Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong (One World, 2020).
In recognition of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, I’m picking Cathy Park Hong’s excellent new memoir, Minor Feelings. The book’s title refers to what Hong describes as a “non-cathartic” and “untelegenic” range of emotions — including paranoia, shame, irritation, and melancholy — “built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perceptions of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.” Hong describes the “purgatorial status” AAPIs inhabit: “distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites,” and trapped in a sort of psychological “panopticon” — requiring constant self-monitoring to justify one’s “conditional existence” in a world where “belonging is always promised and just out of reach.” Minor Feelings maneuvers between personal narrative and broader reflections on race, sex, history, and capitalism. (Not to mention comedy and literature: After reading this, you’ll want to revisit the entire oeuvre of Richard Pryor, and you’ll never think of Catcher in the Rye in the same way.) Throughout this memoir, Hong highlights the lives of notable Asian Americans — including the artist and poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, filmmaker and artist Wu Tsang, and civil rights activist Yuri Kochiyama — and most of all, her own. The result is a poetic yet urgent call for visibility and belonging. We exist, Hong is saying. We’re here, right next to you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Kim
Robert Kim is the executive director of the Education Law Center, based in Newark, NJ. His most recent book is Education and the Law, 6th ed.
