Minor Feelings: a Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2020

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Summary

Essay Summaries & Analyses

Essays 1-2

Essays 3-4

Essays 5-7

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Essays 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Essay 1 Summary: “United”

Depressed Hong is living in Brooklyn with her husband and seeking a therapist. She hopes to find “a Korean American therapist because I wouldn’t have to explain myself as much. She’d just look at me and just know where I was coming from” (5). While Hong has a cathartic first session with a Korean American therapist, in which she explains her depression and family history, the therapist repeatedly rejects her entreaties for further sessions. Stinging with rejection, Hong writes a diatribe in a review, complaining that all Koreans are too repressed to be trusted as mental health professionals. The review is mysteriously deleted. When Hong eventually settles on a Jewish therapist, she wonders whether the Korean American practitioner rejected her because Hong’s personal history was replete with “issues that she herself had not fully processed” (28).

Hong, the daughter of Korean American immigrants, has long felt ill at ease with her ethnic identity. She feels that Asian Americans occupy an uneasy liminal space. They are “distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down” (9). Asian Americans have often been called the model minority owing to their economic advancement and have even been labelled as the most likely to disappear into the white race through intermarriage and hard work. However, these are fantasies that ignore the discrimination and racism Asians have faced. Too often, this racism is projected inwards, as Asians see themselves “the way whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy” (9). This causes immense self-criticism and leads to a mistrust of other Asians. Hong describes the mutual disrespect she and her Vietnamese teenage pedicurist felt as “two negative ions repelling each other. He treated me badly because he hated himself. I treated him badly because I hated myself” (12).

As a poet at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate program, Hong was careful to remove all ethnic identity markers from her work, wanting to be recognized for her formal innovation. However, this did not stop another classmate from describing her work as “hack identity politics poems” (15) and even going so far as saying that non-white poets should be “exterminated” (16). Hong notices that although her Asian predecessors in the course wrote dissertations, none of them became published poets. She fears that she will disappear like them.

A violent history between Asians and white Americans runs counter to the myth that Asians are the most integrated ethnic group. White atrocities against Asians include, but are not limited to, recruiting Chinese people to replace Black enslaved people on the plantations after the Civil War, and working them to death in the building of the transcontinental railroad. Hong admits that as a first-generation Korean American, she also looks at the pictures of Chinese laborers “the way white settlers must have seem them, real funny-looking in their padded pajamas and long weird braids, like aliens photoshopped into a Western” (20). The violence of whites against Asians extends to Hong’s own family history when her grandfather was held at gunpoint by American soldiers during the Korean War, because he was suspected of being a Communist.

It was not until 1965 that immigration bans limiting the number of Asians in America were lifted. This was in America’s own interest in serving as a means to “reboot their racist Jim Crow image” and show that non-white populations would thrive there as long as they worked hard (22). Hong also shows that the problem of racial tension between white and Asian people has not gone away. Since the 2016 election of Donald Trump there has been a spike in hate crimes against Asians, while other subtler forms of prejudice, such as being overlooked for promotion, continue. Asian anger and disobedience are unwelcomed by white people, who prefer them to align with the compliant stereotype.

Overall, there is consensus among Asian Americans, who are from diverse East and South Asian counties, that there is no common or collective identity. When Hong hears “the phrase ‘Asians are next in line to be white,’ I replace the word ‘white’ with ‘disappear.’ Asians are next in line to disappear”(34). However, imitating white people is not a state of peace for Asian Americans, as they wear themselves out trying to compensate for the fact that they are not white by continually trying to improve themselves in line with white capitalist standards.

Essay 2 Summary: “Stand Up”

As a poetry student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Hong finds that trying to emulate the white modernist convention of erasing all markers of identity and becoming an anonymous orator does not suit her. As an Asian American woman addressing a majority white audience at poetry readings, Hong finds it difficult to deny her identity. She writes, “If Walt Whitman’s I contained multitudes, my I contained 5.6 percent of this country” (42). Hong’s mentors and audiences reinforce this idea when they tell her that because she is Asian she can only speak for Asians in her poetry, even if this is of little interest to the white majority at Iowa.

Exhausted by attempts to deny race and identity at poetry readings, Hong begins to watch more standup comedy, where practitioners embrace notions of identity and audience. She finds that the conventional forms of literature in the Western canon, such as the confessional lyric ode or realist novel, would misrepresent her experience, even as they would make it palatable to whites. After watching the Black comedian Richard Pryor, she experiments with structure and making jokes about herself as a way of writing frankly. However, the white audience at her poetry readings do not know how to react to her new confrontational attitude.

Hong is also critical of the white-dominated publishing industry’s promotion of a single representative story for a particular ethnic group. She wishes to “overhaul the tired ethnic narratives that have automated our identities; that have made our lives palatable to a white audience but removed them from our own lived realities” (47). In the past twenty years, the publishing industry has championed Bengali American writer Jhumpa Lahiri as the single voice for Asians. Her fiction “supports the fantasy of Asian American immigrants as compliant strivers” (48). While Lahiri’s narratives present character arcs that resolve themselves through cultural integration, Hong believes that the reality of Asian Americans is better categorized by what she terms “minor feelings: the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed” (55). Instead of Lahiri’s euphoric arc, which charts change, the real lived experience of many Asian Americans is one of a racist capitalist system “that keeps the individual in place” (56). Minor feelings result from the cognitive dissonance between the promoted cultural narrative of improvement and the lived experience of not being able to live up to expectations because of racism.

When she watches Richard Pryor’s standup, Hong occupies a shifting and sometimes uncomfortable middle ground between the binaries of Black and white: “[O]ne minute I’m laughing at white people, and feeling the rage of black oppression as if it’s my own, until the next bit, when I realize I’m allied with white people” (53). This discomfiting middle ground also reflects her life experiences. Hong was born in Koreatown, Los Angeles, until her father’s career success meant that the family could live in a more affluent suburb.

Hong is ashamed of the “antiblackness” in the Korean community and is forced to admit that “Asians are both victims and perpetrators of racism” (60). For every story of solidarity, there are also stories of Koreans wanting to make a profit off African Americans in order to facilitate their moving to whiter parts of town.

All of these contradictions come into play as Hong searches for a poetic form that will “comfort the afflicted, but more than that, I wanted to afflict the comfortable; I wanted to make them squirm in shame, probably because I too identify with the comfortable” (61).

Essays 1-2 Analysis

The first two essays explain how, as an Asian American woman, Hong’s battle with depression is a far more complex matter than an individual’s mental health. Hong feels lonely in an experience that has not been fully articulated and recognized in American culture: depression that arises from ancestral trauma and lived experiences of racism. She writes that much of her insecurity stems from the “racial self-hatred” which is “seeing yourself the way whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy” (9).

Rather than providing an objective, depersonalized view of the Asian American experience, Hong, writing in first person, makes herself a distinct subject with intense wants and needs. She also makes use of the second-person pronoun “you” to plunge the reader directly into her experiences. Her pursuit of the Korean therapist whom she chooses so that “I wouldn’t have to explain myself as much” is comic in its intensity and the inventiveness of its methods (5). When the therapist eventually rejects her, potentially because Hong’s uncomfortable experiences will bring up the therapist’s own, Hong falls into the stereotype of calling Asians repressed in her negative review. However, Hong’s passion and even her irrationality in this matter perform the important work of fighting against the racist stereotype of Asians as compliant and emotionless. She also cites other examples of Asian passion, such as her father’s indignance at being asked about the Korean War by a white American who fought there, and interracial violence in Koreatown.

Hong’s insistence on being distinct informs her poetry and is a function of being a poet of color in a white-majority discipline. Whereas the white male poets of the American modernist tradition preferred the fantasy of anonymity because it better allowed them to speak for all humans, this proved impossible for Hong. At early poetry readings, her majority-white audiences found it difficult to see that she could speak for anyone except Asian people. Thus, finding poetry devoid of role-models Hong turned to stand-up comedy, where figures such as the African American comic Richard Pryor, show that inventiveness is possible while inhabiting one’s racial identity and lived experience. While white poets strive to be “without identity, Pryor is always channeling other characters ‘while black’” (55).

Although Asian Americans have been able to enjoy economic and social advantages that elude other non-white demographics, Hong scorns the idea that Asians will be able to access whiteness either through intermarriage or the accumulation of wealth. She feels that the racist power structures put in place by white people will always be an obstacle to utopian notions of race becoming irrelevant. Thus, instead of progression, people of color more often experience lack of change in their social and economic conditions. This non-change leads to “minor feelings,” which are the racialized negative emotions based on continued experiences of racism (55). While white people do not want to see racism and promote the narrative of progress towards equality, people of color experience cognitive dissonance, as the propaganda of equality and their lived experiences are at odds. Hong shows that such an experience is damaging to mental health, as being told that you live in a meritocracy while experiencing racism leads to intense feelings of self-doubt and self-criticism.