certain period of her life to keep me grounded. For me it felt more like seven good essays packaged together but they did not always connect or lead logically into the next topic.
It's not the best essay collection I've ever read but I'd still recommend it to those interested. And I'm interested to read her poetry next!
April 26, 2024
Cathy Park Hong x Aga Zano (x Tajfuny) - to się musiało udać.
December 9, 2021
I need more! This beautiful and thought provoking book opens up more experiences that have to do with being a minority in the US. Being a mexican from the border, my experience has been very different, but I feel somehow just connected with everything Cathy Park Hong says. And she opens up so generously about her life, I just have to say, read this book, be more human.
November 1, 2020
When I first started reading this book, I felt that the writing came from a place of such rage and made such sweeping generalizations that I found hard to relate to. Having taken a more traditionally Asian route (engineering) and having grown up Chinese in a diverse part of Canada, I've been fortunate enough to avoid many of Hong's experiences of racism especially in the writing industry in America. As I continued reading, I found myself identifying and sympathizing with some of her experiences and behavioral tendencies surrounding issues involving lack of self-confidence and individualism that Hong argues are engraved in Asian Americans by way of an inherently white capitalistic system that invalidates their struggles.
I am reminded of "Quiet" by Susan Cain where in a chapter on cultural differences, Cain argues that humility and introverted-ness are rewarded in Asian culture and Asian school systems, thereby rationalizing the disproportionate amount of introverts observed in Asian Americans. At the time, this idea that quietness/reservedness was a trait built in to Asian culture resonated with me. While Cain's argument may be true, the cultural context that exists in Asian countries is not present in America, rendering her justification incomplete. Reading Hong's collection of essays, I've come to realize that Cain's argument completely overlooked the oppression experienced by Asians in America - the "ni-hao's", "chink" remarks, looks of pity when speaking with an accent, and and other subtle "minor feelings" that ultimately strip a minority of their sense of belonging and perpetuate a desire to be as small and as hidden as possible to avoid humiliation. I appreciated the short history lessons scattered throughout the essays to compliment Hong's argument that Asian Americans are made to feel like outsiders through the country's history of discriminating immigration policies and imperialism.
The essays were deeply personal but I wouldn't go so far as to generalize the minor feelings she describes to all Asian Americans, especially those outside of East Asia. The lack of formality in her personal essays was very effective in exposing her personality. Hong harbors a lot of salt (for lack of a better word) towards many of her personal experiences and various people in her life. I, too, identify as a salty person, which made her all the more relatable, but in the context of the essays and the book, was admittedly quite off-putting. I think she projected her own personal feelings, opinions, and experiences onto others a little too much.
I've always been iffy about collections of essays because they tend to get rambly and lack cohesion - this unfortunately wasn't much different. Despite its shortcomings, this book is the only one I've come across addressing Asian American oppression in such a direct, raw, and authentic way. Overall, its existence as a book feels very necessary and was a very thought-provoking read.
I am reminded of "Quiet" by Susan Cain where in a chapter on cultural differences, Cain argues that humility and introverted-ness are rewarded in Asian culture and Asian school systems, thereby rationalizing the disproportionate amount of introverts observed in Asian Americans. At the time, this idea that quietness/reservedness was a trait built in to Asian culture resonated with me. While Cain's argument may be true, the cultural context that exists in Asian countries is not present in America, rendering her justification incomplete. Reading Hong's collection of essays, I've come to realize that Cain's argument completely overlooked the oppression experienced by Asians in America - the "ni-hao's", "chink" remarks, looks of pity when speaking with an accent, and and other subtle "minor feelings" that ultimately strip a minority of their sense of belonging and perpetuate a desire to be as small and as hidden as possible to avoid humiliation. I appreciated the short history lessons scattered throughout the essays to compliment Hong's argument that Asian Americans are made to feel like outsiders through the country's history of discriminating immigration policies and imperialism.
The essays were deeply personal but I wouldn't go so far as to generalize the minor feelings she describes to all Asian Americans, especially those outside of East Asia. The lack of formality in her personal essays was very effective in exposing her personality. Hong harbors a lot of salt (for lack of a better word) towards many of her personal experiences and various people in her life. I, too, identify as a salty person, which made her all the more relatable, but in the context of the essays and the book, was admittedly quite off-putting. I think she projected her own personal feelings, opinions, and experiences onto others a little too much.
I've always been iffy about collections of essays because they tend to get rambly and lack cohesion - this unfortunately wasn't much different. Despite its shortcomings, this book is the only one I've come across addressing Asian American oppression in such a direct, raw, and authentic way. Overall, its existence as a book feels very necessary and was a very thought-provoking read.
August 14, 2023
3.5 stars
I loved and related to what Hong wrote about Asian Americans and invisibility. She had insightful and clear commentary on the Asian American assimilation into and contribution to American capitalism, as well as how whiteness is insidious and turns us against ourselves while also ensuring that we don’t even know the “self” we are betraying. I also appreciated the specific connections of Asian American identity to writing, from the idea of having to write about trauma and being Asian (in a way that is palatable to white people, of course) to the question of if it is possible to write an Asian American narrative without discussing the mother. The critique she makes of Jhumpa Lahiri’s writing (and I’m sure many others’, unfortunately) holding the characters at a distance to allow the white reader to fill in the space themselves will stick with me for a while. And I know that some readers were put off by Hong’s somewhat unlikeable personality, but it somehow made the reading experience more interesting for me.
I do wish this collection had centered on more general topics, since I preferred those essays more than her more personal stories. In particular, I really did not enjoy an essay about her friends that took up too much of the book for me—it did not fit in, and it was boring and so intimate that it felt borderline invasive. I also expected this book to be a lot more impactful than it actually was, and I think this is because a lot of what this book discusses are things I already know, understand, and have internalized in some way. She was able to put into words some things that I hadn’t read about before, but for the most part, I was left mainly nodding my head but not feeling like it had radically changed my way of thinking. That is not a flaw of the book itself; I think this would be a great book to pick up for anyone newer to Asian American studies or racial theory in general, especially with how easily readable and comprehensible it is.
“I want to destroy the universal. I want to rip it down. It is not whiteness but our contained condition that is universal, because we are the global majority.”
I loved and related to what Hong wrote about Asian Americans and invisibility. She had insightful and clear commentary on the Asian American assimilation into and contribution to American capitalism, as well as how whiteness is insidious and turns us against ourselves while also ensuring that we don’t even know the “self” we are betraying. I also appreciated the specific connections of Asian American identity to writing, from the idea of having to write about trauma and being Asian (in a way that is palatable to white people, of course) to the question of if it is possible to write an Asian American narrative without discussing the mother. The critique she makes of Jhumpa Lahiri’s writing (and I’m sure many others’, unfortunately) holding the characters at a distance to allow the white reader to fill in the space themselves will stick with me for a while. And I know that some readers were put off by Hong’s somewhat unlikeable personality, but it somehow made the reading experience more interesting for me.
I do wish this collection had centered on more general topics, since I preferred those essays more than her more personal stories. In particular, I really did not enjoy an essay about her friends that took up too much of the book for me—it did not fit in, and it was boring and so intimate that it felt borderline invasive. I also expected this book to be a lot more impactful than it actually was, and I think this is because a lot of what this book discusses are things I already know, understand, and have internalized in some way. She was able to put into words some things that I hadn’t read about before, but for the most part, I was left mainly nodding my head but not feeling like it had radically changed my way of thinking. That is not a flaw of the book itself; I think this would be a great book to pick up for anyone newer to Asian American studies or racial theory in general, especially with how easily readable and comprehensible it is.
May 29, 2020
There were a few essays in here that were really good, but most of them were pretty disjointed and over-written,
August 30, 2020
Asians occupy a weird spot in the American mind. They don't really know what to do with us. By definition, anybody from the the continent of Asia or whose family is from Asia is technically Asian, but the many Americans are not going to see it that way. When these people say 'Asian', they really mean Chinese, Japanese and Korean people — East Asians, if you will. Indians, on the other hand, are just Indians, a separate group on their own, though not to be confused with Native Americans. The real tricky bit comes in when there is an Indian, a Bangladeshi, a Pakistani and a Japanese sitting next to each other. Telling the average American that these are all Asians is going to really mess with their minds — now imagine adding Malays to the mix. That will really screw with their heads.
Anyway, between the chants of 'Black Lives Matter!' on one side and 'All Lives Matter' on the other, I really wanted to get a perspective of Asian Americans amid all of this. Cathy Park Hong's book, then, came to me at an opportune time. I am going to paraphrase here, but Park Hong describes Asians as being not white enough to enjoy the common privileges, though also not black enough to have massive social reforms/movements to call their own. They exist this strange limbo in the American society, simply because, like I said, they don't really know what to do with us. And because we are overlooked at times, for good or for ill, transgressions against us, too, tend not to be taken seriously. I wanted to read about micro-aggression, specifically micro-aggressions committed by everyday folks against Asians in America. Park Hong's book, at least on the surface, promises just that.
What I got, though, is a series of disjointed essays with certain passages and anecdotes that I could relate to, but mostly went completely over my head. Maybe it is because Park Hong is a poet first and an essayist second, or maybe it's because she's neck-deep in the art world, but chunks of her writing in this book don't resonate with me at all.
Then again, some might argue that it is because I am not an Asian in America, and I am from one of three Chinese-majority countries in the world (Mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore), I am unable to put myself in the shoes of the micro-aggressions that Asian Americans have to deal with on a daily basis. However, I literally just finished Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, and that book resonated so much with me on a deeper level, despite the fact that 1) I am not black 2) I am not from Ghana 3) I do not have a family history of slavery as far as I know.
I think a good author pulls you into the narrative no matter how different the background/setting/character is. Minor Feelings, on the other hand, just feels like angry, unfiltered diary entries that feels... not processed or thought through. The result is an essay collection that's incoherent and unable to reach out to a wider audience such as myself.
Anyway, between the chants of 'Black Lives Matter!' on one side and 'All Lives Matter' on the other, I really wanted to get a perspective of Asian Americans amid all of this. Cathy Park Hong's book, then, came to me at an opportune time. I am going to paraphrase here, but Park Hong describes Asians as being not white enough to enjoy the common privileges, though also not black enough to have massive social reforms/movements to call their own. They exist this strange limbo in the American society, simply because, like I said, they don't really know what to do with us. And because we are overlooked at times, for good or for ill, transgressions against us, too, tend not to be taken seriously. I wanted to read about micro-aggression, specifically micro-aggressions committed by everyday folks against Asians in America. Park Hong's book, at least on the surface, promises just that.
What I got, though, is a series of disjointed essays with certain passages and anecdotes that I could relate to, but mostly went completely over my head. Maybe it is because Park Hong is a poet first and an essayist second, or maybe it's because she's neck-deep in the art world, but chunks of her writing in this book don't resonate with me at all.
Then again, some might argue that it is because I am not an Asian in America, and I am from one of three Chinese-majority countries in the world (Mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore), I am unable to put myself in the shoes of the micro-aggressions that Asian Americans have to deal with on a daily basis. However, I literally just finished Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, and that book resonated so much with me on a deeper level, despite the fact that 1) I am not black 2) I am not from Ghana 3) I do not have a family history of slavery as far as I know.
I think a good author pulls you into the narrative no matter how different the background/setting/character is. Minor Feelings, on the other hand, just feels like angry, unfiltered diary entries that feels... not processed or thought through. The result is an essay collection that's incoherent and unable to reach out to a wider audience such as myself.
May 22, 2021
I really appreciated Hong's perspective in this collection of essays. She examines the "minor" racism experienced by Asian Americans through the lense of her own life. Her writing is a mesh of cultural criticism, personal reflections and thoughtful analysis.
"I began this book as a dare to myself. I still clung to a prejudice that writing about my racial identity was minor and non-urgent, a defense that I had to pry open to see what throbbed beneath it. "
"I began this book as a dare to myself. I still clung to a prejudice that writing about my racial identity was minor and non-urgent, a defense that I had to pry open to see what throbbed beneath it. "
April 25, 2021
Cathy Park Hong’s essays mingle thoughts on art and writing with blisteringly-honest accounts of her own experiences. She explores ideas about race and racism juxtaposing key moments from America’s history - war in Korea and Vietnam, Japanese internment camps in WW2 America, Asian American civil rights groups - with the history of her family. Then she moves between reflections on her life as a Korean American to the condition of Asian Americans as a broader group - all entangled in the similarly confusing, challenging, lived reality that is contemporary, capitalist America. The outcome’s intense, powerful, meditative, often unexpectedly entertaining or provocative, sometimes spilling over into an outpouring of controlled, but justifiably deep-rooted, anger. She’s sometimes harsh in her judgements of her friends, of her parents' generation but neither does she spare herself, as she attempts to trace the complexities of the legacies of American capitalism, its imperialist underpinnings and its insidious imprint on communities like the one she grew up in and ultimately on individuals like her. She examines her routes out of her predicament primarily through her work with language and poetry, the myriad forms of resistance that draw on her growing political awareness, and the writers and artists who inspired her. I thought this was an incredibly compelling collection, hard to put down, not just because of the many, many passages I found instantly recognisable and relatable - sudden encounters with casual racism, the duplicitous “white innocence” that enables wilful ignorance and denial - but because of the way Park Hong almost effortlessly blends personal and political into a magnificently accessible, insightful whole. Are there instances where her gaze falters or is less incisive? Undoubtedly but she still captured and held my attention throughout.
March 7, 2020
The blurb: "Asian Americans inhabit a purgatorial status: neither white enough nor black enough" is extremely bad and a good reflection of the book.
December 11, 2020
Excellent essay collection!! New (to me) perspective. Really enjoyed this!!
4.5 Stars
Read on kindle
4.5 Stars
Read on kindle
June 30, 2020
I read this book in 2 days! It's very compelling and accessible.
This is one of the most clear-eyed and insightful discussions about being Asian American and about race in America. (No, never a hyphen in "Asian American" when talking about the people! Hong doesn't use a hyphen either! The NYT "style" is wrong.)
She is straight-forward and vulnerable in equal measure. Hong conveys insights and analyses that are sharp and provocative. And it is extremely personal, unapologetically personal.
As importantly, these “creative fiction” essays are beautifully written; a poet’s touch graces the words, the images and the sounds. I especially found her critique of American literature and the publishing industry enlightening as it posed difficult questions about my awareness as a reader and consumer.
Her take on race, gender, sexuality, etc. is precise and unflinching. Hong handles psychological phenomenon and cultural factors with surgical skills and argues her point with clarity and passion.
Some quotes:
Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it's more than a chat about race. It's ontological. It's like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why our reality is distinct from their reality. Except it's even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving you don't exist. (18)
¶ For the last twenty years, until recently, Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories were the temple of ethnic fiction that supports the fantasy of Asian American immigrants as compliant strivers. The fault lies not in Lahiri herself, who I think is an absorbing storyteller, but in the publishing industry that used to position her books as the “single story” on immigrant life. Using enough comforting ethnic props to satisfy the white reader’s taste for cultural difference, Lahiri write in a flat, restrained prose, where her characters never think or feel but just do: “I opened a bank account, rented a post office box, and bought a plastic bowl and a spoon at Woolworth’s.” Her characters are always understated and avoid any interiority, which, as Jane Hu writes in The New Yorker, has become a fairly typical literary affect that signals Asianness (in fact, more East Asianness than South Asianness) to readers....
¶ Much of Lahiri's fiction complies with the MFA orthodoxy of show, don't tell, which allows the reader to step into the character's pain without having to, as Susan Sontag writes, locate their own privilege "on the same map" as the character's suffering. Because the character's inner thoughts are evacuated, the reader can get behind the cockpit of the character's consciousness and cinematically see what the character sees without being disturbed by incessant editorializing. (48-49)
¶ The ethnic literary project has always been a humanist project in which nonwhite writers must prove they are human beings who feel pain. Will there be a future where, I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain? I don’t think, therefore I am—I hurt, therefore I am. Therefore, my books are graded on a pain scale. If it’s 2, maybe it’s worth telling my story. If it’s 10, my book will be a bestseller.
¶ Of course, writers of color must tell their stories of racial trauma, but for too long our stories have been shaped by the white imagination. Publishers expect authors to privatize their trauma: an exceptional family or historic tragedy test the character before they arrive at a revelation of self-affirmation. In many Asian American novels, writers set trauma in a distant mother country or within an insular Asian family to ensure that their pain is not reproof against American imperial geopolitics or domestic racism; the outlying forces that cause their pain—Asian Patriarchal Father, White People Back Then—are remote enough to allow everyone, including the reader off the hook.
¶ At the start of his career, the poet and novelist Ocean Vuong was the living embodiment of human resilience…In multiple interviews, Vuong is asked to rehearse his shattering experiences of refugee impoverishment and the salvation he found in poetry. He assures the public that he has not only sung but lived through his libretto of hurt so that his poetry and biography have become welded into a single American myth of individual triumph. (49-51)
¶ Where do I, as a Korean American woman, situate myself when (Richard) Pryor sets up these black/white binaries? One minute I'm laughing at white people, and feeling the rage of black oppression as if it's my own, until the next bit, when I realize I'm allied with white people....(53)
¶ In Pryor, I saw someone channel what I call minor feelings: the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed. Minor feelings arrive, for instance upon hearing a slight, knowing it’s racial, and being told, Oh, that’s all in your head. A now-classic book that explores minor feelings is Claudine Rakine’s Citizen. After hearing a racist remark, the speaker asks herself, What did you say? She saw what she saw, she heard what she heard, but after her reality has been belittled so many times, she begins to doubt her very own senses. Such disfiguring of senses engenders the minor feelings of paranoia, shame, irritation, and melancholy.
¶ Minor feelings are not often featured in contemporary American literature because these emotions do not conform to the archetypical narrative that highlights survival and self-determination. Unlike the organizing principle of a bildungsroman, minor feelings are not generated from major change but from lack of change, in particular, structural racial and economic change. Rather than using racial trauma as a dramatic stage of individual growth, the literature of minor feelings explores the trauma of a racist capitalist system that keeps the individual in place. It’s play tennis “while black” and dining out “while black.” It’s hearing the same verdict when testimony after testimony has been given. After every print run, Rankine adds another name of a black citizen murdered by a cop to the already long list of names at the end of the book. This act acknowledges both a remembering and the fact that change is not happening fast enough. (55-56)
¶ Minor feelings occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance. You are told, “Things are so much better,” while you think, “Things are the same.” You are told, “Asian Americans are so successful,” while you feel like a failure…
¶ Minor feelings are also the emotions we are accused of having when we decide to be difficult—in order words, when we decide to be honest. When minor feelings are finally externalized, they are interpreted as hostile, ungrateful, jealous, depressing, and belligerent, affects ascribed to racialized behavior that whites consider out of line. Our feelings are overreactions because our lived experiences of structural inequity are not commensurate with their deluded reality. (56-57)
¶ Writing about race is a polemic, in that we must confront the white capitalist infrastructure that has erased us, but also a lyric, in that our inner consciousness is knotted with contradictions. As much as I protest against the easy narrative of overcoming, I have to believe we will overcome racial inequities; as much has I’m exasperated by sentimental immigrant stories of suffering, I think Korean are some of the most traumatized people I know. As I try to move beyond the stereotypes to express my inner consciousness, it’s clear that how I am perceived inheres to who I am. To truthfully write about race, I almost have to write against narrative because the racialized mind is, as Frantz Fanon wrote, an “infernal circle.” (64)
¶ One characteristic of racism is that children are treated like adults and adults are treated like children. Watching a parent debased like a child is the deepest shame. I cannot count the number of times I have seen my parents condescended to or mocked by white adults. This was so customary that when my mother had any encounter with a white adult, I was always hypervigilant, ready to mediate or pull her away. To grow up in Asian America is to witness the humiliation of authority figures like your parents and to learn not to depend on them: they cannot protect you.
¶ The indignity of being Asian in this country has been underreported. We have been cowed by the lie that we have it good. We keep our heads down and work hard, believing that our diligence will only make us disappear. By not speaking up, we perpetuate the myth that our shame is caused by our repressive culture and the country we fled, whereas America has given us nothing but opportunity. The lie that Asians have it good is so insidious that even now as I write, I’m shadowed by doubt that I didn’t have it bad compared to others. But racist trauma is not a competitive sport. The problem is not that my childhood was exceptionally traumatic but that it was in fact rather typical. (77-78)
¶ It’s also human nature to repel shame by penalizing and refusing continued engagement with the source of their shame. Most white Americans live in segregated environment, which, as Alcoff writes, “protects and insulates them from race-based stress.” As a result, any proximity to minorities—seeing Latinx families move into their town, watching news clips of black protesters chanting “I can’t breathe” in Grand Central Station—sparks intolerable discomfort. Suddenly Americans feel self-conscious of their white identity and this self-consciousness misleads them into thinking their identity is under threat. In feeling wrong, they feel wronged. In being asked to be made aware of white tears, white tears turn dangerous. White tears, as Damon Young explains in The Root, are why defeated Southerners refused to accept the freedom of black slaves and formed the Ku Klux Klan. And white tears are why 63% of white men and 53% of white women elected a malignant man-child as their leader. For to be aware of history, they would be forced to be held accountable, and rather than face that shame, they’d rather, by any means necessary, maintain their innocence. 88
¶ Whether our families come from Guatemala, Afghanistan, or South Korea, the immigrants since 1965 shared histories that extend beyond this nation, to our countries of origin, where our lineage has been decimated by Western imperialism, war, and dictatorships orchestrated or supported by the United States. In our efforts to belong in America, we act grateful, as if we’ve been given a second change at life. But our shared root is not the opportunity this nation has given us but how the capitalist accumulation of white supremacy has enriched itself off the blood of our countries. We cannot forget this. 89-90
¶ Rather than “speaking about” a culture outside your experience, the filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha suggests we “speak nearby.” In an interview for Artform, Trinh says:
¶ Myung Mi Kim was the first poet who said I didn’t need to sound like a white poet nor did I have to “translate” my experiences so that they sounded accessible to a white audience. No other mentor afterwards was so emphatic about this idea as her. Illegibility was a political act. In the past, I was encouraged to write about my Asian experience but I still had to write it in a way a white poet would—so instead of copying a white poet, I was copying a white poet copying their idea of an Asian poet. When Kim first read my poems, she said, “Why are you imitating someone else’s speech patterns?” I said, “I don’t know.” She said, “What is your earliest memory of language? Write a poem from that memory.”
¶ A friend and poet, Eugene Ostashevsky, said that “if you knock English enough, it becomes a door to another language.” This is what Myung Mi Kim first taught me: to knock at English, using what I considered my ineloquence—my bilingualism, my childhood struggles with English—and fuse that into my own collection of lexemes that came closest to my conflicted consciousness. 139-140
¶ From invisible girlhood, the Asian American woman will blossom in a fetish object. When she is at last visible—at last desired—she realizes much to her chagrin that this desire for her is treated like a perversion. This is most obvious in porn, where our murky desires are coldly isolated into categories in which white is the default and every other race is sexual aberration. But the Asian woman is reminded every day that her attractiveness is a perversion, in instances ranging from skin-crawling Tinder messages (“I’d like to try my first Asian woman”) to microaggressions from white friends. I recall a white friend pointing out to me that Jewish men only dated Asian women because they wanted to find women who were the opposite of their pushy mothers. Implied in this tone-deaf complaint was her assumption that Asian women are docile and compliant. Well-meaning friends never fail to warn me, if a white guy was attracted to me, that he probably had an Asian fetish. The result: I distrusted my desirousness. My sexuality was a pathology. If anyone non-Asian liked me, there was something wrong with him. 174-175
This is one of the most clear-eyed and insightful discussions about being Asian American and about race in America. (No, never a hyphen in "Asian American" when talking about the people! Hong doesn't use a hyphen either! The NYT "style" is wrong.)
She is straight-forward and vulnerable in equal measure. Hong conveys insights and analyses that are sharp and provocative. And it is extremely personal, unapologetically personal.
As importantly, these “creative fiction” essays are beautifully written; a poet’s touch graces the words, the images and the sounds. I especially found her critique of American literature and the publishing industry enlightening as it posed difficult questions about my awareness as a reader and consumer.
Her take on race, gender, sexuality, etc. is precise and unflinching. Hong handles psychological phenomenon and cultural factors with surgical skills and argues her point with clarity and passion.
Some quotes:
Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it's more than a chat about race. It's ontological. It's like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why our reality is distinct from their reality. Except it's even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving you don't exist. (18)
¶ For the last twenty years, until recently, Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories were the temple of ethnic fiction that supports the fantasy of Asian American immigrants as compliant strivers. The fault lies not in Lahiri herself, who I think is an absorbing storyteller, but in the publishing industry that used to position her books as the “single story” on immigrant life. Using enough comforting ethnic props to satisfy the white reader’s taste for cultural difference, Lahiri write in a flat, restrained prose, where her characters never think or feel but just do: “I opened a bank account, rented a post office box, and bought a plastic bowl and a spoon at Woolworth’s.” Her characters are always understated and avoid any interiority, which, as Jane Hu writes in The New Yorker, has become a fairly typical literary affect that signals Asianness (in fact, more East Asianness than South Asianness) to readers....
¶ Much of Lahiri's fiction complies with the MFA orthodoxy of show, don't tell, which allows the reader to step into the character's pain without having to, as Susan Sontag writes, locate their own privilege "on the same map" as the character's suffering. Because the character's inner thoughts are evacuated, the reader can get behind the cockpit of the character's consciousness and cinematically see what the character sees without being disturbed by incessant editorializing. (48-49)
¶ The ethnic literary project has always been a humanist project in which nonwhite writers must prove they are human beings who feel pain. Will there be a future where, I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain? I don’t think, therefore I am—I hurt, therefore I am. Therefore, my books are graded on a pain scale. If it’s 2, maybe it’s worth telling my story. If it’s 10, my book will be a bestseller.
¶ Of course, writers of color must tell their stories of racial trauma, but for too long our stories have been shaped by the white imagination. Publishers expect authors to privatize their trauma: an exceptional family or historic tragedy test the character before they arrive at a revelation of self-affirmation. In many Asian American novels, writers set trauma in a distant mother country or within an insular Asian family to ensure that their pain is not reproof against American imperial geopolitics or domestic racism; the outlying forces that cause their pain—Asian Patriarchal Father, White People Back Then—are remote enough to allow everyone, including the reader off the hook.
¶ At the start of his career, the poet and novelist Ocean Vuong was the living embodiment of human resilience…In multiple interviews, Vuong is asked to rehearse his shattering experiences of refugee impoverishment and the salvation he found in poetry. He assures the public that he has not only sung but lived through his libretto of hurt so that his poetry and biography have become welded into a single American myth of individual triumph. (49-51)
¶ Where do I, as a Korean American woman, situate myself when (Richard) Pryor sets up these black/white binaries? One minute I'm laughing at white people, and feeling the rage of black oppression as if it's my own, until the next bit, when I realize I'm allied with white people....(53)
¶ In Pryor, I saw someone channel what I call minor feelings: the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed. Minor feelings arrive, for instance upon hearing a slight, knowing it’s racial, and being told, Oh, that’s all in your head. A now-classic book that explores minor feelings is Claudine Rakine’s Citizen. After hearing a racist remark, the speaker asks herself, What did you say? She saw what she saw, she heard what she heard, but after her reality has been belittled so many times, she begins to doubt her very own senses. Such disfiguring of senses engenders the minor feelings of paranoia, shame, irritation, and melancholy.
¶ Minor feelings are not often featured in contemporary American literature because these emotions do not conform to the archetypical narrative that highlights survival and self-determination. Unlike the organizing principle of a bildungsroman, minor feelings are not generated from major change but from lack of change, in particular, structural racial and economic change. Rather than using racial trauma as a dramatic stage of individual growth, the literature of minor feelings explores the trauma of a racist capitalist system that keeps the individual in place. It’s play tennis “while black” and dining out “while black.” It’s hearing the same verdict when testimony after testimony has been given. After every print run, Rankine adds another name of a black citizen murdered by a cop to the already long list of names at the end of the book. This act acknowledges both a remembering and the fact that change is not happening fast enough. (55-56)
¶ Minor feelings occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance. You are told, “Things are so much better,” while you think, “Things are the same.” You are told, “Asian Americans are so successful,” while you feel like a failure…
¶ Minor feelings are also the emotions we are accused of having when we decide to be difficult—in order words, when we decide to be honest. When minor feelings are finally externalized, they are interpreted as hostile, ungrateful, jealous, depressing, and belligerent, affects ascribed to racialized behavior that whites consider out of line. Our feelings are overreactions because our lived experiences of structural inequity are not commensurate with their deluded reality. (56-57)
¶ Writing about race is a polemic, in that we must confront the white capitalist infrastructure that has erased us, but also a lyric, in that our inner consciousness is knotted with contradictions. As much as I protest against the easy narrative of overcoming, I have to believe we will overcome racial inequities; as much has I’m exasperated by sentimental immigrant stories of suffering, I think Korean are some of the most traumatized people I know. As I try to move beyond the stereotypes to express my inner consciousness, it’s clear that how I am perceived inheres to who I am. To truthfully write about race, I almost have to write against narrative because the racialized mind is, as Frantz Fanon wrote, an “infernal circle.” (64)
¶ One characteristic of racism is that children are treated like adults and adults are treated like children. Watching a parent debased like a child is the deepest shame. I cannot count the number of times I have seen my parents condescended to or mocked by white adults. This was so customary that when my mother had any encounter with a white adult, I was always hypervigilant, ready to mediate or pull her away. To grow up in Asian America is to witness the humiliation of authority figures like your parents and to learn not to depend on them: they cannot protect you.
¶ The indignity of being Asian in this country has been underreported. We have been cowed by the lie that we have it good. We keep our heads down and work hard, believing that our diligence will only make us disappear. By not speaking up, we perpetuate the myth that our shame is caused by our repressive culture and the country we fled, whereas America has given us nothing but opportunity. The lie that Asians have it good is so insidious that even now as I write, I’m shadowed by doubt that I didn’t have it bad compared to others. But racist trauma is not a competitive sport. The problem is not that my childhood was exceptionally traumatic but that it was in fact rather typical. (77-78)
¶ It’s also human nature to repel shame by penalizing and refusing continued engagement with the source of their shame. Most white Americans live in segregated environment, which, as Alcoff writes, “protects and insulates them from race-based stress.” As a result, any proximity to minorities—seeing Latinx families move into their town, watching news clips of black protesters chanting “I can’t breathe” in Grand Central Station—sparks intolerable discomfort. Suddenly Americans feel self-conscious of their white identity and this self-consciousness misleads them into thinking their identity is under threat. In feeling wrong, they feel wronged. In being asked to be made aware of white tears, white tears turn dangerous. White tears, as Damon Young explains in The Root, are why defeated Southerners refused to accept the freedom of black slaves and formed the Ku Klux Klan. And white tears are why 63% of white men and 53% of white women elected a malignant man-child as their leader. For to be aware of history, they would be forced to be held accountable, and rather than face that shame, they’d rather, by any means necessary, maintain their innocence. 88
¶ Whether our families come from Guatemala, Afghanistan, or South Korea, the immigrants since 1965 shared histories that extend beyond this nation, to our countries of origin, where our lineage has been decimated by Western imperialism, war, and dictatorships orchestrated or supported by the United States. In our efforts to belong in America, we act grateful, as if we’ve been given a second change at life. But our shared root is not the opportunity this nation has given us but how the capitalist accumulation of white supremacy has enriched itself off the blood of our countries. We cannot forget this. 89-90
¶ Rather than “speaking about” a culture outside your experience, the filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha suggests we “speak nearby.” In an interview for Artform, Trinh says:
When you decide to speak nearby, rather than speak about, the first thing you need to do is to acknowledge the possible gap between you and those who populate your film: in other words, to leave the space of representation open so that, although you’re very close to your subject, you’re also committed to not speaking on their behalf, in their place or on top of them. You can only speak nearby, in proximity (whether they other is physically present or absent), which requires that you deliberately suspend meaning, preventing it from merely closing and hence leaving a gap in the formation process. This allows the other person to come in and fill that space as they wish…(102-103)
¶ Myung Mi Kim was the first poet who said I didn’t need to sound like a white poet nor did I have to “translate” my experiences so that they sounded accessible to a white audience. No other mentor afterwards was so emphatic about this idea as her. Illegibility was a political act. In the past, I was encouraged to write about my Asian experience but I still had to write it in a way a white poet would—so instead of copying a white poet, I was copying a white poet copying their idea of an Asian poet. When Kim first read my poems, she said, “Why are you imitating someone else’s speech patterns?” I said, “I don’t know.” She said, “What is your earliest memory of language? Write a poem from that memory.”
¶ A friend and poet, Eugene Ostashevsky, said that “if you knock English enough, it becomes a door to another language.” This is what Myung Mi Kim first taught me: to knock at English, using what I considered my ineloquence—my bilingualism, my childhood struggles with English—and fuse that into my own collection of lexemes that came closest to my conflicted consciousness. 139-140
¶ From invisible girlhood, the Asian American woman will blossom in a fetish object. When she is at last visible—at last desired—she realizes much to her chagrin that this desire for her is treated like a perversion. This is most obvious in porn, where our murky desires are coldly isolated into categories in which white is the default and every other race is sexual aberration. But the Asian woman is reminded every day that her attractiveness is a perversion, in instances ranging from skin-crawling Tinder messages (“I’d like to try my first Asian woman”) to microaggressions from white friends. I recall a white friend pointing out to me that Jewish men only dated Asian women because they wanted to find women who were the opposite of their pushy mothers. Implied in this tone-deaf complaint was her assumption that Asian women are docile and compliant. Well-meaning friends never fail to warn me, if a white guy was attracted to me, that he probably had an Asian fetish. The result: I distrusted my desirousness. My sexuality was a pathology. If anyone non-Asian liked me, there was something wrong with him. 174-175
February 25, 2020
QUOTES:
There was no reason for me to be depressed. But anytime I was happy, the fear of an awful catastrophe would follow, so I made myself feel awful to preempt the catastrophe from hitting.
For as long as I could remember, I have struggled to prove myself into existence.
In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status: not white enough nor black enough; distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we're being used by whites to keep the black man down.
Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy.
I was so privileged I was acquiring the most useless graduate degree imaginable.
Back then, only select professionals from Asia were granted visas to the United States: doctors, engineers, and mechanics. This screening process, by the way, is how the whole model minority quackery began: the US government only allowed the most educated and highly trained Asians in and then took all the credit for their success. See! Anyone can live the American Dream! they'd say about a doctor who came into the country already a doctor.
Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it's more than a chat about race. It's ontological. It's like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it's even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don't exist.
Most Americans know nothing about Asian Americans. They think Chinese is synecdoche for Asians the way Kleenex is for tissues.
What if my cannibalizing ego is not a racial phenomenon but my own damn problem?
Everyone around me behaved badly, but somehow I was the biggest problem.
The privilege of assimilation is that you are left alone. But assimilation must not be mistaken for power, because once you have acquired power, you are exposed, and your model minority qualifications that helped you in the past can be used against you, since you are no longer invisible.
But because we know we won't be believed, we don't quite believe it ourselves. So we blame ourselves for being too outspoken or too proud or too ambitious.
My ego is in free fall while my superego is boundless, railing that my existence is not enough, never enough, so I become compulsive in my efforts to do better, be better, blindly following this country's gospel of self-interest, proving my individual worth by expanding my net worth, until I vanish.
Writers of color had to behave better in their poetry and in person; they had to always act gracious and grateful so that white people would be comfortable enough to sympathize with their racialized experiences.
The ethnic literary project has always been a humanist project in which nonwhite writers must prove they are human beings who feel pain. Will there be a future where I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain?
Minor feelings: the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one's perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.
Minor feelings occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance. You are told, "Things are so much better," while you think, Things are the same. You are told, "Asian Americans are so successful," while you feel like a failure. This optimism sets up false expectations that increase these feelings of dysphoria.
Our feelings are overreactions because our lived experiences of structural inequity are not commensurate with their deluded reality.
We put our minor feelings aside to protect white feelings.
Reading to my daughter, I see my own youth drifting away while hers attaches firmly to this country. I am not passing down happy memories of my own so much as I am staging happy memories for her. My parents did the same for me, but their idea of providing was vastly more fundamental: food, shelter, school.
Innocence is both a privilege and a cognitive handicap, a sheltered unknowingness that, once protracted into adulthood, hardens into entitlement.
One characteristic of racism is that children are treated like adults and adults are treated like children.
But racial trauma is not a competitive sport. The problem is not that my childhood was exceptionally traumatic but that it was in fact rather typical.
What's harder to report is not the incident itself but the stress of its anticipation. The white reign of terror can be invisible and cumulative, chipping away at one's worth until there's nothing left but self-loathing.
Of course, "white tears" does not refer to all pain but to the particular emotional fragility a white person experiences when they find racial stress so intolerable they become hypersensitive and defensive, focusing the stress back to their own bruised ego.
...I could live only for myself, for my immediate family, following the expectations of my parents, whose survivor instincts align with this country's neoliberal ethos, which is to get ahead at the expense of anyone else while burying the shame that binds us.
For to be aware of history, they would be forced to be held accountable, and rather than face that shame, they'd rather, by any means necessary, maintain their innocence.
As a poet, I have always treated English as a weapon in a power struggle, wielding it against those who are more powerful than me. But I falter when using English as an expression of love. I've always been so protective of making sure that my family's inside sounds didn't leak outside that I don't know how to allow the outside in. I was raised by a kind of love that was so inextricable from pain that I fear that once I air that love, it will oxidize to betrayal, as if I'm turning English against my family.
But a side effect of this justified rage has been a "stay in your lane" politics in which artists and writers are asked to speak only from their personal ethnic experiences. Such a politics not only assumes racial identity is pure--while ignoring the messy lived realities in which racial groups overlap--but reduces racial identity to intellectual property... The soul of innovation thrives on cross-cultural inspiration. If we are restricted to our lanes, culture will die.
The curse of anyone nonwhite is that you are so busy arguing what you're not that you never arrive at what you are.
This was the most Korean trait about her, her intense desire to die and survive at the same time, drives that didn't cancel each other out but stood in confluence.
The problem with silence is that it can't speak up and say why it's silent. And so silence collects, becomes amplified, takes on a life outside our intentions, in that silence can get misread as indifference, or avoidance, or even shame, and eventually this silence passes over into forgetting.
I don't want to care that no one else cares because I don't want to be left stranded in my rage.
Capitalism as retribution for racism. But isn't that how whiteness recruits us? Whether it's through retribution or indebtedness, who are we when we become better than them in a system that destroyed us?
If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering. The indebted Asian American is therefore the ideal neoliberal subject.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha writes, "Arrest the machine that purports to employ democracy but rather causes the successive refraction of her." The most damaging legacy of the West has been its power to decide who our enemies are, turning us not only against our own people, like North and South Korea, but turning me against myself.
At what cost do I have this life?
I'd rather be indebted than be the kind of white man who thinks the world owes him, because to live an ethical life is to be held accountable to history.
Whiteness has already recruited us to become their junior partners in genocidal wars; conscripted us to be antiblack and colorist; to work for, and even head, corporations that scythe off immigrant jobs like heads of wheat.
Unless we are read as Muslim or trans, Asian Americans are fortunate not to live under hard surveillance, but we live under a softer panopticon, so subtle that it's internalized, in that we monitor ourselves, which characterizes our conditional existence. Even if we've been here for four generations, our status here remains conditional; belonging is always promised and just out of reach so that we behave, whether it's the insatiable acquisition of material belongings or belonging as a peace of mind where we are absorbed into mainstream society. If the Asian American consciousness must be emancipated, we must free ourselves of our conditional existence.
There was no reason for me to be depressed. But anytime I was happy, the fear of an awful catastrophe would follow, so I made myself feel awful to preempt the catastrophe from hitting.
For as long as I could remember, I have struggled to prove myself into existence.
In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status: not white enough nor black enough; distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we're being used by whites to keep the black man down.
Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy.
I was so privileged I was acquiring the most useless graduate degree imaginable.
Back then, only select professionals from Asia were granted visas to the United States: doctors, engineers, and mechanics. This screening process, by the way, is how the whole model minority quackery began: the US government only allowed the most educated and highly trained Asians in and then took all the credit for their success. See! Anyone can live the American Dream! they'd say about a doctor who came into the country already a doctor.
Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it's more than a chat about race. It's ontological. It's like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it's even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don't exist.
Most Americans know nothing about Asian Americans. They think Chinese is synecdoche for Asians the way Kleenex is for tissues.
What if my cannibalizing ego is not a racial phenomenon but my own damn problem?
Everyone around me behaved badly, but somehow I was the biggest problem.
The privilege of assimilation is that you are left alone. But assimilation must not be mistaken for power, because once you have acquired power, you are exposed, and your model minority qualifications that helped you in the past can be used against you, since you are no longer invisible.
But because we know we won't be believed, we don't quite believe it ourselves. So we blame ourselves for being too outspoken or too proud or too ambitious.
My ego is in free fall while my superego is boundless, railing that my existence is not enough, never enough, so I become compulsive in my efforts to do better, be better, blindly following this country's gospel of self-interest, proving my individual worth by expanding my net worth, until I vanish.
Writers of color had to behave better in their poetry and in person; they had to always act gracious and grateful so that white people would be comfortable enough to sympathize with their racialized experiences.
The ethnic literary project has always been a humanist project in which nonwhite writers must prove they are human beings who feel pain. Will there be a future where I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain?
Minor feelings: the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one's perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.
Minor feelings occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance. You are told, "Things are so much better," while you think, Things are the same. You are told, "Asian Americans are so successful," while you feel like a failure. This optimism sets up false expectations that increase these feelings of dysphoria.
Our feelings are overreactions because our lived experiences of structural inequity are not commensurate with their deluded reality.
We put our minor feelings aside to protect white feelings.
Reading to my daughter, I see my own youth drifting away while hers attaches firmly to this country. I am not passing down happy memories of my own so much as I am staging happy memories for her. My parents did the same for me, but their idea of providing was vastly more fundamental: food, shelter, school.
Innocence is both a privilege and a cognitive handicap, a sheltered unknowingness that, once protracted into adulthood, hardens into entitlement.
One characteristic of racism is that children are treated like adults and adults are treated like children.
But racial trauma is not a competitive sport. The problem is not that my childhood was exceptionally traumatic but that it was in fact rather typical.
What's harder to report is not the incident itself but the stress of its anticipation. The white reign of terror can be invisible and cumulative, chipping away at one's worth until there's nothing left but self-loathing.
Of course, "white tears" does not refer to all pain but to the particular emotional fragility a white person experiences when they find racial stress so intolerable they become hypersensitive and defensive, focusing the stress back to their own bruised ego.
...I could live only for myself, for my immediate family, following the expectations of my parents, whose survivor instincts align with this country's neoliberal ethos, which is to get ahead at the expense of anyone else while burying the shame that binds us.
For to be aware of history, they would be forced to be held accountable, and rather than face that shame, they'd rather, by any means necessary, maintain their innocence.
As a poet, I have always treated English as a weapon in a power struggle, wielding it against those who are more powerful than me. But I falter when using English as an expression of love. I've always been so protective of making sure that my family's inside sounds didn't leak outside that I don't know how to allow the outside in. I was raised by a kind of love that was so inextricable from pain that I fear that once I air that love, it will oxidize to betrayal, as if I'm turning English against my family.
But a side effect of this justified rage has been a "stay in your lane" politics in which artists and writers are asked to speak only from their personal ethnic experiences. Such a politics not only assumes racial identity is pure--while ignoring the messy lived realities in which racial groups overlap--but reduces racial identity to intellectual property... The soul of innovation thrives on cross-cultural inspiration. If we are restricted to our lanes, culture will die.
The curse of anyone nonwhite is that you are so busy arguing what you're not that you never arrive at what you are.
This was the most Korean trait about her, her intense desire to die and survive at the same time, drives that didn't cancel each other out but stood in confluence.
The problem with silence is that it can't speak up and say why it's silent. And so silence collects, becomes amplified, takes on a life outside our intentions, in that silence can get misread as indifference, or avoidance, or even shame, and eventually this silence passes over into forgetting.
I don't want to care that no one else cares because I don't want to be left stranded in my rage.
Capitalism as retribution for racism. But isn't that how whiteness recruits us? Whether it's through retribution or indebtedness, who are we when we become better than them in a system that destroyed us?
If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering. The indebted Asian American is therefore the ideal neoliberal subject.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha writes, "Arrest the machine that purports to employ democracy but rather causes the successive refraction of her." The most damaging legacy of the West has been its power to decide who our enemies are, turning us not only against our own people, like North and South Korea, but turning me against myself.
At what cost do I have this life?
I'd rather be indebted than be the kind of white man who thinks the world owes him, because to live an ethical life is to be held accountable to history.
Whiteness has already recruited us to become their junior partners in genocidal wars; conscripted us to be antiblack and colorist; to work for, and even head, corporations that scythe off immigrant jobs like heads of wheat.
Unless we are read as Muslim or trans, Asian Americans are fortunate not to live under hard surveillance, but we live under a softer panopticon, so subtle that it's internalized, in that we monitor ourselves, which characterizes our conditional existence. Even if we've been here for four generations, our status here remains conditional; belonging is always promised and just out of reach so that we behave, whether it's the insatiable acquisition of material belongings or belonging as a peace of mind where we are absorbed into mainstream society. If the Asian American consciousness must be emancipated, we must free ourselves of our conditional existence.
May 3, 2021
Where do I even start? I only got through 75% of this book...that’s all I could take and even that was a chore. After reading the essay about her two friends in college, I couldn’t take any more narcissistic, jealous, and self-serving ramblings any longer.
I don’t know what the purpose of this book is and I don’t think Cathy Park Hong does either. The first half of the book was so chaotic. It was filled with stream of conscious ramblings and irrelevant stories that had no purpose. Anytime Hong did try to make some kind of point, she would quote an intellectual/academic to make it for her. Hong made no points of her own and brought nothing new to the table. It’s unsurprising because she proved throughout her essays that she is incredibly unoriginal. For example, she admits that when she started doing stand-up comedy she would use other comedians’ jokes. “At first, I recited jokes by other comedians, which violates a cardinal rule in comedy, but I convinced myself I was pulling a conceptual stunt rather than actually doing stand-up.” She justifies her plagiarism as some kind of artistic choice. Throughout the book she shows through her actions that she is inadequate and unoriginal and needs to take from others to compensate. She is envious of her friends and blames them for being the reason she quit art in college because they were better than her at it. This book itself seems to be a violation of personal privacy that her friends had requested, yet she again justifies her actions because she’s a writer. “It’s unrealistic for me as a writer not to take from other people’s lives. I’m not some friendless orphan. My life overlaps with the lives of others so I have no choice but to take from others, which is why writers are full of care, but also—if they’re at all truthful—a bit cruel.” The fact of the matter is, Hong’s life is too boring to write about so she has to write about her suicidal friend instead and exploit her suffering to make her seem interesting. “Helen always accused me of feeling this way, and though I denied it, she was right: I did harbor those thoughts. I felt buried by our friendship, and maybe, just maybe, if she did kill herself, it wouldn’t be so bad. I would feel unburied. I would feel free.” “I would have had a happier four years in college had I never met Helen. But I wouldn’t have been the writer I am today.” Again, this is about her college friend who made several cries for help but was ignored by Hong who felt inconvenienced by it all. Needless to say, I wouldn’t want to be friends with Hong.
Hong’s self-hatred is pungent throughout the book. It’s clear to me that she hates being Asian and assumes every other Asian feels the same. She even admits this in her story about getting her nails done at the Vietnamese salon and berating the young Vietnamese boy who worked there. In the first half of the book, I found her attempts at intersectionality to actually do the opposite of what she was trying to do. I think she was trying to unify minority communities but instead she just drew a deeper line. I felt like she had an underlying prejudice for dark skinned people, particularly the Black community and Southeast Asians. She claims that “racial trauma is not a competitive sport” but she brings up things like how Asian-Americans actually experienced the largest mass lynching in American history. It made me question why she was bringing that up when we all know which group of people died the most from lynchings. She also made comments about Indians at times that I found suspect.
“I am embarrassed to say that I sometimes act like that white woman. When I phone in my order to a Chinese restaurant and the cashier doesn’t understand me, I repeat myself impatiently. When I call Time Warner and reach a representative with an Indian accent, I am already exasperated because I heard that Indian call centers barely train their employees.”
When complaining about how the publishing industry favors white authors and only picks one Asian author to represent the entirety of the Asian experience, instead of sharing more facts on the history of discrimination in the publishing industry and how they can change, she names that one author they chose (who is Indian) and goes on to criticize this woman’s work. It was very strange. Hong often points blame in the wrong direction.
I understand that her internalized racism/self hatred may contribute to her behavior but I don’t think it excuses racism towards other groups. She is perpetuating the same white supremacist behavior that she is trying to fight. I think she needs to address her own racist tendencies and realize that siding with white supremacy won’t help her.
I also didn’t like the writing style of this book. The book was a mess and just confused. Half memoir, half attempts at making points about the Asian American experience but instead of writing her own thoughts Hong just quotes other peoples’ works. Many of the stories were manic and all over the place. In a random story about a trans woman and the bar she works at, Hong interjects a random anecdote of her mother’s friend who owned a jewelry store in that area which got broken into and then proceeds to continue her story about the trans woman. Often times I struggled to find the connection between some stories or what their point was – spoiler alert: there often times was none. For a poet, I found her writing to be streams of consciousness, inner ramblings. There was no flow. She never showed me, just told me, and to be honest, I still don’t know what she was trying to tell me.
The only thing that I can say I gained from this book is that the Asian American experience is complicated and nuanced. But if I am to learn more or anything at all about that, I’ll have to find it in another book.
I don’t know what the purpose of this book is and I don’t think Cathy Park Hong does either. The first half of the book was so chaotic. It was filled with stream of conscious ramblings and irrelevant stories that had no purpose. Anytime Hong did try to make some kind of point, she would quote an intellectual/academic to make it for her. Hong made no points of her own and brought nothing new to the table. It’s unsurprising because she proved throughout her essays that she is incredibly unoriginal. For example, she admits that when she started doing stand-up comedy she would use other comedians’ jokes. “At first, I recited jokes by other comedians, which violates a cardinal rule in comedy, but I convinced myself I was pulling a conceptual stunt rather than actually doing stand-up.” She justifies her plagiarism as some kind of artistic choice. Throughout the book she shows through her actions that she is inadequate and unoriginal and needs to take from others to compensate. She is envious of her friends and blames them for being the reason she quit art in college because they were better than her at it. This book itself seems to be a violation of personal privacy that her friends had requested, yet she again justifies her actions because she’s a writer. “It’s unrealistic for me as a writer not to take from other people’s lives. I’m not some friendless orphan. My life overlaps with the lives of others so I have no choice but to take from others, which is why writers are full of care, but also—if they’re at all truthful—a bit cruel.” The fact of the matter is, Hong’s life is too boring to write about so she has to write about her suicidal friend instead and exploit her suffering to make her seem interesting. “Helen always accused me of feeling this way, and though I denied it, she was right: I did harbor those thoughts. I felt buried by our friendship, and maybe, just maybe, if she did kill herself, it wouldn’t be so bad. I would feel unburied. I would feel free.” “I would have had a happier four years in college had I never met Helen. But I wouldn’t have been the writer I am today.” Again, this is about her college friend who made several cries for help but was ignored by Hong who felt inconvenienced by it all. Needless to say, I wouldn’t want to be friends with Hong.
Hong’s self-hatred is pungent throughout the book. It’s clear to me that she hates being Asian and assumes every other Asian feels the same. She even admits this in her story about getting her nails done at the Vietnamese salon and berating the young Vietnamese boy who worked there. In the first half of the book, I found her attempts at intersectionality to actually do the opposite of what she was trying to do. I think she was trying to unify minority communities but instead she just drew a deeper line. I felt like she had an underlying prejudice for dark skinned people, particularly the Black community and Southeast Asians. She claims that “racial trauma is not a competitive sport” but she brings up things like how Asian-Americans actually experienced the largest mass lynching in American history. It made me question why she was bringing that up when we all know which group of people died the most from lynchings. She also made comments about Indians at times that I found suspect.
“I am embarrassed to say that I sometimes act like that white woman. When I phone in my order to a Chinese restaurant and the cashier doesn’t understand me, I repeat myself impatiently. When I call Time Warner and reach a representative with an Indian accent, I am already exasperated because I heard that Indian call centers barely train their employees.”
When complaining about how the publishing industry favors white authors and only picks one Asian author to represent the entirety of the Asian experience, instead of sharing more facts on the history of discrimination in the publishing industry and how they can change, she names that one author they chose (who is Indian) and goes on to criticize this woman’s work. It was very strange. Hong often points blame in the wrong direction.
I understand that her internalized racism/self hatred may contribute to her behavior but I don’t think it excuses racism towards other groups. She is perpetuating the same white supremacist behavior that she is trying to fight. I think she needs to address her own racist tendencies and realize that siding with white supremacy won’t help her.
I also didn’t like the writing style of this book. The book was a mess and just confused. Half memoir, half attempts at making points about the Asian American experience but instead of writing her own thoughts Hong just quotes other peoples’ works. Many of the stories were manic and all over the place. In a random story about a trans woman and the bar she works at, Hong interjects a random anecdote of her mother’s friend who owned a jewelry store in that area which got broken into and then proceeds to continue her story about the trans woman. Often times I struggled to find the connection between some stories or what their point was – spoiler alert: there often times was none. For a poet, I found her writing to be streams of consciousness, inner ramblings. There was no flow. She never showed me, just told me, and to be honest, I still don’t know what she was trying to tell me.
The only thing that I can say I gained from this book is that the Asian American experience is complicated and nuanced. But if I am to learn more or anything at all about that, I’ll have to find it in another book.
July 14, 2020
I may change my review if I ever decide to finish this book but based on the first essay, I just can't relate to the author's generalization of the Asian American experience. That said, I understand there is no "Asian American Experience" as a blanket term but somehow the author assumes there is?? (If I'm wrong please point out the chapters/essays which I should read).
The author's experience with the Vietnamese American nail tech for example. Assuming that the poor service she received is because he is a self hating Asian person who is turning his aggression towards her, whereas just from her general description of the events it sounds like she was being rude and difficult. The issue with the Korean-American therapist who didn't want to take her on as a patient and then having her berate and stalk the women with poor reviews...??? WTF? Being the opposite of complacent, the opposite of the stereotype of the meek and mild model minority also doesn't give anyone the right to be nasty towards others. There's a huge lack of self awareness and I can't suffer through this book to find out of she ever finds any.
I also find the tone and language incredibly elitist which is partly why I just can't bring myself to finish it. We aren't all neurotic self hating Asian people!
The author's experience with the Vietnamese American nail tech for example. Assuming that the poor service she received is because he is a self hating Asian person who is turning his aggression towards her, whereas just from her general description of the events it sounds like she was being rude and difficult. The issue with the Korean-American therapist who didn't want to take her on as a patient and then having her berate and stalk the women with poor reviews...??? WTF? Being the opposite of complacent, the opposite of the stereotype of the meek and mild model minority also doesn't give anyone the right to be nasty towards others. There's a huge lack of self awareness and I can't suffer through this book to find out of she ever finds any.
I also find the tone and language incredibly elitist which is partly why I just can't bring myself to finish it. We aren't all neurotic self hating Asian people!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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