![]() ![]() “Minor Feelings ” complicates with brutal honesty the previously monolithic expectations of what it means to be both an Asian American and an Asian American artist. However, despite the distance between our experiences, I understood the importance of “Minor Feelings ” in shattering the idea that a single story can define and reduce the Asian American experience. Apart from being called the occasional racial slur on the street, I could not relate to the blatant racism or hardship Hong or the Koreans she knew faced in Southern California, and I felt as if I didn’t deserve as much space as they did. Most of the other Asian students at my high school never talked about being Asian apart from complaining about their parents or making boba jokes. I initially found “Minor Feelings ” distant from the Asianness I had known. Silence and invisibility define us until “we’re so post-racial we’re silicon.” Asian Americans, often seen as not Black or white enough, “inhabit a vague purgatorial status” where we’re ignored unless utilized as political or racial weapons have access to economic comfort, yet are barred from positions of power and are seen as calm and impassive, when in reality we’re working very hard to stay afloat. ![]() Hong finds common ground among Asians in how we’re perceived by others. She emphasizes that “the problem is not that childhood was exceptionally traumatic but that it was in fact rather typical,” and highlights the need to “balance multiple truths,” when talking about Asian Americans’ relationship with other minorities. She chose to write a short essay collection instead because its “exit routes permit to stray” but “always return, from a different angle.” Within personal stories about feeling incompetent in art school, developing a tic in her eye and being a depressed poet in New York, Hong carries glints of truth on the shared Asian American experience.ĭespite her doubts, Hong acknowledges the need for both a new literary and social precedent for Asian Americans. ![]() Poetic lyric felt too much like a form in which Hong would have to point out what she wasn’t more than what she was. In writing “Minor Feelings ,” Hong admits that because she can only “speak nearby” the Asian American condition, she struggled with choosing the right literary form. Hong also wonders if her experience as an East Asian, atheist, cis female, professional could speak properly to “a racial group that remains so nonspecific,” wondering if “there was any shared language between us.” She catches herself questioning whether there is any shared ground between her and the 14-year-old Vietnamese boy doing her nails at the nail salon. While writing “Minor Feelings ,” Hong admits that 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.” Hong recalls that among non-white people in Koreatown, despite the fact that everyone was casually racist, “Koreans worked the front and Mexicans worked the back.” “Minor Feelings ” is a serialization of Hong’s racial angst, which sometimes manifests in her constant doubt of the validity of this very book. Within these essays, Hong launches an honest investigation into the minor feelings that plague her life as an Asian American, straddling the line between shame and unapologetic pride, privilege and powerlessness and the multiplicities that form an ever-changing and imperfect perception of her Asian American identity. “Minor Feelings ” contains seven essays, each simultaneously memoir and criticism, personal and general. Cathy Park Hong, a Korean American who was raised in Los Angeles, is the author of three poetry collections and teaches at Rutgers University. ![]() Cathy Park Hong’s first essay collection “Minor Feelings ” is named after “the racialized range of emotions” built from “the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.” Based on theorist Sianne Ngai’s “ugly feelings,” they are often interpreted as “hostile, ungrateful, jealous, depressing, and belligerent” to non-marginalized people, persist for long periods of time and never lead to catharsis. ![]()
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