Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong

Abstract

Reviewed by: Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong Shaina Khan (bio) Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong. New York, NY: One World, 2020, 224 pp., $27.00 hardcover, $18.00 paper. Early in Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, Cathy Park Hong explains the Korean word han. There is no English equivalent for han, and so Hong describes it as "a combination of bitterness, wistfulness, shame, melancholy, and vengefulness" that has resulted from horrible, unrectified forces like "colonialism, war, and U.S.-supported dictatorships" (54). Han pervades the book. Melancholy, shame, vengefulness, and the other emotions that Hong lists become prominent in turns, but they are inseparable from each other as Hong details historical and contemporary injustices, her own experiences of racism, and white America's hatred and fragility. Minor Feelings is not a hopeful book. It is not meant to be. However, while I can't speak for all Asian Americans, I find that the book perfectly locates disparate Asian American experiences within the discourse of race in the United States. Hong's chapters are composed in slightly different styles. "United," for instance, is a series of history lessons and analyses about nationally publicized incidents of racism against Asian Americans. "Stand Up" considers the work of other artists, particularly Richard Pryor, whose comedy led Hong to revelations about her own work. Of all the chapters, "An Education" is most like a memoir; here, Hong tells her origin story as a poet. She recounts details of her closest and most complicated friendships during college, one of which shaped her into "the writer I am today" (149). "Portrait of an Artist" reads something like a long-form feature story, albeit one to which Hong has deep emotional connections. The varying styles complement each other. Hong's story about moving into her college dorm, when her father met her roommate's G.I. father who enthusiastically told them he had fought in the Korean War, gains significance in later chapters as Hong conveys pieces of her grandparents' and parents' experiences in Korea during that same war. The stories connect and add depth to each other, uncovering the fears, frustrations, resistances, and silences that are part of many Asian Americans' history and present. Hong begins the book with "United." The multiple meanings of the chapter's title are slowly revealed as Hong elucidates events in the lives of individual Asian Americans and in Asian American communities. She remembers a white stranger who approached her and informed her that "Asians are the next in line to be white" (17–18). Hong's simultaneous eye-rolling and uneasiness are both evident in her description of the incident. Besides the obvious frustration of having white people explain her experiences to her, Hong demonstrates the "vague purgatorial status" that Asian Americans are positioned in. We are separated both from whiteness and from other races through societal narratives that Hong calls "model minority quackery" (13). She also relates poet and [End Page 354] academic Prageeta Sharma's brief term as director of a creative writing program in Montana. After Sharma refused to accept an egregious act of racialized sexual harassment as a friendly joke, she was quickly rejected as "not Montana enough" (24). Hong explains that Sharma's father had been treated similarly in academia, and the commonalities were interpreted as a hereditary problem rather than a systemic, racist one. Lastly, "United" recounts David Dao's brutal removal from a United Airlines flight. Hong contends that, although social media posts described Dao as an "everyman," it was only because Dao is an Asian man—and therefore seen as "passive, unmasculine, untrustworthy, suspicious, and foreign"—that the security officers treated him so violently. The chapter "Portrait of an Artist" pivots around Hong's interest in the work of poet and artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Hong writes that she was a sophomore in college when she first read Cha's Dictee. In Dictee, Cha articulated Hong's own feelings about English, namely that it "could never be a true reflection of her consciousness, that it was as much an imposition on her consciousness as it was a form of expression" (185...