Reviewed by Kyung Lee
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
by Cathy Park Hong
One World
206 pages. $18.00. ISBN 978-1984820389, February 2020
The poet Cathy Park Hong, in her Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, explores the self-alienating psychological recess of Asian American immigrants, who experience both imposed and internalized displacement. Through seven essays, Hong interrogates the internalized struggles of Asian Americans, weaving her social critique with autobiographical anecdotes, historical overviews, and literary, cultural references.
Hong opens the chapter “United” with an intimate account of her bout with neurotic depression, a symptom arising from her poetic struggle to inscribe her existence and resistance to the self-hatred minorities experience. She then deconstructs the myth of the model minority, tracing its origins to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, a policy that selectively admitted professionals from Asia. Hong counters this myth by pointing out the stark income disparities within Asian Americans. She also explores the historical entanglement of Asian Americans and African Americans, arguing that the former were brought to the United States to replace and regulate the latter. This tension, she suggests, was the very kindling that invisible hegemonic white power exploited to manage the racial arsenal and its explosion during the 1992 LA riots.
In “Stand Up,” Hong recounts how, during her depression, she experienced a “shock of recognition” (p. 54) while watching Richard Pryor’s stand-up routines. This moment helped crystallize her understanding of “minor feelings”—the pervasive sense of helplessness in the face of microaggressions from outside and self-hatred from within—which Pryor managed to sublimate into subversive comedy routines.
Hong critiques the “solipsism of white innocence” (p. 90) in the following chapter “The End of White Innocence.” White nostalgia, as she diagnoses, is a longing for “an era when the nation was violently hostile to anyone different” (p. 73). She discerns a connection between white nostalgia and “white tears” (p. 83), a self-pitying impulse to uphold the capitalist white supremacist hierarchy (p. 86). This chapter urges white Americans to cultivate “white double consciousness” (p. 87) to recognize their privilege and the shame it entails.
In “Bad English,” Hong critiques the linguistic hegemony imposed on immigrants by observing how native speakers’ slowed, simplified speech reinforces, in her mother, Anglocentric dominance and triggers minor feelings. As a poet, she sought to challenge this hierarchy through “speaking nearby” and “writing nearby” (pp. 104–105) to draw out minorities from their “respective racial containment” (p. 197) and to advocate for solidarity among minority languages and marginalized voices and. However, the absence of her own poetry as direct examples leaves one wonder about her boundary-defying, solidarity-expanding poetics in its practice.
The autobiographical “An Education” recounts Hong’s sororal journey, shaped by a complex but constructive rivalry with fellow Asian American students, Helen and Erin. Art and poetry serve as both a bridge and a buffer in their friendship that helped sustain their bond despite strains of betrayal and emotional distance, a camaraderie that accompanied them in their pursuit of individual artistic agency.
In “Portrait of an Artist,” Hong pays tribute to avant-garde poet and artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose violent death was overlooked by law enforcement as yet another “Oriental Jane Doe” (p. 164). Within elite artistic circles, however, Cha remains revered as a sublime example of self-inscription—a rare example to western audiences of the potential and sheer talent of an Asian Artist. By breaking the silence shrouding Cha’s life and death, Hong critiques America’s unconscious orientalism by juxtaposing the systemic erasure of anonymous Asian women and the tendency to celebrate lost genius only in retrospect.
In the final essay, “The Indebted,” Hong reflects on the monotony of life in Korea, concluding with the ambiguous statement, “then be grateful that you live here” (p. 193). The statement’s tone remains open to interpretation—is Hong sincere or satirical? Hong also makes a bold claim that Korean soldiers in Vietnam “raped and murdered civilians indiscriminately” (p. 201), citing some 8,000 civilian deaths. This raises important questions: Is she drawing a parallel between Korean soldiers’ zeal for retribution and America’s impulse for vengeance and punishment during the Korean War? As she attempts to free Asian Americans from the constraints of minor feelings, Hong simultaneously reassesses Korea’s indebtedness to America by subverting conventional narratives of gratitude and obligation.
Hong’s anachronism (p. 154) in attributing the Taft-Katsura Agreement (1905) to Franklin Delano Roosevelt rather than to Theodore Roosevelt could have further reinforced Hong’s argument that Koreans should shed their sense of indebtedness to the United States. For this imperial land-grabbing alliance ultimately facilitated the Japanese annexation of the Kingdom of Chosun in 1910, a reason for ethnic Koreans’ ambivalence as they are grateful to the Inchon Landing and post-war humanitarian aid provided by imperial America but feel betrayed by its imperial alliance.
Hong’s work is unapologetically personal, yet it intersects broader themes of racial containment and capitalist white supremacy of America. Her intricate poetic topography, interwoven with history, pop culture, and literature, also draws upon African American culture and literature to make their diverse voices available. In so doing, Minor Feelings illuminates the deep-seated helplessness and internalized self-hatred experienced by minority Americans, delivering a penetrating exploration of identity and its complex entanglement with politics and culture.
At once informative and poetic, Hong’s writing is infused with sharp wit and biting irony, making it both engaging and nuanced. Minor Feelings serves as an essential guide for those navigating multiple identities and offers both lay and scholarly readers a profound understanding of the vast literary and artistic contributions these marginalized communities have made to the ever-evolving landscape of American culture.
However, her arguments occasionally reveal limitations. For instance, her discovery of “our radical history” (p. 191) is confined to her second-generation perspective. The generational distinctions within Korean immigrant communities—first generation, 1.5 generation, and second generation—connote varying degrees of Americanization and their emotional ties to Korea. Hong’s second-generation perspective aligns more closely with Americanness while Theresa Hak Kyung Cha—a 1.5 generation immigrant who came to America as a child—as well as many first-generation immigrants carries the cultural fault lines in their split identities. Anglophonic and Americanized, Hong seems to oscillate between an outsider—viewing Korea as a place filled with self-same people, who are suicidal—and an empathizer acutely aware of the injustices Korea has suffered.
Each of us experiences America in uniquely personal ways, shaping distinct relationships with our adopted country. Like Odysseus bearing Ithaca on his journey, or salmon bent on returning to their upstream birthplace, many first-generation immigrants carry their homeland within them as they navigate life in their new country. Korea is ingrained in them while they go by daily lives in borrowed “habits.”
It is through the second generation that the first generation finds stability to settle and build their new homes in America. Hong’s work serves as a compass for immigrants to navigate the unfamiliar land and offers the contained, isolated bicultural generation a mirror for self-awareness. Her critique of racial paradigms and linguistic hegemony compels readers—whether immigrants or monolingual Americans—to critically assess their own relationship with America.
About the reviewer: Kyung Lee is a PhD, MEd, Reading Specialist and Assistant Professor of English
Literatures and Cultural Studies at the University of Texas at Rio Grande Valley.