Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong | Book Review
Credit: Penguin Random House
Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong
About the Book - Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.
Binding these essays together is Hong’s theory of “minor feelings.” As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these “minor feelings” occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you’re told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they’re dissonant—and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her.
With sly humor and a poet’s searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche—and of a writer’s search to both uncover and speak the truth.
Review
This was a book that I stuck with me long after I closed it. Reading Hong’s essays ranging from childhood recollections to current events, it felt like Hong was writing straight from my own personal experiences. Our Asian American experiences intertwined though miles apart as we grapple with the contradictions of the American Dream with the harsh reality of race, immigration, and womanhood. How validating is it for someone to put into words the feelings that Asian Americans carry but cannot name. These minor feelings are pervasive and impossible to ignore.