Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

by Cathy Park Hong

Narrated by Cathy Park Hong

Unabridged — 6 hours, 52 minutes

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

by Cathy Park Hong

Narrated by Cathy Park Hong

Unabridged — 6 hours, 52 minutes

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Overview

A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian American consciousness and the struggle to be human

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

MARCH 2020 - AudioFile

Cathy Park Hong brings a poet’s rigor to her narration of these seven essays about the multiplicity of Asian-American experiences. The daughter of Korean immigrants tells stories from her life as well as from American history, examining the particular spaces Asian Americans inhabit in the national understanding of race. Hong’s delivery is precise and deliberate. She speaks every word as if it is absolutely essential, thus inviting listeners into the experiences she describes. The seriousness of her tone adds weight to her analysis. Through the complex lenses of art and language, she lays bare how white supremacy and imperialism warp the American psyche. It is as hard to stop listening to these essays as it is to remain unmoved by them. L.S. 2021 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai

Minor Feelings is studded with moments [of]…candor and dark humor shot through with glittering self-awareness.

Publishers Weekly

12/09/2019

In this blistering essay collection, poet Hong (Engine Empire) interrogates America’s racial categories to explore the “under-reported” Asian-American experience. Hong, a child of Korean immigrants, was born in Los Angeles’s Koreatown, but moved from the neighborhood before the 1992 riots upended the area. Her topics include personal experiences, from learning English as a second language and obsessing over her scented Hello Kitty–branded erasers as a child, to mining the repertoire of Richard Pryor as a young woman entering the stand-up scene. She is both angry and wryly funny when examining her struggles with depression, hemifacial spasm disorder, and poetry peers who dismissed her first book as “hack identity politics.” Assessing perceptions of Asian-Americans as “next in line to be white,” as one man tells her, she observes that in fact they have the “highest income disparity out of any racial group” in the country. Her confrontational prose maintains a poet’s lyricism in “The End of White Innocence,” which recalls a childhood “spent looking into the menagerie of white children.” Combining cultural criticism and personal exploration, Hong constructs a trenchant examination of race in America. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit. (Feb.)

From the Publisher

[A] formidable new essay collection . . . I read Minor Feelings in a fugue of enveloping recognition and distancing flinch. . . . [Cathy Park] Hong is writing in agonized pursuit of a liberation that doesn’t look white—a new sound, a new affect, a new consciousness—and the result feels like what she was waiting for.”—Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror

Minor Feelings is a major reckoning, pulling no punches as the author uses her life’s flashpoints to give voice to a wider Asian American experience, one with cascading consequences.”—NPR

“Hong dissects her experiences as an Asian American to create an intricate meditation on racial awareness in the U.S. Through a combination of cultural criticism and personal stories, Hong, a poet, lays bare the shame and confusion she felt in her youth as the daughter of Korean immigrants, and the way those feelings morphed as she grew older. From analyzing Richard Pryor’s stand-up to interrogating her relationship with the English language, Hong underscores essential themes of identity and otherness.”Time

“Cathy Park Hong’s new memoir confronts the tough questions of Asian American identity. Drawing its title from Hong’s theory regarding the impact of racial stereotypes and lies on ethnic minorities, this memoir-in-essays is a must-read at a time of rising racist violence and distrust.”Bustle

“An incendiary nonfiction book about a pressing social issue of the day . . . With its mix of the personal and political, Minor Feelings is the kind of trenchant social critique that’s bound to get people talking.”BuzzFeed

“Hong busts out of the closed loop of Asian American discourse and takes off at a run. It’s not that she doesn’t address the model minority myth, the brutality of casual racism, or the mortifications of a first-gen childhood; she writes passionately about how Asians are dismissed, the lowly ‘carpenter ants of the service industry.’ It’s just that she also makes every ‘immigrant talking point,’ as she calls them, viscerally specific. . . . Hong’s essays make a case for solidarity that begins at self-awareness.”GEN

“At-times funny, often deeply thought-provoking work . . . Minor Feelings is an urgent consideration of identity, social structures, and artistic practice. It’s a necessary intervention in a world burgeoning with creativity but stymied by a lack of language and ability to grapple with nuance. Hong takes a step in remedying that.”Chicago Review of Books

“Self aware and relentlessly sharp essays. Nimble, smart, and deliberate, Minor Feelings is a major conversation starter.”Marie Claire

“With radical candor, Cathy Hong Park critically examines what it means to be Asian American today and challenges herself and her readers to abandon the idea of a monolithic Asian American experience and instead acknowledge a range of racialized emotions which have been heretofore dismissed.”Ms.

“Part memoir, part cultural criticism, the poet and essayist’s Cathy Park Hong’s first book of prose had me underlining and annotating nearly every page.”—R. O. Kwon, Electric Literature

Library Journal

01/01/2020

Poet and essayist Hong's family history beautifully details how her life and art have been shaped by her Korean American identity. Among the many topics the author explores are the violent history of Korea and how that heritage has impacted generations of her family, her discomfort and confusion navigating her race as a child in the Los Angeles area, and how race affected friendships and mental health throughout her life. She also dissects popular culture, from Richard Pryor's stand-up to the artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Every page is packed with details and reflections on the myriad ways that Americans' lives are shaped by race. The author has a particular talent for bringing a moment to life, inviting readers to confront the raw emotions of a given scene. She does not shy away from complication or bluntness, but presents her truth with all its complexity. VERDICT An extraordinary blend of memoir, cultural criticism, and history that will invite readers from all backgrounds, though especially those who identify as Asian American, to consider the complex relationships between race, family, heritage, and society that shape American lives.—Sarah Schroeder, Univ. of Washington Bothell

MARCH 2020 - AudioFile

Cathy Park Hong brings a poet’s rigor to her narration of these seven essays about the multiplicity of Asian-American experiences. The daughter of Korean immigrants tells stories from her life as well as from American history, examining the particular spaces Asian Americans inhabit in the national understanding of race. Hong’s delivery is precise and deliberate. She speaks every word as if it is absolutely essential, thus inviting listeners into the experiences she describes. The seriousness of her tone adds weight to her analysis. Through the complex lenses of art and language, she lays bare how white supremacy and imperialism warp the American psyche. It is as hard to stop listening to these essays as it is to remain unmoved by them. L.S. 2021 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2019-11-05
The poetry editor of the New Republic discusses her experiences living and working in a culture hostile to expressions of Asian individuality and identity.

In this memoir in essays, Hong (Engine Empire, 2012, etc.) offers a fierce and timely meditation on race and gender issues from her perspective as a Korean American woman. She begins by reflecting on her struggles with depression, which she traces to being forced into the role of model minority. Working harder than everyone else for recognition as an artist, she describes how she watched herself disappear into the "vague purgatorial" no-man's land inhabited by other Asian Americans. The author details how her experiences developing bonds with other talented Asian American women in college taught her to take herself seriously in a world that stereotyped Asians as "math-crunching middle managers." She began developing a greater sense of race consciousness when watching comedian Richard Pryor, which she explores in the essay "Stand Up." His no-holds-barred comedic monologues embodied racialized "negative [and] dysphoric" emotions with which she immediately identified. In turn, Hong attempted to access those "minor feelings" through her own brief foray into stand-up comedy. Like the experiments with language she discusses in "Bad English," the author was seeking a way to speak honestly about her own experiences with racism in an effort to end "white innocence," a concept she addresses sharply in a separate essay. As she sees it, the United States has achieved dominance through "the capitalist accumulation of white supremacy." In "Portrait of an Artist," Hong discusses Asian female invisibility by delving into the groundbreaking work of artist and novelist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Seeking to force confrontation with Cha's largely undiscussed murder, Hong examines how Cha died while suggesting that Cha's preoccupation with discursive erasure was a manifestation of revolutionary—rather than "feminine" self-silencing—impulses. 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.

Product Details

BN ID: 2940177293974
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Publication date: 02/25/2020
Edition description: Unabridged
Sales rank: 846,664

Read an Excerpt

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.”

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