Minor Feelings: a Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2020

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Essay Summaries & Analyses

Essays 1-2

Essays 3-4

Essays 5-7

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Essays 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Essay 3 Summary: “The End of White Innocence”

Hong considers that only white children in America are privileged with a childhood that is free from care and self-consciousness. Like other people of color, Hong felt like she grew up “outside the model of the enshrined white child” and that she looked “sideways” at white childhood with envious eyes (68). Hong, whose childhood was full of duty and devoid of tender, playful moments with her parents, feels an “uncanny weightlessness” where nostalgic memories should be (67). As the mother of a four-year-old girl, she tries to recreate these missing scenes with her daughter, while realizing that her own parents also tried to give her what they missed from their childhoods—namely, the fundamentals of food, shelter, and education.

Hong finds that white literary and popular culture is obsessed with childhood and solipsistically indulgent about its ending. As part of the New Sincerity movement of the mid-aughts, writers and filmmakers traveled back in time to hallowed visions of childhood when white people’s majority standing in America was unthreatened. For example, Wes Anderson’s film, Moonrise Kingdom, is set in 1965 on New Penzance, a fictitious island. The film, which shows two 12-year-olds falling in love, is entirely devoid of people of color. The film’s mood is completely ahistorical, as 1965 was the year when race was at the forefront of most Americans’ minds. It was a year of enthusiastic Civil Rights activism, race riots, and President Johnson’s approval of the Hart-Celler Act, which lifted the racist immigration bans that limited the number of Asians coming into the country. Since the lifting of the bans, more than 90 percent of immigrants have come from outside Europe, and the Pew Research Center predicts that by 2050 white Americans will be the minority. Hong thus reads the whiteness of Anderson’s childhood idyll “as if the Neverland of New Penzance is the last imperiled island before the incoming storm of minorities floods in” (73). She cannot help seeing the film as “fetishizing an era when the nation was violently hostile to anyone different” (73).

Hong perceives that white people often grant themselves the privilege of an extended innocence when it comes to racial matters. She cites Basil Bernstein’s definition of innocence, which is “not just an ‘absence of knowledge’ but ‘an active state of repelling knowledge,’ embroiled in the statement, ‘Well, I don’t see race’ where I eclipses the seeing” (74). This can lead to a white sense of entitlement, in addition to the illusion that white people bear no responsibility for their ancestors’ misdeeds.

While there is a tendency amongst Asian Americans not to speak about the racism they have endured, Hong argues that by keeping quiet, Asians perpetuate the myth “that our shame is caused by our repressive culture and the country we fled, whereas America has given us nothing but opportunity” (78). She writes that the problem with her childhood was that it was “rather typical” amongst Asian Americans rather than “exceptionally traumatic” (78).

For Hong, the term “white tears,” which became popular after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, denotes “the particular emotional fragility a white person experiences when they find racial stress so intolerable they become hypersensitive and defensive, focusing the stress back to their own bruised ego” (83). Some conservative white people have taken this bias further, claiming that they are the ones persecuted for their race, despite the fact that they continue to hoard the vast majority of the country’s wealth and power. Rather than being accountable for the racism in the country and facing that shame, white people would “rather, by any means necessary maintain their innocence” (88).

Hong feels compelled to address the issue of whiteness because Asian Americans have not reckoned with where they stand in the nation’s racial hierarchy. Socially and economically privileged Asian Americans who state that race is not a big factor in their lives have reckoned neither with the discrimination nor the entitlements they have received because of their race. Such Asians form narratives about how their immigrant parents’ survival instincts aligned with America’s neoliberal ethos, while burying the shame that they feel comes attached to their racial identity.

Essay 4 Summary: “Bad English”

As Hong was mainly surrounded by Korean and limited English prior to entering primary school, her own fluency in English was delayed until the age of six. While Hong was initially ashamed of the grammatically inaccurate English she picked up in Koreatown, now, as a poet, she takes inspiration from a gag site called english.com that showcases East Asians’ mistranslations of English phrases. Hong considers “bad English” her heritage, and is one of many writers of color who disrupt the grammatical structures of English to disturb the linguistic power structures forced on them as a means of oppression and control.

As a child, Hong’s relationship to English, both grammatical and in the many dialects she encountered in multicultural Koreatown, was complex. She was ashamed of her mother’s inability to speak fluent English and found the condescending ways that white people spoke to her unbearable. When her mother was angry, Hong was conscientious about shutting all the windows, “making sure that my family’s inside sounds didn’t leak outside” (101).

Hong also writes that casual racism and the exchange of racial slurs amongst children of color was prevalent in Koreatown. However, she admits that “it would be wrong of me to say that we were all on equal footing, which is why I can’t just write about my bad English next to your bad English” without commenting on the distances between different ethnic communities (108). For example, Korean Americans were often wealthier than their Latinx neighbors, and Hong’s mother preferred for her not to associate with Latinx children on racist grounds. While Hong feels guilty about this, she does not want to steep herself in the self-serving guilt of the ethnically privileged. Instead, she wants to begin to write an apology and create a space in her work where multiculturalism can thrive without the traditional hierarchies. While Hong understands the motives behind the recent trend against cultural appropriation, she believes that true innovation is cross-cultural in spirit and that “if we are restricted to our lanes, culture will die” (102).

Essays 3-4 Analysis

These middle chapters deal with the relationship between white people and Asian Americans. Hong shows that white discomfort about the increasingly multiethnic face of their nation retreats to states of innocence that pretend that the change is not happening. Hong takes British sociologist Basil Bernstein’s definition of innocence as “not just an ‘absence of knowledge’ but ‘an active state of repelling knowledge,’ embroiled in the statement, ‘Well, I don’t see race’ where I eclipses the seeing’” (74). Such a state enables white people to deny the uncomfortable history of injustice that their ancestors have perpetrated and that still benefits them today. Instead of addressing their responsibilities and attempting to pay reparations to the communities they have oppressed, white people enter a state of solipsism and self-absorption, where retreats to childhood and the inner life mean that they do not have to deal with the discomfiting past. Nostalgic endeavors such as Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, set in 1965, the same year as the overturning of racist immigration bans, extend white people’s childhoods while erasing the truth about the nation’s changing face. Then, alleged progressives such as Hong’s white college friend, who cried when Hong became the target of racial abuse, make themselves the victims of racist schemes. In its most extreme form, white denial takes the form of white people’s presentation of themselves as the subjugated race, and taking self-protective measures such as voting for elected officials who condone racism.

Hong also shows that childhood, the time of life most associated with innocence, is reserved for white people. Non-white children of immigrants are treated like little adults by their war- and hardship-traumatized parents, and are regarded not as innocents but as emblems of their race by white adults. In a perverse reversal of this phenomenon, their parents, who sometimes have an imperfect command of English, are regarded as childlike and talked down to by white adults. This in turn encouraged Hong to unwittingly copy the racists in looking down on her parents and feeling that they were powerless to fulfil their roles as guardians and protectors.

Only later, as a poet, was Hong able to see the creative potential of the fragmented English her parents and the Koreatown community spoke. This creole dialect was a mix of Korean and English, but it also borrowed from the African American and Latinx communities living nearby. Hong is an advocate of borrowing from other cultures’ dialects over the “‘stay in your lane’ politics in which artists and writers are asked to speak only from their personal ethnic experiences” (101). The latter spins the myth of pure ethnic identity, whereas lived reality constitutes a messy overlap of cultures. However, given the reality that Koreans enjoyed social and economic advantages that other groups did not, Hong acknowledges that she can only speak near, rather than directly, to the experiences of other communities. Her struggle as a poet is to find a language that can account for all of this complexity.