Cathy Park Hong

"Asian Americans inhabit a purgatorial status: neither white enough nor black enough, unmentioned in most conversations about racial identity. In the popular imagination, Asian Americans are all high-achieving professionals. But 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, from tech millionaires to service industry laborers ... Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong ... confronts this thorny subject, blending memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose the truth of racialized consciousness in America"--Publisher marketing.

An Asian American Reckoning

Minor Feelings

Chosen as a Guardian BOOK OF 2020 and picked by AnOther as a Book You Should Read This Year"unputdownable ... Hong's razor-sharp, provocative prose will linger long after you put Minor Feelings down" AnOther 'Minor Feelings is anything but minor. In these provocative and passionate essays, Cathy Park Hong gives us an incendiary account of what it means to be and to feel Asian American today ... Minor Feelings is absolutely necessary.' - Nguyen Thanh Viet, author of the Sympathizer 'Hong says the book was 'a dare to herself', and she makes good on it: by writing into the heart of her own discomfort, she emerges with a reckoning destined to be a classic.' - Maggie Nelson, author of the Argonauts 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.

A Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition

cee 

If we are restricted to our lanes, culture will die. Rather than speaking about a culture outside your experience, the filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha

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 are very close to your subject, you're also not committed to speaking on their behalf. 

The writer Jeff Chang says, "I want to love us." But he can't bring himself to do that because he doesn't know who "us" is. I share that uncertainty.

Emiley Jones

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.

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.

Already, “woke” is a hashtag that’s now mocked, when being awake is not a singular revelation, but a long-term commitment fueled by constant reevaluation.

But where does the silence that neglects her end, and where does the silence that respects her begin? 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.

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.

…and a collector’s taste is notable for what he leaves out.

…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.

“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.”

“My confidence was impoverished from a lifelong diet of conditional love and a society who thinks I’m as interchangeable as lint.”

The paragraph that follows this one is also good because I don’t think we truly pick up on habit we associate with our face until we see them or they’re pointed out 

“The face is the most naked part of ourselves, but we don’t realize it until the face is somehow injured, and then all we think of is its naked condition.”

tiff <3

But even in opposition, I still see my life in relation to whiteness. 

I always thought my physical identity was the problem, but writing made me realize that even without myself present, I still couldn't rise above myself, which pitched me into a kind of despair.

You're a survivor, and like most survivors, you are a god-awful parent.

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.

Helen 

incisive and brilliant essays on being asian american, language, & art-making. hong moves through these essays with an enviable surgical precision; she toggles between the academic and personal with so much fluidity I never know whether the next paragraph is going to require me to learn sat up, spine taut, or flinch away with the kind of discomfort only recognition can evoke. essential reading—minor feelings is the kind of book someone writes because they wish they had the opportunity to read it

biddy

Eva Ströberg

This book is brutal, it peels and bares my thoughts and feelings as an immigrant in a white (people) country. I feel seen, and can relate with many of her thoughts and ideas, and at the same time, I can feel how irate the author is about the injustice many Asian Americans experience everyday in their lives.

I don't live in the US, but reading her accounts about the 1992 riot in Koreatown in LA, and other unrest, and also the history from the Chinese Exclusion Act, to the Japanese internment camp and the rape and murder of Theresa Cha in the Puck building in the 1982.

I understand her anger, I would be too if I had lived her life. Asian women are always thought as docile, meek, and considered "next-in-line" to be white, and so on, but we're the ones who get the blames when things gone bad. All the racial insults and abuse that we have to deal with in our lives. It is a wonder how we can keep our head down and mouth shut.

A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian American consciousness and the struggle to be human “Brilliant . . . To read this book is to become more human.”—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHY • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times • The Washington Post • NPR • Time • New Statesman • BuzzFeed • Esquire • The New York Public Library • Book Riot Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world. 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. Minor feelings are not small, they’re dissonant—and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her. With sly humor and a poet’s searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry 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. Praise for Minor Feelings “Hong begins her new book of essays with a bang. . . .The essays wander a variegated terrain of memoir, criticism and polemic, oscillating between smooth proclamations of certainty and twitches of self-doubt. . . . Minor Feelings is studded with moments [of] candor and dark humor shot through with glittering self-awareness.”—The New York Times “Hong uses her own experiences as a jumping off point to examine race and emotion in the United States.”—Newsweek (40 Must-Read Fiction and Nonfiction Books to Savor This Spring) “Powerful . . . [Hong] brings together memoiristic personal essay and reflection, historical accounts and modern reporting, and other works of art and writing, in order to amplify a multitude of voices and capture Asian America as a collection of contradictions. She does so with sharp wit and radical transparency.”—Salon

Gelaine Trinidad

A difficult but vital read. 

Already, "woke" is a hashtag that's now mocked, when being awake is not a singular revelation but a long-term commitment fueled by constant reevaluation. - Cathy Park Hong

Hannah Yoon

This is an incredible but extremely uncomfortable book to read. As a Korean, I felt like she was exposing my soul. This book is so timely, as if she knew where we would be in June 2020. She is poetic with her stories and has way of connecting everything together. The book is cathartic but also hard to take in because of the way she uses words to describe the feelings I didn't even realize I had. I had to take my time with this because I felt like I had to sit with so many of her points. I don't think she is speaking for ALL Asians or on behalf of them. It feels partially like a memoir.

Brian

amazing book. recommend to all my asian american homies!

Natalie

The "Asian American" label is a slippery one, accurate insofar as it indicates an ancestral continent, and suggests some shared experiences, upbringing, and traumas. Because of the topic's broad nature, the strongest essays in this collection are those that addresses the US's systemic issues with race and history of xenophobia. The more anecdotal pieces, such as the one recounting her experiences in art school with two fellow East Asian women, are those in which Minor Feelings risks losing its audience. Those are in the minority, though, in this overall incisive and timely collection of essays.

James Tucker

Absolutely blown away by this book. As an Asian-American, it made me feel seen and gave words to feelings I've had for a while. There was also a lot of Asian-American and pan-Asian history I wasn't familiar with. All of it reinforcing my belief that, for all of the gifts it's given me, America is the evil Empire.

Karis Ryu

Cathy Park Hong doesn't try to speak for all Asian Americans, which I am immensely glad for. Too often I hear "Asian American" (I use that term carefully because I have my issues with it) speakers, celebrities, and writers conflate their life experiences with an "Asian American consciousness" that they imply a kind of total understanding of, which is false because that clutters the limited pathways of expression for Americans of Asian descent, filling them with one specific kind of overpowering narrative, and excludes people who then don't feel "Asian American" enough. Hong does not assume total knowledge of any lived experience. She draws from her own, and from research and observation, to make objective realities about living in America with yellow skin known. She does not try to speak for me. She speaks for herself, and in doing so sees me.

Most importantly, she does not shy away from the entanglements of interracial cooperation and understanding - we CANNOT speak about racism as an isolated phenomenon within one culture, because it is not isolated nor only impacts one group of people, especially within the United States, and our current global climate as a result, where racism against black people has permeated through every social crevice - and the looming legacy and ongoing consequences of whiteness, as it has been imposed throughout our histories and pressed into the world.

I'm pretty sure I highlighted 90% of this entire book. Rec rec rec.

jiveen liew

I feel so seen.

I hurt at the pain she writes that are not my own but are analogously mine. I cry for the suffering of the other Asian women in this book, their experiences though foreign to me, strangely familial. Like, maybe if my circumstances were slightly different, they might happen to me or those around me. 

What I did not expect was the aching feel of longing. A deep pining to belong, even for a time, to a circle of Cathys, Erins, and Helens. For the experiences they had as confident Asian art majors in a white college. Asian women who were as unapologetic as they were poetic and tragic.

I yearn for the version of myself that had friends like them. She who was brave, who just went for it. Reading that chapter, that version of myself became so crystallized, so corporeal that I was struck with a feeling of nostalgia. Like, she was who the younger, less jaded us thought I would be now.

Ivy X

Pg 118-119 
“Does an Asian American narrative always have to return to the mother?”

“I will only say that my mother was broken then, though I don’t know how. When illness is unnamed, the blame is displaced onto the child”

—————-

Amazingly written series of essays that forced me to contemplate my (and others) unconscious thoughts and experiences.

written with such care and honesty, the second half of the collection really drew me in and brought it home, as if i was invited to watch another’s own reflection of the self. it takes the personal but doesn’t isolate, recognizing the history that led to this moment and all the ways in which we’ve always been intertwined. 

Sara

all of my annotations were just "!!!" after every sentence. my only complaint about this was with the second half, which i've seen a lot of other reviewers speak about, but overall I really related a lot of what Hong write about, especially when discussing internal gaslighting and not feeling like your trauma or experiences are valid because your identity exists in a nuanced place that labels don't exist for.

Katie Chua

literally finished in a day, couldn't put down, made me feel some Major feelings about my Minor feelings ...

Patty Pforte

I really enjoy short essays and in this powerful book the short essays really work. My favorites are “Bad English” and the last few chapters especially “Indebted,” which packed a punch.

Angbeen Abbas

feel like this book went in a direction i was not expecting it to, but it was still really enjoyable. not exactly a primer on Asian Americans and racism in a typical way, it explores those themes alongside those of artistry, poetry, motherhood, migration. cathy park hong is a pretty great writer, and this book was definitely worth slogging through some parts that felt a bit slow.

Annie Qiu

a collection of essays that resonated with me so hard - topics like being asian and making art, being an asian woman when it comes to dating, belonging, white ignorance - and topics that I couldn't personally relate to and didn't know much about but still am so appreciative that I read about - like the Korean War and Vietnam War. I really enjoyed Cathy Park Hong's stream of consciousness style of writing - it lets her explore all the nuances involved in being Asian American and tangents that I wouldn't have expected to be in a book about the AA experience but are important to Hong. 

my fav 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 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."

"From invisible girlhood, the Asian American woman will blossom into 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. ... Well-meaning friends never failed 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."

"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. I accept that the burden of history is solely on my shoulders; that it’s up to me to earn back reparations for the losses my parents incurred, and to do so, I must, without complaint, prove myself in the workforce."

"It is not whiteness but our contained condition that is universal, because we are the global majority. By we I mean nonwhites, the formerly colonized; survivors, such as Native Americans, whose ancestors have already lived through end times; migrants and refugees living through end times currently, fleeing the droughts and floods and gang violence reaped by climate change that’s been brought on by Western empire."

"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."

CATHY PARK. HONG

'Minor Feelings is anything but minor. In these provocative and passionate essays, Cathy Park Hong gives us an incendiary account of what it means to be and to feel Asian American today ... Minor Feelings is absolutely necessary.' - Nguyen Thanh Viet, author of the Sympathizer'Hong says the book was 'a dare to herself', and she makes good on it: by writing into the heart of her own discomfort, she emerges with a reckoning destined to be a classic.' - Maggie Nelson, author of the ArgonautsWhat 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.

priya

1.5 stars

i remember feeling annoyed, confused, bored and cringing while reading this, but it still probably deserves more than 1 star. 

"It’s a funny thing about racialization in America. It doesn’t matter that Japan once colonised Korea and parts of China and invaded the Phillipines during World War II. It doesn’t matter that there has been a long, bloody territorial dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir or that Laotians have been systematically genociding the Hmong people since the Vietnam War. Whatever power struggle your nation had with other Asian nations - most of it the fallout of Western imperialism and the Cold War - is steamrolled flat by Americans who don’t know the difference."

"If the innocence of childhood is being protected and comforted, the precarity of childhood is when one feels least  protected and comfortable. "

Allison King

“Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status . . . distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down.”

Athena Eloy

Shelby Doherty

** spoiler alert **
           Likes:
- Objectively a good book, well thought out and presented well
- Liked how it takes specific instances from her life, others, and the lives of those in general.
- It's good to hear other's voices and their lived experiences

Dislikes:
- Not what I was expecting when I started (had thought that this was a fiction before getting into it)

Cindy

Welp. This book just slaps.

Hong captures the unnamed, often dysphoric and shameful emotions that come part-and-parcel with the Asian American experience. It's not hard to flinch at the familiarity of the subjects that Hong mentions: the fear of being labeled as an identitarian, the difficulty of representing a one-size-fits-all label like "Asian American", the worry of creating content to placate a white audience, the trauma of our ancestors' immigration and the way it trickles down to parenting, the apologetic space where Asian Americans have been relegated within society, etc. It puts the provoking in thought-provoking.

Minor Feelings does not provide answers (nor does it promise them), but it does raise important questions and bring them under sharp relief.

Emily Wu

Holy crap. I encourage every Asian American, or every minority, or frankly everyone to read this book. It's role in my opinion, is to be a thought and conversation starter, and to me, that's exactly what it was. I need to go back to take notes, and really reflect on many of the points I highlighted throughout the book. I think many people have issues with the style of the book and how she goes from history lessons and then deviates into her life and personal stories. I find that as an Asian American, this is an entirely relevant and necessary way to reflect. So much of history is lost, and even now, so much is hidden in the shadows (like these past couple of days in regards to violence against Asian Americans) and we can not solely rely on history nor our experiences but need both to paint a full picture. While of course, like everyone else, I don't agree with everything in the book, it did its job incredibly well in highlighting our complex history and relations between Asian cultures, and initiating a reflection on my own history, family, actions and identity. Overall, there's much to discuss from this and I highly recommend it as a must-read. This is just the beginning of this conversation, and I can't wait to see where it goes next.

Katie Cheng

A complex book that I found to be a bit of a maze of styles and thoughts--which thus will make for a fun re-read! I'm sure I'll find some tidbits in crevices that I missed in the first go-round.

I enjoyed that Hong is alternately crass/irreverent and thoughtful/heartfelt. She comes off as selfish yet generous, grating yet endearing. She is a fun personality to spend time with.

I enjoyed chewing on Hong's insights on racial dynamics in America. She speaks about the fluid position of Asian Americans relative to other races. She points out the way Asian Americans' relative privilege makes us susceptible to being lap dogs in the seat of white supremacy, craning for validation/approval. She tells stories of Asian Americans trying to claw past each other, having internalized both the insidious disease of white supremacy, and the shame and self-loathing that is a symptom of generations of gaslighting.

Hong pulls together personal stories, observation, and history to explore race and identity in America. She regularly breaks the fourth wall, observing to the reader her uncertainty about her own motivations, authority, and impact of writing on these topics. Despite these misgivings, Hong strides courageously forward in her essays, and challenges the reader to defy limiting constructs in both thought and action, break molds, live with integrity, and speak out. An empowering read to start the year!

"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. Conscription is every day and unconscious. It is the default way of life among those of us who live in relative comfort, unless we make an effort to choose otherwise."

Minor Feelings An Asian American Reckoning

Reviews

Highlights