s.penkevich's Reviews > Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

‘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.’

’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.'