MINOR FEELINGS: AN ASIAN AMERICAN RECKONING By Cathy Park Hong

MINOR FEELINGS: AN ASIAN AMERICAN RECKONING

PUB: ONE WORLD (PENGUN RANDOM HOUSE IMPRINT)

PUB DATE: Feb 25, 2020

Cathy Park Hong

SYNOPSIS:

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.

EDITORIAL REVIEWS:

“Cathy Park Hong’s brilliant, penetrating, and unforgettable Minor Feelings is what was missing from our shelf of classics. She brings acute intelligence, scholarly knowledge, and recognizable vulnerability to the formation of a new school of thought she names minor feelings. In conversation with Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings, Hong charts her emotional life as a Korean American immigrant woman, thereby shattering the concept of a single story of the Asian experience. Minor Feelings builds through what Hong names a ‘racialized range of emotions,’ which are routinely dismissed by others. To read this book is to become more human.”—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen

“Minor Feelings is anything but minor. In these provocative and passionate essays, Cathy Park Hong gives us an incendiary account of what it means to be and to feel Asian American today. Minor Feelings is absolutely necessary.”—Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer and The Refugees

“Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings truly delivers news we can use. It will educate some and inspire hallelujahs from others; people will productively argue with it, be inspired by it, think and feel with and around it. Hong says the book was ‘a dare to herself,’ and she makes good on it: by writing into the heart of her own discomfort, she emerges with a reckoning destined to become a classic.”—Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts and Bluets

“Minor Feelings is an essayistic investigation of those feelings so hard to name, a mix of the elusive, denied, unexpected, and unexplored—a fierce catalogue of that which has not been named and yet won’t be ignored; an electric intervention, a provocation, and a renewal.”—Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

THOUGHTS/REVIEW:

When I heard about this book and received an Advanced Readers' Copy, I was drawn to the title and the author. I read it in a span of a week, because I wanted to thoroughly absorb, understand and really read Cathy Park Hong's words in this collection of incredibly powerful and raw essays that spoke to me as an Asian American woman. I felt that for once, someone put into words what I have felt all along but I never really had to courage to speak out loud or acknowledge, and Hong explains why beautifully in this book.

Some of the things that struck me in her book is Hong's mention of the "new racial awareness mediator" when you have to explain your race to someone, and that "Most Americans know nothing about Asian Americans. They think Chinese is synecdoche for Asians that was Kleenex is for tissues". I definitely related to this when I am constantly explaining myself and my heritage to someone. 

The essays come well researched as well and love learning about the history of our country's Manifest Destiny where Hong mentions about how three Chinese laborers died for every two miles of track for the transcontinental railroad, and at the completion of the railroad, not one photo was taken of a Chinese man in the celebratory photos. 

Hong explores these minor feelings which she describes are the range of emotions mostly negative from everyday feelings of being slighted with racial undertones that others may conjure your own feelings as though made up or being overly sensitive. 

Hong's mention of the 1992 LA Riots really resonated with me as I personally experienced this first hand being a witness to how my parents and our entire family were so affected by this incident - and having to come back to our business after looters have destroyed the restaurant. I didn't understand what was happening then but Hong was able to explain it well in the book.

I cannot recommend this book enough. Hong wrote this book with courage and with all her heart - exposing her feelings with honesty and wit. Her writing is incredible and a true masterpiece. A dissertation of the Asian American experience. This is required reading and a must read! 

Brava! A standing ovation!

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT:

Cathy Park Hong is the author of Translating Mo'um and Dance Dance Revolution and has won a Pushcart Prize and the Barnard Women Poets Prize. She lives in New York and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Cathy Park Hong’s book of creative nonfiction, Minor Feelings, will be published in Spring 2020 by One World/Random House (US) and Profile Books (UK). She is also the author of poetry collections Engine Empire, published in 2012 by W.W. Norton, Dance Dance Revolution, chosen by Adrienne Rich for the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Translating Mo'um. Hong is the recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in Poetry, A Public Space, Paris Review, McSweeney's, Baffler, Yale Review, The Nation, and other journals. She is the poetry editor of the New Republic and is a professor at Rutgers-Newark University.