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Intro
In her essay collection Minor Feelings, Korean American poet Cathy Park Hong connects her personal experiences of race and ethnicity to a broader analysis of Asian American identity, art, and politics in the U.S. today. She argues that Asian Americans are too often spoken for and too infrequently given the chance to actually speak for themselves. And she contends that they can learn to do the latter by listening to the “minor feelings” of the book’s title: the negative emotions associated with being a racial minority in a country that simply doesn’t acknowledge one’s existence or perspective.
The book’s first essay is called “United.” One day, suddenly convinced that her old facial tic has returned, Hong falls into a deep depression. She visits a Korean American therapist (Eunice Cho), who refuses to treat her and won’t say why. Outwardly, Hong’s life seems perfect, but on the inside, she feels invisible and stuck. She realizes that she has always “struggled to prove [herself] into existence,” which is troubling her poetry. In fact, Asian Americans are largely invisible in American culture, even though there are millions of them and they have been in the U.S. for centuries. When they are visible, it’s usually through the model minority myth—which depicts them as intelligent, compliant, emotionless foreigners who will eventually become like white people if they keep working hard for long enough. Like many Asian Americans, Hong has internalized this myth and learned to compare herself to an impossible standard. She will need to shed it if she wants to overcome her depression and find her authentic voice as a writer.
In the next essay, “Stand Up,” Hong explores how Richard Pryor’s comedy helped her heal by enabling her to answer the question: “Who am I writing for?” The American education system and poetry community taught her to write for white people. This meant either ignoring her identity entirely or focusing on topics like trauma, resilience, and success, which would fit white readers’ simplistic expectations for Asian American poetry. But by telling stories rooted in his own minor feelings, Richard Pryor showed her that it’s possible to name and subvert stereotypes through art, too. Hong asks how she could incorporate the same strategy into her own writing. For instance, she imagines telling the story of the 1992 riots between Los Angeles’s Black and Korean communities through the lens of the minor feelings of people who actually lived through it. Doing so would hopefully allow her to capture the situation’s context and complexity, without simply turning one racial group into the hero and the other into the villain.
In “The End of White Innocence,” Hong contrasts her own unhappy, chaotic, shame-filled childhood with the traditional American ideal of childhood as a time of innocence, purity, and exploration. Yet this concept has always been reserved for white children. Indeed, when movies like Moonrise Kingdom celebrate white childhood in the mid-20th century, their nostalgia is really about something else entirely: they’re really yearning for the days when white people could profit from a systematically racist society without having to feel guilty about it. Today, white people often pursue the same “sheltered unknowingness” by avoiding situations that reminds them about racism—or even by calling people who point it out anti-white racists. Today, a story is considered “universal” if it is told from the perspectives of the world’s small white minority. Hong asks what it would mean to instead tell stories from the perspective of the true global majority, the formerly colonized people who cannot just forget their families’ and countries’ history so easily.
Hong tries to answer this question in her fourth essay, “Bad English,” which celebrates the accented, nonstandard, mixed dialects of English that immigrants actually speak. These dialects are often mocked on the schoolyard and in popular media, but Hong finds that they capture her experience and worldview far better than standard English. Thus, unlike the countless Asian American writers who try to distance themselves from their families’ and communities’ speech, Hong declares that “Bad English is my heritage.”
But whose bad English can Hong write? Since it’s common for white artists to copy and profit off of non-white artists’ work, many Americans now support the informal “stay in your lane” rule—that artists should only cover their own cultures and identities. But this idea is misguided: identities don’t exist in homogeneous bubbles, and by removing all the diversity from their work, artists of color would be doing exactly what white writers do. Instead, Hong suggests the strategy that filmmaker Trinh T. Min-ha calls “speaking nearby” other cultures: telling stories about other people without trying to speak for them or declare what they mean.
Hong’s next essay, “An Education,” explores how her college friendship with two other ambitious Asian American students shaped her racial consciousness and creative work. Erin, her roommate, is a brilliant professional artist and one of her closest friends to this day. But Helen was unstable, domineering, and frequently violent. She developed serious drug addictions and plagiarized Hong’s poetry, but she was also a visionary artist who astonished her teachers and classmates. (Hong doesn’t regret falling out of touch with Helen after college.) Still, Hong, Erin, and Helen all played crucial roles in one another’s development as artists: by taking one another seriously as artists, they built the kind of confidence that artists of color often struggle to cultivate.
The essay “Portrait of an Artist” focuses on the story of Korean American poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, who was raped and murdered in 1982. Just a few days earlier, Cha had published her book Dictee, a groundbreaking multilingual work of poetry, memoir, and history that interlaces stories about Cha’s own mother with those of martyrs like Yu Guan Soon and Joan of Arc. To Hong, Cha was one of the first writers who captured the simultaneous insight and invisibility that comes with being Asian American. Cha truly developed her own voice, beyond the confines of stereotype. So, Hong explores the lack of scholarly and media attention to Cha’s death, which is usually passed over quickly (and occasionally treated as a secret “answer key” for interpreting her work). Does detailing the evidence about Cha’s violent death do her justice, Hong asks, or merely dehumanize her? Justice, Hong decides, at least up to a certain point. She interviews Cha’s friends and family members and explains how Cha’s brother John helped lead the search for her body.
Hong’s final essay, “The Indebted,” returns to Asian Americans in general. Today, many Asian Americans try to define their place in mainstream U.S. society through the strategy from the movie Crazy Rich Asians: they try to make a ton of money and buy their way in. This solution is convenient because many young Asian Americans feel indebted to their immigrant parents and see building wealth as a natural way to pay them back. But Hong views it as untenable, most of all because the only way for Asian Americans to build wealth is by joining the same racist, capitalist, and imperialist system that has long excluded them and inflicted violence on their families overseas. She proposes another option instead: solidarity. Asian Americans should bond with other Americans of color and present a united front against racism in all of its manifestations. Artists should particularly focus on fighting “racial containment” norms, which insist that white artists and writers can make universal claims, while artists and writers of color can only write about their own groups’ particular experiences. Of course, this has been Hong’s goal in this book, and only time will tell if she succeeds in spurring a broader social change.
