by Sarah Berg, Fulbright Alumna
Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020) is a collection of personal essays that interrogate the contradictions inherent in the very idea of Asian American identity. Simultaneously acerbic and thoughtful, the essays in Minor Feelings revisit periods of Hong’s life upon which a multiplicity of theses about Asian American existence are scaffolded with a stability that might be surprising if Hong didn’t take such care in illustrating each supporting point with bold, honest prose. For this Asian American, these essays are a revelation.
Hong and I have our differences (while we are both Korean American, I am 20 years younger and half white), but the way her topics resonated with me was uncanny—somehow, she directly referenced things that I knew. Reading the essays, I learned that, like me, Hong studied writing and art at a university in Ohio, navigated the deterioration of friendship through mental illness, and is drawn to the writers and artists Hito Steryl, Ocean Vuong, Emily Jungmin Yoon, Jos Charles, and most importantly to both of us, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Obviously, these interests are not exclusively mine, but to read a book that builds itself around a base of knowledge that I already had was wholly new. Minor Feelings’ speculative underpinning revealed itself to me thusly, humming with what-ifs—what if the literary canon was not solely composed by and about white men, what if our art bore the merit it deserves, what if people’s experiences are not in fact universal, but inextricable from the racial identities we inhabit? It made me feel like an intelligent and credible reader, banishing the wariness that can accompany reading an identity text when you are of the identity in question—that anxious second self peering over your shoulder, asking nervously, “How will this deny your own ideas of yourself? Will you be okay with it?”
It is instinctual to fear these questions, but with “an unreliable narrator, hypervigilant to the point of being paranoid” like Hong, Minor Feelings allows readers to resist the idea that a book must be an echo chamber of affirmation or its author an infallible source, a pressure that often falls upon writers of color (I would run out of fingers counting the times all heads turned expectantly toward me when a question nebulously about Korea would arise in my college classes). Some of my opinions differ from those expressed by Hong in the text. I, for example, bristled at her generalizing statements about Korean women being “so self-conscious about the size of their faces that they will go under the knife to shave their jawlines down,” but found that her commitment to feelings—as minor or as major as we find them to be—was a fitting driving force for such a reckoning. Direct, uncertain, messy, and purposeful, Hong’s words grant complexity to readers like me who have been led to believe that they must define themselves by a certain singular “we.”
But what about readers not like me? As I turned the pages of Minor Feelings, I found myself repeatedly wishing that it had been taught in all my college classes, been made required reading for white classmates who took Asian/Asian American studies courses only to gain so-called “Global Initiatives” credits or learn how to do business with China. I thought not only about these classmates, but about my white friends, too. As genuinely well-intentioned as they are, it has always been the white people I love whose genuine innocence (ignorance) has done the most harm. In the essay titled “White Innocence,” Hong writes, “Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it’s more than a chat about race. It’s ontological. It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality.” Reading Minor Feelings, I found myself preemptively stifling my urge to recommend it to my white friends, knowing that somehow, I would end up having to explain such personal truths to them over and over again.
Something my white friends love is “representation,” an all-too-well-known literary buzzword that once may have oh-so-innocently referred to the deliberate media portrayal of certain groups or experiences but has since become disappointingly derivative. It’s something that my younger self wrung out books, movies, and music in an attempt to find before realizing that it exists only at the intersection of the white gaze and capitalist marketability. Hong quotes poet Jos Charles in saying, “It is horrible to be tangible inside capital,” which succinctly describes the sickly disappointment I realized young me was experiencing. Even in the hands of the most well-intentioned creators, I found Asian American stories, in all their scarcity, to be devastatingly whitewashed. Why would I want to view myself as white people view me? It’s difficult to describe the dissonance that rings within my head when I see, for example, Vietnamese Lana Condor play half-white, half-Korean Lara Jean in To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before [1]. It’s an adorable, well-acted movie adapted from a book by a Korean American writer, but when white friends gush about how it will make me feel seen, not even its plethora of strategically placed yogurt drinks can keep me from feeling that I’m really just being looked at, briefly and perhaps from a great distance. Are an “Asian” [2] face and scattering of palatable cultural symbols all that are needed to conjure my image? If we want to free representation from its neoliberal bounds, we must commit to complexity, which Minor Feelings does. Hong thwarts the smug self-awareness that grants representation its invisible, performative capital R, resisting the commodification of the “Asian American experience” as purposefully and fearlessly as she lays bare her observations of it.
Dissonance is a steady presence in my life, but I encountered a new kind when I moved to Korea in 2019. Six months before the start of the pandemic, my face assumed a label I’d never really known: white. This is not to say that whiteness was not familiar with me; it had known me all my life, granting me privilege in ways I denied as only the privileged can. But here, it became frank and open. Where I had once been Asian American, I was now solely American, a concept associated with whiteness in Korea. In the essay “The Indebted,” Hong covers the essential history of the term “Asian American,” which was invented in 1968 by students at UC Berkeley “to inaugurate a new political identity . . . radicalized by the black power movement and the anti-colonial movement.” As I came of age in the states, I fully embraced “Asian American” as me and mine, and when I read Minor Feelings in the early months of 2020, I found myself comforted by the way I was transported back into all of the identity’s bright anger, pain, and solidarity—feelings that are precious belongings to me. But I soon realized that I was so used to defining my Asian American identity in terms of its resistance to whiteness that the dissonance I was experiencing was rooted in the fact that the only whiteness around to push against was my own.
Despite this realization, questions of identity remain, hiding around every corner and waiting to tear their victims into categorizable pieces. Hong writes on page 28, “What is us? Is there even such a concept as an Asian American consciousness?” An almost-answer comes on page 183, where she writes, “And so, like a snail’s antenna that’s been touched, I retracted the first person plural,” framing a collection that synthesizes a careful and deliberate analysis with the singularity of personal insight, rage, grief, and confusion. Reading this book gave me the push to realize that I can define myself, and over the past year, I’ve learned to seize all the questions and pluck the punctuation from their tails, relieving them (and me) of that uncomfortable interrogative lilt. In this way, Minor Feelings is not just a reckoning, but an essential tool, mirror, and companion that has irrevocably influenced this period of my life.
[1] Important to note that I have not read the book or seen the second or third movies.[2] Scare quotes are necessary here as “Asian” is not a definitive physical descriptor.
[Featured Photo by Nina Horabik]