Cathy Park Hong

"Minor feelings" writes poet Cathy Park Hong "occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance." In seven personal essays, she explores her own 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." show more

Hong tackles a variety of topics, writing often from her own experiences, but bringing in thoughts from other writers and thinkers. She writes in "Stand Up" about audience, and how many people of color are expected to write for a white audience or only about specific topics, and her own relationship to Richard Pryor's stand up works. In "Bad English" she ruminates on the ways in which making fun of the Asian accent is still acceptable, and also how she as a poet whose second language was English uses the language to her own purposes. "An Education" discusses the sometimes fraught friendship she had with two other Asian American artists in college. She ruminates on whether she as a Korean American can speak only to her specific experiences or more broadly as Asian American, which covers such a variety of identities and experiences as immigrants and their descendants in the U.S. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Her thoughts are personal and far-reaching, she's writing for herself and for everyone, but she doesn't slow down to explain if you're not following along with her narrative. I feel like I'd have to read it a second time through, take notes and talk back, to get even more out of it. show less

The poetry editor of the New Republic discusses her experiences living and working in a culture hostile to expressions of Asian individuality and identity.

In this memoir in essays, Hong (Engine Empire, 2012, etc.) offers a fierce and timely meditation on race and gender issues from her perspective as a Korean American woman. She begins by reflecting on her struggles with depression, which she traces to being forced into the role of model minority. Working harder than everyone else for show more recognition as an artist, she describes how she watched herself disappear into the “vague purgatorial” no-man’s land inhabited by other Asian Americans. The author details how her experiences developing bonds with other talented Asian American women in college taught her to take herself seriously in a world that stereotyped Asians as “math-crunching middle managers.” She began developing a greater sense of race consciousness when watching comedian Richard Pryor, which she explores in the essay “Stand Up.” His no-holds-barred comedic monologues embodied racialized “negative [and] dysphoric” emotions with which she immediately identified. In turn, Hong attempted to access those “minor feelings” through her own brief foray into stand-up comedy. Like the experiments with language she discusses in “Bad English,” the author was seeking a way to speak honestly about her own experiences with racism in an effort to end “white innocence,” a concept she addresses sharply in a separate essay. As she sees it, the United States has achieved dominance through “the capitalist accumulation of white supremacy.” In “Portrait of an Artist,” Hong discusses Asian female invisibility by delving into the groundbreaking work of artist and novelist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Seeking to force confrontation with Cha’s largely undiscussed murder, Hong examines how Cha died while suggesting that Cha’s preoccupation with discursive erasure was a manifestation of revolutionary—rather than “feminine” self-silencing—impulses. Candid and unapologetically political, Hong’s text deftly explores the explosive emotions surrounding race in ways sure to impact the discourse surrounding Asian identity as well as race and belonging in America.

A provocatively incisive debut nonfiction book. show less

I do not share some of Hong's grander assessments of America's past actions and future likely paths (others are unassailably historically correct or certainly possible) but her lived experience is hers and it is instructive and fascinating. It also supports her opinions. Her story moved the needle on my perception of America and Americans. There is an urgency to it in this time when anti-Asian violence seems to rise each week. Hong tells a story about being assaulted with hate speech in a show more subway station and having a white friend make it all about her (the friend) and her pain at having experienced this. I am not trying to be that woman. I am just bearing witness that I have never had that happen while with Asian friends until the past 17 months, during which time it has happened twice, both times on the subway, and that I am rarely on the subway these days with work being remote. These assholes diminishing strangers, othering them, should sicken us all. The "minor feelings" of the title are these things and others, the phrase is, I think, roughly synonymous with microaggression (the acts of aggression themselves and the impact of the microaggessions.) Park puts together an analysis of the ethnic Asian experience in the US, through a string of essays intermittently personal, political and historical (all steeped in cultural criticism) that at least for me moved my understanding of microaggression from intellectual understanding to clouds parting empathic and intellectual understanding. I did not know what I did not know.

I appreciated how Park used the stories of others as well as her own. Her deconstruction of Richard Pryor was spectacular as were her narratives and interpretations of the lives and sanitized legacies of other artists and revolutionaries. She may want to lay off the Amiri Baraka. She may have chosen to sanitize that legacy herself, forgetting his violent misogyny and antisemitism. Shame on a poet whose whole life is built on the importance of language for lionizing and quoting as gospel (repeatedly in this book) the words of a man who wrote:

"Smile, jew. Dance, jew. Tell me you love me, jew...I got the extermination blues, jewboys. I got the hitler syndrome figured"

It doesn't mean he did not write and do important things, but he was no antidote to Trump, he was just as malignant, just less powerful.

All in all Minor Feelings is brilliant, wide ranging but still cohesive, instructive, beautifully written. (Her discussions of shaping her second language to her will, assaulting the orthodoxy of language was one of my favorite themes. I have often thought Nabokov did the same, that he created beautiful prose by attacking rather than embracing his new tongue.) I believe building authentic understanding is the greatest thing a writer can do. Park has done that. Every American should read this book. show less

there's so much to like here in these essays. she's a poet so her writing is thoughtful and powerful.

what was most impactful for me:
- she said that the japanese internment camps were used as a basis for the muslim registry that trump and his allies tried to implement early in his presidency. i don't remember that being used as justification and am disgusted if it was. i thought we'd all roundly disavowed that awfulness in our past, but to use it to move forward with the demonizing of another show more group?
- a quote from jess row, in his book white flights: "America's great and possibly catastrophic failure is its failure to imagine what it means to live together."
-"Whether it's through retribution or indebtedness, who are we when we become better than them in a system that destroyed us?"
-a quote from lorraine o'grady in 2018: "In the future, white supremacy will no longer need white people."

and, without a doubt, what i most take away from this book is the idea that she talks about when she talks about the immigrant and diverse stories that the publishing industry has championed, and the books that i've loved as a reader. are they books that specifically appeal to some stereotypes or messages directed to white people? do i like them because they tell a certain story? is it a comfortable story that makes me feel like i'm getting the perspective of a person of color but it's really whitewashed for my benefit? i don't know the answer but i've never really considered the question in a way that i should have. i will be thinking about it now. show less