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 CitizenFINALIST 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 … 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
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This is definitely worth a revisit for me. I learned a lot about pieces of history I hadn’t previously delved into, and the author sets these pieces close to or distant from her personal life in an absorbing constellation.
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.
Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings truly delivers news we can use. It will educate some and inspire hallelujahs from others; people will productively argue with it, be inspired by it, think and feel with and around it. 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 become a classic.
I seldom finish a book and say we are not ready for what I just read. But we are so not ready for what Cathy Park Hong does in Minor Feelings. And thankfully, she does not care whether we are ready or not. Minor Feelings seals intellectual cracks while patiently revealing emotional and national secrets I was afraid and unwilling to name. Few books change how we talk to each other and whisper to ourselves. Minor Feeling is one of those books that changes the language we use to reckon, to talk, to write, and to hide. Cathy Park Hong sees us. Her vision and execution are so breathtaking. And so genius. And so absolutely scary. Read it. Reread it. It will read you.
Cathy Park Hong’s book is tremendous. The entire time I read, I was hissing yes and yes and YESSSSS and letting my minor feelings become major feelings, which I think is the glory of a book like this — it takes all the parts of us that we can barely account for and gives them back fully recognized. It felt like having someone sit me down in a chair and say, ‘Your feelings are real’ and ‘This is how we got here’ and ‘Here is a way out’ all at once. It broke my heart with relief.
Hong slyly opens this book with a sort of hilarious search for a Korean therapist believing that there would be a shared experience, a shorthand, so to speak – that she wouldn’t have to explain herself. But then, the therapist rejects her. Funny. And a brilliant metaphor for the problem of undertaking a book about race – how do you speak about the Korean American experience without overgeneralizing? The answer is to get personal. Hong’s personal experience is so vivid, and so universal as to be relatable to me as a Jewish American. I especially resonated with this quote “racial trauma is not a competitive sport.” As a Jewish Woman I’m repeatedly told that I can “pass.” That, consequently, the micro-aggressions I experience are nothing compared to the black experience. You have white privilege, I am told, can you imagine if you were black? Sort of, maybe. But it’s not a competition, people. As a Jew, I could relate to Hong’s feelings of being “othered.” Neither white nor a person of color. AND all that aside, the book is beautifully written. Her poetic voice drives the narrative.
Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong was not at all what I expected. This book is brutally honest, causing an old white male (me) to pause and reconsider convenient assumptions I have hidden behind. The book is very readable except for the pauses when you have to consider how events could happen as Ms. Hong describes them. I would recommend that every family that has adopted someone from South Korea or China or India should read this book. Had I read this 30+ years ago, I could have been a better father to my second son. Looking at him and and looking back, many things that happened and how he (and I) handled them start to make more sense. This book is real, chock full of truth, including inconvenient truth, and is very disturbing. If I were forced to find something to criticize it would be that there is little reason for optimism in this book. Although the blurbs said the book included humor, I found little. With my son there is constant humor. Still, the book was truly amazing. It is so well written, so intimate, so candid that I recommend this book to everyone with whom I discuss books.
Cathy Park Hong’s brilliant, penetrating, and unforgettable Minor Feelings is what was missing from our shelf of classics. She brings acute intelligence, scholarly knowledge, and recognizable vulnerability to the formation of a new school of thought she names minor feelings. In conversation with Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings, Hong charts her emotional life as a Korean American immigrant woman, thereby shattering the concept of a single story of the Asian experience. Minor Feelings builds through what Hong names a ‘racialized range of emotions,’ which are routinely dismissed by others. To read this book is to become more human.
Minor Feelings is an essayistic investigation of those feelings so hard to name, a mix of the elusive, denied, unexpected, and unexplored — a fierce catalogue of that which has not been named and yet won’t be ignored; an electric intervention, a provocation, and a renewal.
When I heard about this book and received an Advanced Readers’ Copy, I was drawn to the title and the author. I read it in a span of a week, because I wanted to thoroughly absorb, understand and really read Cathy Park Hong’s words in this collection of incredibly powerful and raw essays that spoke to me as an Asian American woman. I felt that for once, someone put into words what I have felt all along but I never really had to courage to speak out loud or acknowledge, and Hong explains why beautifully in this book.
Some of the things that struck me in her book is Hong’s mention of the “new racial awareness mediator” when you have to explain your race to someone, and that “Most Americans know nothing about Asian Americans. They think Chinese is synecdoche for Asians that was Kleenex is for tissues”. I definitely related to this when I am constantly explaining myself and my heritage to someone.
The essays come well researched as well and love learning about the history of our country’s Manifest Destiny where Hong mentions about how three Chinese laborers died for every two miles of track for the transcontinental railroad, and at the completion of the railroad, not one photo was taken of a Chinese man in the celebratory photos.
Hong explores these minor feelings which she describes are the range of emotions mostly negative from everyday feelings of being slighted with racial undertones that others may conjure your own feelings as though made up or being overly sensitive.
I cannot recommend this book enough. Hong wrote this book with courage and with all her heart – exposing her feelings with honesty and wit. Her writing is incredible and a true masterpiece. A dissertation of the Asian American experience. This is required reading and a must read!
Brava! A standing ovation!