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.