Review: Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong

Review by Kate Carmody

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
Cathy Park Hong
One World, February 2020.
$27.00; 224 pp.
ISBN: 978-1984820365

In Minor Feelings, poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong exposes the racism, shame, and erasure forced upon her as a Korean American woman. While some of the essays in this collection are more argumentative than others, all of the essays are what Eula Biss calls, “a record of a well-stocked, careful mind working across a particular problem.” And Hong’s mind is expansive. She says, “I began this book as a dare to myself. I still clung to a prejudice that writing about my race was minor and non-urgent, a defense I had to pry open to see what throbbed beneath it.” Hong interrogates dominant ideologies through fragmentation and juxtaposition. She thematically weaves nonlinear threads of personal narrative, cultural criticism, literary criticism, history, popular culture, and current events to reveal the intricate inner workings of our capitalist white supremacist patriarchy.

Poets have a way of capturing the essence of a feeling, which arguably can conjure a deeper understanding and consciousness than narrative. Hong laces her poetic sensibility into every page of Minor Feelings. Her fragmentary lyrical essay form is itself an act of resistance, a subversion of the traditional, authoritative, linear essay that argues a singular truth. The neat narrative of immigrants leaving their troubles behind and finding success in America dehumanizes immigrants. She says, “To truthfully write about race, I almost have to write against narrative.” Without a singular narrative to follow, readers can’t predict an outcome and instead must follow the writer’s lead. The mosaic of fragments in each essay and the collection of essays as a whole allow Hong to give equal weight to the various aspects of her identity as a woman, a Korean American, an immigrant, and an artist.

Hong’s essays explore how white dominant society uses Asian Americans as the “Model Minority” and submissive pleasers to justify the oppression of African Americans and to erase Asian Americans’ experiences with racism. Hong explains that the covert racism in combination with the overt racism Asian Americans encounter on a daily basis leads to internalized oppression and shame. “Racial self-hatred,” Hong explains, “is seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy.” She then weaves anecdotes with historical and current anti-Asian policies to illustrate the damaging effects of racist practices and policies.

In “Stand Up,” Hong defines “minor feelings” as “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, build from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned and dismissed.” By naming this phenomenon she acknowledges the experiences of her readers of color and the commonalities in their oppression while challenging white readers to examine their ties to white supremacy. Naming the microaggressions and institutional racism people of color endure renders them visible.

Hong masterfully rejects white innocence, which allows white people see their point of view as universal, nonracial, and see their advantages as earned. In “An Education,” she states, “The avant-garde genealogy could be tracked through stories of bad-boy white artists who ‘got away with it’” because of their positionality and their “access to power.” Therefore, Hong not only holds artists accountable for reinforcing white cultural hegemony, she also shows how racism is embedded in the institutions. Hong zooms into her personal experiences learning English or studying art and then zooming out to show experiences of other Asian American artists giving readers the scope of the problem. Even in positions of power, even after establishing their authority and talent, Asian Americans are constantly undermined. As Hong collages her life with other Asian Americans and with historical events, she also questions her authority and her ability to speak to the Asian American experience, which includes people from a broad range of geographic locations, cultures, and ethnicities. Hong manages to find a delicate balance between calling out whiteness, arguing with herself on the page, and honest reflection, which makes readers trust that she’s done her homework, both internally and externally.

Hong’s journey as an artist learning to confront and resist dominant ideology and celebrate her identity is equally compelling. Hong, like all writers/artists of color, was expected to cater to a white audience by including racial and ethnic markers in her work. In college, Hong learned that she didn’t have to “‘translate’” her life. Her poetry professor Myung Mi Kim taught her, “Illegibility was a political act.” Hong’s exposure to artists, friends, and professors of color was an awakening for her. Hong writes about her relationship with Erin and Helen, her two Asian American roommates, which was often complicated—most of their issues can be attributed to generational trauma and difficulty in finding their way in our white supremacist patriarchy. Their complexities make them human. Ultimately, they took each other seriously as artists and pushed each other to continue to perfect their craft, which gave them “the confidence of white men.” Helen and Erin helped Hong learn to quiet the insecurities caused by being questioned relentlessly and disregarded, so she could overcome uninformed criticism from white peers and professors.

Hong celebrates the artists and activists of color that have helped her find her voice. Within her beautiful tribute to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is a warning about the dominant culture’s tendency to boil radical artists and activists into their most convenient and palatable attributes. Like activist and scholar Vincent Harding does to Martin Luther King Jr. in Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero, Hong humanizes Cha to combat the mythic avant-garde heroine she’s become. Hong writes, “we must confront the white capitalist infrastructure that has erased us” and show “that our inner consciousness is knotted with contradictions.” As she celebrates those that have influenced her, she calls for solidarity. “If the Asian American consciousness must be emancipated,” she believes, “we must free ourselves of our conditional existence.”

David Mara in A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing says, “Literature can function as a pleasure that reinforces the existing structures of power and perceptions of our reality, or it can function as pleasure that comes from exposing those structures by expanding our sense of and understand of our reality.” Minor Feelings is an example of literature that exposes our sense of reality. Hong’s willingness to tackle vulnerabilities and work through self-doubt and contradictory ideas on the page makes Minor Feelings a model for people interested in understanding whiteness, the dynamics of unequal power, the ways we internalize our dominant or oppressive positions, and how we interact with each other.

Kate Carmody is a writer, teacher, and activist. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Lady/Liberty/Lit, Stain’d Arts, and Lunch Ticket. She received her MFA from Antioch University in Los Angeles. She lives in Denver, Colorado with her husband and dog. The three of them are in a band called Datafacer. Find her on Twitter at @KateCarmody8.