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Cathy Park Hong

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Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

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Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning Kindle Edition

by Cathy Park Hong (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.5 3,012 ratings

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • ONE OF TIME’S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE • A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian American consciousness

“Brilliant . . . To read this book is to become more human.”—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen

In development as a television series starring and adapted by Greta Lee • One of Time’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Year • Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, New Statesman, BuzzFeed, Esquire, The New York Public Library, and Book Riot

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.

Praise for Minor Feelings

“Hong begins her new book of essays with a bang. . . .The essays wander a variegated terrain of memoir, criticism and polemic, oscillating between smooth proclamations of certainty and twitches of self-doubt. . . . Minor Feelings is studded with moments [of] candor and dark humor shot through with glittering self-awareness.”—The New York Times

“Hong uses her own experiences as a jumping off point to examine race and emotion in the United States.”—Newsweek

“Powerful . . . [Hong] brings together memoiristic personal essay and reflection, historical accounts and modern reporting, and other works of art and writing, in order to amplify a multitude of voices and capture Asian America as a collection of contradictions. She does so with sharp wit and radical transparency.”—Salon

From the Publisher

NPR says, “Hong uses her life’s flashpoints to give voice to a wider Asian American experience.”

Editorial Reviews

Review

“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

“I seldom finish a book and say we are not ready for what I just read. But we are so not ready for what Cathy Park Hong does in Minor Feelings. And thankfully, she does not care whether we are ready or not. Minor Feelings seals intellectual cracks while patiently revealing emotional and national secrets I was afraid and unwilling to name. Few books change how we talk to each other and whisper to ourselves. Minor Feeling is one of those books that changes the language we use to reckon, to talk, to write, and to hide. Cathy Park Hong sees us. Her vision and execution are so breathtaking. And so genius. And so absolutely scary. Read it. Reread it. It will read you.”—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

“Cathy Park Hong’s book is tremendous. The entire time I read, I was hissing yes and yes and YESSSSS and letting my minor feelings become major feelings, which I think is the glory of a book like this—it takes all the parts of us that we can barely account for and gives them back fully recognized. It felt like having someone sit me down in a chair and say, ‘Your feelings are real’ and ‘This is how we got here’ and ‘Here is a way out’ all at once. It broke my heart with relief.”—Mira Jacob, author of Good Talk and The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing

“A fierce and timely meditation on race and gender issues from [Hong’s] perspective as a Korean American woman . . . Candid and unapologetically political, Hong’s text deftly explores the explosive emotions surrounding race in ways sure to impact the discourse surrounding Asian identity as well as race and belonging in America. . . . A provocatively incisive debut nonfiction book.”—Kirkus Reviews

“In this blistering essay collection . . . [Cathy Park Hong] is both angry and wryly funny. . . . Her confrontational prose maintains a poet’s lyricism. . . . Combining cultural criticism and personal exploration, Hong constructs a trenchant examination of race in America.”—Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Cathy Park Hong is the author of three poetry collections including Dance Dance Revolution, chosen by Adrienne Rich for the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Engine Empire. Hong is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Boston Review, and other journals. She is the poetry editor of The New Republic and full professor at the Rutgers University–Newark MFA program in poetry. In 2021, she was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in the world.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

United

My depression began with an imaginary tic.

For an hour, I stared at the mirror, waiting for my eyelid to flutter or the corner of my mouth to tingle.

“Do you see my tic?” I asked my husband.

“No.”

“Do you see my tic now?” I asked my husband.

“No.”

“Do you see my tic now?” I asked my husband.

“No!”

In my early twenties, I used to have an actual tic in my right eyelid that spread so that my right facial muscles contracted my eye into an occasional Popeye squint. I found out I had a rare neuromuscular condition called hemifacial spasm, triggered by two cranial nerves behind my ear that became twisted. In 2004, when I was twenty-six years old, a doctor in Pittsburgh corrected my spasms by inserting a tiny sponge to separate the two entwined nerves.

Now, seven years later, I was convinced my spasms had returned—that somehow the sponge had slipped and my nerves had knotted themselves up again. My face was no longer my face but a mask of trembling nerves threatening to mutiny. There was a glitch in the machine. Any second, a nerve could misfire and spasm like a snaking hose hissing water. I thought about my face so much I could feel my nerves, and my nerves felt ticklish. The face is the most naked part of ourselves, but we don’t realize it until the face is somehow injured, and then all we think of is its naked condition.

My self-conscious habits returned. I found elaborate ruses to hide my face in public, cradling my cheek against my hand as if I were in constant dismay, or looking away to quietly ponder a question about the weather when all I could think of was my ticklish nerves that could, any second, seize my face into a tic.

There was no tic.

It was my mind threatening mutiny. I was turning paranoid, obsessive. I wanted someone to unscrew my head and screw on a less neurotic head.

“Stinking thinking,” my husband called my thinking.

To try to fall asleep, I ingested whiskey, then whiskey with Ambien, then whiskey with Ambien, Xanax, and weed, but nothing could make me sleep. When I could not sleep, I could not think. When I could not think, I could not write nor could I socialize and carry on a conversation. I was the child again. The child who could not speak English.

I lived in a beautiful rent-stabilized loft on an unremarkable corridor of Lower Broadway known for its retail jeans stores that pumped out a wallpaper of Hot 97 hits. I was finally living the New York life I wanted. I was recently married and had just finished writing a book. There was no reason for me to be depressed. But anytime I was happy, the fear of an awful catastrophe would follow, so I made myself feel awful to preempt the catastrophe from hitting. Overtaxed by this anxiety, I sank into deep depression. A friend said that when she was depressed, she felt like a “sloth that fell from its tree.” An apt description. I was dull, depleted, until I had to go out and interface with the public, and then I felt flayed.

I decided to see a therapist to treat my depression. I wanted a Korean American therapist because I wouldn’t have to explain myself as much. She’d look at me and just know where I was coming from. Out of the hundreds of New York therapists available on the Aetna database of mental health care providers, I found exactly one therapist with a Korean surname. I left a message for her and she called me back. We set up a consultation.

Her small, dimly lit waiting room had a framed Diego Rivera poster of a kneeling woman holding a giant basket of calla lilies. The whole room was furnished in Rivera’s tranquilizing palette: the brown vase of cattails, the caramel leather armchair, a rug the color of dying coral.

The therapist opened her door. The first thing I noticed was the size of her face. The therapist had an enormous face. I wondered if this was a problem for her, since Korean women are so self-conscious about the size of their faces that they will go under the knife to shave their jawlines down (a common Korean compliment: “Your face is so small it’s the size of a fist!”).

I went into her office and sat down on her couch. She told me she was going to begin with some standard consultation questions. The questions she asked were indeed standard: Was I hearing voices in my head? Having suicidal thoughts? I was soothed by how standard these questions were since it assured me that my depression was not in fact me but a condition that was typical. I answered her consultation questions despondently; I might have even hammed up my despondency, to prove to her, and myself, that I needed to be there. But when she asked, “Was there ever a time in childhood where you felt comfort?” I searched for a memory, and when I couldn’t recall a time, I collapsed into sobs. I told her the beginning of everything—my depression, my family history—and when our consultation was over, I felt remarkably cleansed. I told her I’d like to see her again.

“I’m not sure I’m taking any more patients with Aetna,” the therapist said neutrally. “I’ll contact you soon.”

The day after, I went ahead and called her office phone to set up another appointment. When I didn’t hear from her after twenty-four hours, I left two more messages. The following day, she left a voicemail, telling me she couldn’t take me as a patient since she’d decided to stop taking Aetna insurance. I immediately called back and left my own voicemail explaining that Aetna would reimburse me 80 percent for all out-of-pocket costs. She didn’t return my call. Throughout the week, I left four more voicemails, each one more desperate than the last, begging for her cell number so we could text about this. Then I began to randomly call her and hang up when I got her machine, hoping to catch her between appointments. I did this half a dozen times per day, until it dawned on me that she might very well have caller ID, which shamed me so badly I slunk into bed and didn’t come out for the rest of the day. Finally, she left another terse message: “It’s a lot of paperwork for you to be reimbursed.” I speed-dialed her number and shouted into her machine: “I can handle the paperwork!”

While I was waiting for her to call back, I had to attend a reading at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. At this point, I was severely depressed. It was a miracle that I managed to board a plane when all I wanted to do was cut my face off. As expected, the reading went badly. To recite my poems to an audience is to be slapped awake by my limitations. I confront the infinite chasm between the audience’s conception of Poet and the underwhelming evidence of me as that poet. I just don’t look the part. Asians lack presence. Asians take up apologetic space. We don’t even have enough presence to be considered real minorities. We’re not racial enough to be token. We’re so post-racial we’re silicon. I recited my poems in the kazoo that is my voice. After my reading, everyone rushed for the exit.

At a layover in the Denver airport on my way back to New York, I saw the therapist’s number on my phone. “Eunice!” I shouted into the phone. “Eunice!” Was it rude to call her by her first name? Should I have called her Dr. Cho? I asked her when I could make my next appointment. Her voice was cold. “Cathy, I appreciate your enthusiasm,” she said, “but it’s best you find another therapist.”

“I’ll handle the paperwork! I love paperwork!”

“I can’t be your therapist.”

“Why not?”

“We’re not right for each other.”

I was shocked. Every pore in my skin sang with hurt. I had no idea that therapists could reject patients like this.

“Can you tell me why?” I asked feebly.

“I’m sorry, I cannot.”

“You’re not going to give me a reason?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not allowed to reveal that information.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“Is it because I left too many voicemails?”

“No,” she said.

“Are you seeing someone I know?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Then it’s because I’m too f***ed up for you, isn’t it?”

“Of course not,” she said.

“Well, that’s how I’m going to feel if you don’t tell me why. You’re making me feel like I should never open up and never share my feelings because I’m going to scare everyone away with my problems! Isn’t this the opposite of what a therapist is supposed to do?”

“I understand how you feel,” she said blandly.

“If I do anything drastic after this phone call, it will be all your fault.”

“This is your depression talking.”

“It’s me talking,” I said.

“I have another patient waiting,” she said.

“Don’t f*** her up too,” I said.

“Good-bye.”

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07VP1SJ4F
Publisher ‏ : ‎ One World (February 25, 2020)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 25, 2020
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 5657 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 225 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 1788165586

Best Sellers Rank: #145,618 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #8 in Asian American Studies (Kindle Store)
- #12 in Art History Criticism
- #22 in Biographies & Memoirs of Asian & Asian American

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4.5 3,012 ratings

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Nance

An essential read

Reviewed in the United States on May 29, 2020

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Cathy Park Hong unpacks, confronts, and dismantles the “model minority” myth and fearlessly explores the complexities of being Asian in America while examining and updating race, capitalism and identity to the 21st century. Each essay is so layered and beautifully written, delving into the variegated truths and contradictions of Asian American identity and weaving personal memories and reflections with historical and current events and cultural and social criticism.

Minor Feelings is many things, it’s hard to put into words, or words that can adequately convey how powerful and brilliant it is. Reading Minor Feelings was so deeply gratifying, satisfying, inspiring, empowering, and illuminating. I felt exposed and profoundly recognized as each essay, each page, each passage peeled away a layer to distant internalized feelings, “ugly feelings” that I had have never reckoned with or known how to even acknowledge. Minor Feelings articulates these emotions and experiences into sharp focus, where I felt overwhelmed as I wasn’t prepared to feel so seen, where my invisible self became visible. Hong’s essays have equipped me with something that I’ve been searching for, a voice. Mira Jacob writes, “[Minor Feelings] takes all the parts of us that we can barely account for and gives them back fully recognized. It felt like having someone sit me down in a chair and say ‘You’re feelings are real’ and ‘This is how we got here’ and Here is a way out’ all at once…” Minor Feelings is an essential read, now more than ever.

49 people found this helpful

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Marv B

Exceptionally written

Reviewed in the United States on July 14, 2023

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I truly enjoyed this book. I learned so much and was called out on my own biases. Very appreciative of the interweaving of history, personal experience, comedy, and difficult topics. Also, this author is a true wordsmith and I needed a dictionary - very evident that she is an academic!

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Darlene Asselin

a tough but worthwhile read

Reviewed in the United States on April 17, 2024

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I’m so glad I read this book as it’s just as important, albeit very different, book as Caste. Both tackle the uncomfortable topics of history, racism, and privileges allowed to some people through our social hierarchy.

Minor Feelings felt so much more visceral and personal than Caste did to me. While Isabelle Wilkerson relayed some of her personal experiences into the book, Caste was a more wonky piece than this book. Hong makes a point throughout the book of highlighting her rage at both the disrespects and gaslighting of Asian Americans (a questionable term, as she repeats through the book). The emotions are immediate and unfiltered in Minor Feelings and that’s one of the reasons it got uncomfortable

I also have never felt so dumb reading a book. I didn’t recognize so many authors and artists and poets that she references and quotes, even as I consider myself a reasonably well-read person. Plus there were a number of words where I had to pull up the dictionary, included Calibanize. Her depth and use of English language is amazing, even as she says she wants to break it.

I’m not a huge essay reader and I enjoyed her chapters that were leaning more in to the memoir. Overall, I’d reccomend this book to nearly everyone. As Hong quotes in the book, “you can’t do better unless you know better.”

One person found this helpful

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Amazon customer

Item in great condition, received quickly

Reviewed in the United States on March 1, 2024

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Item as described, prompt shipping.

Reviewed in the United States on December 6, 2023

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It’s a book that needs to be re-read to interpret the depth of the “minor”, as in “minority” feeelings. it’s not a novel, it’s a series of related short stories that combine to give the reader pause on prejudice towards Asians. An excellent read.

One person found this helpful

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RAYSKAR

3.5 Stars - Very important points about being Asian-American, but wasn't a fan of the writing style

Reviewed in the United States on October 9, 2023

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This book made such good points about being Asian-American. There are SO MANY incredible quotes that really highlight the Asian experience as a whole. It is so hard to find Asian-American books that really highlight the internal struggles of being Asian-American. Cathy Park Hong very eloquently highlights these struggles in a way that ignites emotions and understanding in her audience.

However, that being said, Hong's writing style often left me feeling confused. Hong inserts these very poignant paragraphs of reflection and insight. However, between these paragraphs, there are often very quick jumps between narratives that don't seemingly connect to one another. Hong alternates from talking about one event to talking about something completely different, without ever really transitioning between the two. This style overall left me confused and took away from the really moving pieces of insight that she offered throughout the book.

Overall, if you can move past the slightly confusing writing style, Hong offers very poignant insight into what it means to be Asian-American and what it means to be human. I wish that the anecdotes in this novel had flowed better, however, I still believe that the novel offers very good insight and voice on the Asian-American experience.

One person found this helpful

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marcie maxfield

Identity: beautifully dissected, refracted, and smashed.

Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2021

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Hong slyly opens this book with a sort of hilarious search for a Korean therapist, believing that there would be a shared experience, a shorthand, so to speak - that she wouldn't have to explain herself. But then, the therapist rejects her. Funny. And a brilliant metaphor for the problem of undertaking a book about race - how do you speak about the Korean American experience without overgeneralizing? The answer is to get personal. Hong's retelling of personal experience is visceral. I especially resonated with this quote "racial trauma is not a competitive sport." As a Jewish woman, I could relate to Hong's feelings of being "othered." Neither white nor a person of color. Beautifully written. Her poetic voice drives the narrative. (less)

3 people found this helpful

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A. Mejia

A must read

Reviewed in Mexico on October 14, 2023

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Beautiful writing that takes you softly through the stories of people you must know, I cried and laughed, and related to a lot since colonialism affect all of us non-white people in different ways. I am grateful to learn about Cathy Park Hong experiences. And also learn hints of what I personally should continue to unpack as a Brown latine person that can also portray colonial violences, because it's not about intent but about the impact of our words and actions. Everyone should read this magnificent book.

Ran Ren

best book

Reviewed in Canada on November 20, 2022

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inspiring ideas and perfect delivery!

Eena

Haven’t read the book yet, reviewing for the condition

Reviewed in Belgium on January 24, 2023

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Book arrived fast and glad it’s on discount, but there’s a crease on the cover. Can’t wait to read this tho

Kindle Customer

Do not buy the Indian edition. It's extremely poor quality!

Reviewed in India on August 23, 2022

Verified Purchase

Published by Hachette India for South Asia this is one of the cheapest cover and paper I've seen sold for rs 500. Avoid. And there's no way to get a refund!

Ninaom1

painful and necessary

Reviewed in the Netherlands on April 11, 2022

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This wasn’t an easy read, but it was a worthwhile one. Cathy reckons with all the complexities regarding race and privilege without providing a clear cut answer and while always keeping humanity in mind.

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