I read "Minor Feelings" by Cathy Park Hong and Here Are My Thoughts
sorry if i call you corny in this newsletter, it's not personal
If you haven’t already heard, I used to be the buyer at an independent bookstore. I was given free rein which I interpreted as a mandate to procure books that were good over books that were sellable. I turned down books that were surefire hits because I didn’t like the look of them. Let nobody say I was good at business…
One such book was Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings. It’s almost universally lauded and now on multiple bestseller lists but I declined to carry it because of my private petty vendetta against the aggregation of American and Singaporean racial politics. I’m currently looking into this conflation for an essay I’m writing so I picked up Minor Feelings to better understand mainstream Asian American discourse. (Or, as I flippantly tweeted, understand why diaspora Asians are so corny.)
My trouble with “Asian American” as a political formation mostly stems from how broad the category is. Hong and other chroniclers of Asian American history point to how students at UC Berkeley coined the term in 1968 to rally the masses against American imperialism. However, like most ideas that originate in radical circles, it has since been stretched to its thinnest application. Asian American can refer to an upper middle class Anglophone professional Korean American like Hong. It can also refer to a working class immigrant from Vietnam working in a nail salon. Early in the book, Hong writes about an encounter she has with a teenage boy working at one such salon. It was a bad and painful pedicure. Hong walked out without paying.
We were like two negative ions repelling each other. He treated me badly because he hated himself. I treated him badly because I hated myself. But what evidence do I have that he hated himself? Why did I think his shame skunked the salon? I am an unreliable narrator, hypervigilant to the point of being paranoid, imposing all my own insecurities onto him.
…
But he was nothing like me. I was so privileged I was acquiring the most useless graduate degree imaginable. What did I know about being a Vietnamese teenage boy who spent all his free hours working at a nail salon? I knew nothing.
Drawing on the literary theorist Sianne Ngai’s “ugly feelings”, the “minor feelings” Hong writes about are the “racialised range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed”. She gives paranoia, shame, irritation, and melancholy as examples. Minor Feelings is at its best when Hong delves into these unflattering emotional states.
She writes about her contradictory emotions after being declined as a patient by a Korean American therapist. At first, she is buoyed by the thought of a therapist to whom she “wouldn’t have to explain [herself] as much”. But when the rejection happens she flies off the handle, leaving multiple voicemails and eventually a comment on RateMyTherapist where she accuses all Koreans of being repressed, rigid, and cold. She sees the roots of her depression in her ethnic experience and throws a tantrum when someone she’s nominated as a representative of that ethnicity fails to help her expunge those feelings. It’s an anecdote where Hong does not come off well.
Recognition is a frequent refrain in the book’s positive reviews. Jia Tolentino said in The New Yorker that the book “bled a dormant discomfort out of [her] with surgical precision”. Echoing some of the uncomfortable experiences Hong writes about — like cringing over parents’ foreign-accented English — Elise Hu writes in NPR that Hong is “naming the pain”. On Goodreads, where the book boasts an impressive 4.26 stars rating, many of the users praise Minor Feelings for allowing them to feel so seen.
How does one square the admission that the Asian American umbrella term is vastly insufficient for describing a heterogenous group of people with the notion that much of the book’s success comes from its ability to represent? The book’s subtitle is “An Asian American Reckoning” but I think it reads better if you pretend it says “An Asian American’s Reckoning”. When Hong uses the pronoun “we” there is a lot of slippage. Throughout the book, “we” describes Korean Americans, Koreans, East Asian Americans, Asian Americans, and “by WE I mean nonwhites, the formerly colonized; survivors” — a veritable stack of nesting dolls. She doesn’t do this glibly though. Whenever the prose zooms out to include Black and brown Americans in her theoretical dragnet, she is apologetic. When she was a child, her own mother barred her from playing with a classmate because she was Mexican. (She was actually Puerto Rican.) Frustratingly, the anecdote ends there. The reader gets a page break and Hong launches into explaining the difficulty of a facile vision of multiculturalism. The chapter ends on a series of placating but unsatisfactory questions.
Can I write honestly? Not only about how much I’ve been hurt but how I have hurt others? And can I do it without steeping myself in guilt, since guilt demands absolution and is therefore self-serving? In other words, can I apologise without demanding your forgiveness? Where do I begin?
She is, as the Instagram activists say, “doing the work”. The moral work of feeling bad. The Asian American identity is being defined by shared questions which cannot be answered. But ultimately, what has been created?
There’s an essay in n+1 by Matthew Shen Goodman called “American Accomplice”. In it, he writes about reading Minor Feelings during the start of the pandemic. The essay is punctuated with reports of the aggression faced by Asians in New York City as Covid swept through the US, this moment of hyper-visibility directly contradicting a claim Hong makes in the book: that Asian Americans are next in line to disappear.
Matthew Shen Goodman has a white father and a Chinese mother. He recognises that people like him are seen as “so proximate to the spoils of whiteness as to almost be white, while still being enticingly and nonthreateningly ‘of color’ such that [they] get to double-dip the benefits of the current state of racial capitalism”. But instead he gestures towards the “whites and Asians” who are “so comfortable making people like [him]”. America is full of Republican, conservative, even far-right couplings like that. The New York Times even ran a story called “The Alt-Right’s Asian Fetish”. He looks up whether or not Hong has a white partner. She does. He says throughout the essay that he’s not worried about who Asian Americans are but what they’re doing.
At a point in the essay, the writer speaks to his mother. He proposes “something Swiftian”. Total disengagement from white people. “If you want to get rid of white thought, white language, white whatever, why continue to be with white people, make another one of them?” His mother laughs at his “trolling” but that suggestion still gave me pause.
I have a white partner. I have dated more Asian than white men — a caveat that Asian women with white partners need to provide — but I am happy with one now. We talk about this often because its worse to be with a white person who won’t talk about it: what it means that we are together, the optics of our pairing, the histories of colonisation and subjugation that most likely shaped our desires, whether or not it is wrong. I seek no redemption in this intellectual hand-wringing. Mine is a politics of coalition building, focusing on my individual private life is the least political thing I could spend my time on.
I don’t want children for many reasons but I do often joke that I especially wouldn’t have them with my partner. I wouldn’t know what to do with a half-Singaporean and half-white child. If we were itemising ethnicity, would that child then be a quarter Chinese and a quarter Indian? What if they hanker after their Singaporeanness, something that I personally hold complex feelings about? I would hate for them to turn to insipid poetry about tang yuan and togetherness — I have never eaten them. I’ve never been to India. I don’t have ancient recipes passed down from my grandmothers. I wouldn’t want my children to become Subtle Asian Traits diaspora corny. “Corny” is flippant but it’s my reaction to the outward obsession with definition that a lot of diaspora Asians have. At its shallowest, its a type of person whose racial identity comes from trivial markers like their love for boba or whether their parents sent them to Kumon as a child. At its best, it’s the reckoning that Minor Feelings aims to deliver. Perhaps my disdain for my hypothetical half-white child comes from my reluctance to define my ethnic identity for anybody including myself. I don’t care so much about race, I care about racism. I’m not worried about what I am, I’m worried about what I’m doing.