A Sticky Reality: Uncovering “Minor Feelings” by Cathy Park Hong
Editorial book review by Anuska Dhar of “Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning”
A couple of years ago, I attended a reading by Natalie Diaz, a queer, Latina, and Mojave American poet. I remember waiting nervously in line afterwards to meet her. She asked me about my own writing and I thanked her for her work because after reading her book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, where Diaz explores complicated family dynamics imbued with the history of reservation life, it was like a door had opened for me. I finally had permission to write about race and my sexual identity in my poetry. Without looking up from the book she was signing for me, she replied casually, “Yeah, and you’ll probably keep writing about them for the rest of your life.” She smiled warmly and I walked away clutching her book and those words to my chest like a bad omen.
Reading Minor Feelings, by Cathy Park Hong, replicates the experience I had with Diaz, of being told the truth so directly that it stuns the senses, leaving you blinking and uprooted. Up until that point, I had thought of my Asian American identity as something to be checked off in my journey as a writer, something to unpack just to crossover into the pasture of a more fully realized consciousness.
As Hong writes, “I internalized their [Hong’s classmates] condescensions, mocked other ethnic poetry as too ethnicky. It was made clear to me that the subject of Asian identity itself was insufficient and inadequate unless it was paired with a meatier subject, like capitalism.” (16-17) Like Hong, I had subconsciously internalized the publishing industry’s catch-22: the only way to be successful as an Asian American writer is to leverage your own identity, but write about your identity too much and you are doomed to never be known as a “Writer” before being known as Asian American, as though Asian-ness is a shtick that one can take off at the end of a long work day. As though true enlightenment is devoid of the sticky reality of being Asian American.
Hong breaks through this mold and with this collection of seven personal essays, she is able to give breathing room and much needed nuance to the tidy narrative that Asians are alloted in the US. Even as she claims she cannot speak in universals for this broad group of people — “I am only capable of ‘speaking nearby’ the Asian American condition, which is so involuted that I can’t stretch myself across it. The more I try to pin it, the more it escapes my grasp” (103) — she manages to make every word resound deeply, whether she is talking about exclusivity in Hollywood, the imperial power of the English language, or the intimate indebtedness of Asian American children to their immigrant parents.
In the essay, “Stand Up,” Hong explores the concept the collection is titled after: minor feelings. As she explains, minor feelings are “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. Minor feelings arise, for instance, upon hearing a slight, knowing it’s racial, and being told, Oh, that’s all in your head” (55).
Perhaps it is this that astounds me most about the collection, Hong’s ability to validate those nagging feelings, those “minor” feelings, that plague the back of my mind, the ones I am too afraid to articulate for fear of inserting myself into a narrative that was I was conditioned to believe I do not belong in. Hong deftly tackles the anti Blackness and privilege that exists in Asian communities while also legitimizing their allyship and friendship to other communities of color.
She works in multitudes, parsing through the layers of silencing that Asians go through as they are told they can succeed through the model of white supremacy and capitalism if only they keep their mouths shut.
Just a couple months after the publication of Minor Feelings in 2020, the murder of George Floyd and the inequities pushed to the forefront by a global pandemic, caused a crack in the conscience of white America. Literature on race was once again circulated on social media in the hopes of raising consciousness, this book being one of many recommendations.
As anti-Asian hate crimes also increased and even more recently have hit a massive spike, I’ll admit that I felt similarly to Hong once did, “I sometimes avoid reading a news story when the victim is Asian because I don’t want to pay attention to the fact that no one else is paying attention. I don’t want to care that no one else cares because I don’t want to be left stranded in my rage.” (173)
Here in Omaha, an explosive was detonated on the concrete stairs leading up to the building of the Nebraska Chinese Association just last Thursday, Feb. 25. Officials are investigating who started the fire and why. Not knowing of what had happened across town, that night I scrolled through my Twitter timeline, like many nights before, secretly hoping that every time I swiped past any tweet addressing anti-Asian hate crimes, it would make all the violence, news stories, and troubling rhetoric magically disappear.
Deep down though, I knew I would have to join the conversation eventually, and Minor Feelings was the perfect place for me to start. In the essay, “Portrait of an Artist,” Hong tells the story of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, the 31-year-old Korean American artist and poet, who was raped and murdered by Joseph Sanza, a security guard at the building in which she was meeting her husband after work.
It was after reading about Cha that I realized the work Hong was doing in unerasing US history, uncovering the stories of Asian Americans, and answering the question a fifth grade version of me had asked to myself during a civil rights lesson, where am I in all of this? Her writing disrupts with every line and Minor Feelings will certainly be added to the canon of introspective literature that calls us to intimately reckon with our racial reality, perhaps as Diaz prophesied to me that day after her reading, for the rest of our lives.