Minor Feelings: A Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition

What happens when an immigrant believes the lies they're told about their own racial identity?

For Cathy Park Hong, they experience the shame and difficulty of "minor feelings".

The daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up in America steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality. With sly humour and a poet's searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and artmaking, and to family and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche - and of a writer's search to both uncover and speak the truth.

 

 

 

 

"When we talk about racial issues, we mustn't forget that racism affects all people across the racial lines. Cathy Park Hong's "Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning" reveals the emotional life of an Asian American woman and how her racial (also, female) identity has sedimented what she calls "minor feelings." Making critical race studies and affect theory accessible for a mainstream audience, the idea of minor feelings refers to "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." She chronicles her upbringing and her academic/ writing career with an acute analysis of how the publishing industry expects authors to privatize trauma, how American optimism is enforced upon Asian Americans when they feel like a failure, and how growing up without the parents reading to her makes her more critical with the notion of 'childhood' and 'innocence.' Tackling a serious issue does not automatically mean you can't be funny. This is where Hong's power lies--she can be playful while showing our ignorance about the lives and voices of Asian Americans."

“Minor Feelings is a major reckoning, pulling no punches as the author uses her life’s flashpoints to give voice to a wider Asian American experience, one with cascading consequences.”—NPR

“Hong dissects her experiences as an Asian American to create an intricate meditation on racial awareness in the U.S. Through a combination of cultural criticism and personal stories, Hong, a poet, lays bare the shame and confusion she felt in her youth as the daughter of Korean immigrants, and the way those feelings morphed as she grew older. From analyzing Richard Pryor’s stand-up to interrogating her relationship with the English language, Hong underscores essential themes of identity and otherness.”—Time

 

“Self aware and relentlessly sharp essays. Nimble, smart, and deliberate, Minor Feelings is a major conversation starter.”—Marie Claire