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The End of White Innocence
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Minor Feelings, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Asian American Politics
Art, Voice, and Audience
History, Ignorance, and Racism
Friendship and Solidarity
Summary
Analysis
Most kids collect toys or dolls; Hong collected pencils, erasers, and notebooks. Her Korean peers frequently ostracized her. They spoke the local L.A. mix of “FOB, Gangsta, and Valley,” which made it harder for her to learn formal English. In fact, she didn’t speak English until age six or seven. Her family and neighbors seldom used it, besides curse words, and they put their own spin on American customs. For instance, Hong’s father has a habit of telling everyone “I love you.” She held off on using her cute mechanical pencils for as long as she could, but she felt “exquisite pleasure” when she finally did. She used them to draw anime-style cartoon girls with the wide eyes and tiny nose she wished she could have.
It's telling that, as a child, Hong expressed herself through drawings and not words. After all, she underlines how her relationship to English is fundamentally different from that of Americans who grew up with it as their first and only language. This raises the question of whose literature counts, and what kind of English writers should use if their native dialect isn’t the standard American English of the white upper and middle classes. Hong emphasizes that this doesn’t just apply to Asian immigrants (to whom she refers with the moniker “FOB,” or “fresh off the boat”), but also many other Americans of color and even some white people (like those who speak California “Valley” English).
Themes
Hong enjoys “collecting bad English,” browsing sites that post incorrect translations from signs and t-shirts in Asia. She finds poetic beauty in the marks Asian languages leave on English, since from living in Seoul, she has seen how English is changing Korean, too. “Bad English is my heritage,” Hong proclaims—she identifies with the long tradition of writers making English theirs by changing it, or othering it. She wants “to eat English before it eats [her].”
Mainstream American culture may view “bad English” as distorting and enfeebling the language, but for Hong, it actually enriches it. Every immigrant’s linguistic background is different, but Hong emphasizes that they all make their own contributions to English, which always is and always has been in flux. When she defines her goal as “to eat English before it eats [her],” Hong means that either she will change standard English, or else standard English will distort her authentic voice—which actually depends on multiple languages, dialects, and registers at the same time.
Themes
Hong’s mother is strong and brilliant in Korean, but she struggles to express herself in English. White people talk to her like a toddler. As a girl, Hong always stepped in to help her mother communicate. Asian accents are “the last accents acceptable to mock.” Hong admits that even she hates calling Chinese restaurants and Indian customer service centers. But she also hates the “gentle, sitcom-friendly, easy listening” Asian accent that many actors use nowadays in TV shows—this accent doesn’t represent the way most Asian families actually communicate.
Hong summarizes how language contributes to the discrimination that Asian Americans face. Unused to speaking foreign languages themselves, many Americans assume that people with accents or limited English competence are unintelligent or immature. It’s such a widespread phenomenon that even Hong plays into it. Of course, the fact that Asian speech patterns are “the last accents acceptable to mock” reflects how little public attention Asian American issues receive in the U.S.
Themes
Hong has always tried to break English apart by mixing words, registers, and genres in her writing. But she has always struggled to express love in English—she’s afraid of letting it into her family life. She also wonders how much she can change English before she offends others. For instance, the dialect that her Koreatown neighbors spoke growing up is now often considered a form of blackface. The U.S. increasingly has a “stay in your lane” policy: artists are expected to only produce work about their own personal experiences and ethnic groups. This is an understandable response to the history of white artists profiting by copying nonwhite artists’ work. But it also treats art as private property. It gets in the way of artistic experimentation and exchange, the processes that enable art to inspire people and transform culture.
Hong’s struggle with English is a key part of her quest to find her own authentic voice as a writer. To what extent, she asks, can she truly express herself in a language that has been imposed on her? And to what extent does her search for artistic freedom mean unfairly imposing on others? In her past work, like Dance Dance Revolution, she has mixed different languages and cultural traditions. But did this mean forcing a narrative onto other people, in the same way that white America has forced a narrative onto her? If writing about minor feelings represents a literary middle ground between disconnected personal narrative and dry sociological analysis, then she’s now looking for a middle ground between being dominated by language and dominating other people’s language. Strict “stay in your lane” artistic norms may be motivated by good intentions, but they’re incompatible with the kind of dynamic, interconnected literature that Hong seeks to create.
Themes
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Hong quotes the filmmaker Trinh T. Min-ha, who argues that artists should “speak nearby” other cultures, not “speak about” them. In other words, rather than taking a position of authority and declaring what other people’s experiences mean, artists should give that authority to those people. Hong cannot hope to speak for Asian America—only to speak nearby it. This is why she has written this book as a collection of lyric essays, without a straightforward thesis. Yet writing nearby Asian Americans’ experiences also requires writing nearby other groups’ experiences.
“Speaking nearby” offers a solution to Hong’s dilemma because it allows artists to bring other people’s experiences into their work without taking away those people’s right to define the meaning of their own lives. In other words, it’s an attempt at inclusion without domination—and this inclusion is necessary to achieve broad political change. Here, Hong also briefly discusses her overall strategy in this book. Namely, her essays address different challenges involved in living and making art as an Asian American, but they do not try to declare what Asian American identity or literature should be.
Themes
When writers of color are told to tell their story, it too often means packaging their stories in a form that white audiences and publishers will want to read. For Hong, bad English is an alternate way for different groups to connect their experiences, without putting the white perspective at the center of their art. At its best, bad English is an oral form—writing it is difficult, especially in the internet age, but Hong is doing her best.
Just like minor feelings, bad English gives Asian American writers a powerful tool for projecting their own true voices and resisting the pull of racist artistic norms. Of course, bad English doesn’t just mean using the same nonstandard dialect as immigrants from one’s same cultural background. Instead, it really means playing freely with English in an effort to invent the dialect or mixed language that best resembles one’s actual speech, thought processes, or worldview.
Themes
Trans Chinese American artist Wu Tsang’s documentary Wildness opens with a shot of the sunset over Los Angeles, a scene familiar to Hong. It goes on to profile the Silver Platter, a mostly Latinx bar where Tsang found a trans community and throws a party every week. The party attendees are very different from the bar’s regular clientele, but Tsang’s parties bring them together in a kind of “secret utopia”—until hipsters show up and gentrify the bar. At the end of the movie, Tsang feels guilty and stops hosting her parties. But Hong wonders how Tsang’s relationship to the community changed after the documentary launched her to international fame.
Wu Tsang’s documentary speaks to the fraught politics of trying to form social and political bonds among different groups through “speaking nearby.” While Tsang successfully brought two embattled minority groups together and enabled them to collaborate, due to the situation’s class dynamics, one of these groups ended up inadvertently harming the other. Tsang’s decision to cancel the parties shows how artists must put the communities they work with and for before their own egos. But Tsang’s ironic rise to fame also shows that “speaking nearby” goes against the art world’s norms: usually, artists are celebrated, not the people whom their art is about. For artists, keeping their subjects in focus requires consistent focus and discipline—it’s all too easy to just let oneself become the center of attention.
Themes
When Hong was growing up, Black, Latinx, and Asian kids were casually racist to each other all the time. While it didn’t hurt as much as racism from white people, it still divided them and set up a racial hierarchy. Hong asks how writers of color can genuinely portray a multiethnic America without repeating the same error or getting too caught up in their guilt. It would be easy to do what white writers have always done: scrub all ethnic difference out of their work.
Hong does not have an easy formula for creating a racially convivial society. Instead, she affirms the importance of all the considerations at play. “Stay in your lane” is just a new version of exoticism, which prevents Americans of color from forming collective identities and makes whiteness seem like a neutral default. But veering too much into other lanes risks bringing about conflict and destruction, not collaboration. The only solution is to seek out a reasonable middle ground. After all, Wu Tsing’s story shows that even the best of plans can backfire—and that building a coalition of multiple groups usually involves carefully balancing power among them.
Themes
