Minor Feelings: a Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition

“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.”

Hong claims that her Asianness puts her in a liminal space where she is neither a white, educated audience’s lofty ideal of a poet, nor even a vivid embodiment of a person of color. She moves from a negative judgment of herself for not looking the part to a commentary about people of her race in general. The generalization that “Asians lack presence” is an internalization of the racist white view of Asian people. Still, this place of discomfort is a crucial starting point for the book’s examination of Asians’ lived experience in America.

“Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy. Your only defense is to be hard on yourself, which becomes compulsive, and therefore a comfort, to peck yourself to death.”

Here, Hong explains the mechanics of racial self-hatred. Seeing herself through the eyes of the white people who plundered her land of origin and declared themselves racially superior to her, Hong acts against her own self-interest. Her constant self-criticism is an internalized version of the blows she and her ancestors received at the hands of racial oppressors. When self-criticism becomes a habit, it, like all other habits, becomes comfortable. It is therefore more natural to be self-critical than self-compassionate.

“Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it’s more than a chat about race. It’s ontological. It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it’s even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don’t exist.” 

Here, Hong shows that educating white people who have historically dismissed the legitimacy of other perspectives about race, is taxing on a person of color’s stamina. Rather than being limited to the easy explanations and takeaways the white person, who may or may not feel guilty about their privileges, seeks, the discussion needs to account for longstanding historical and cultural wrongs. Hong’s notion that the bulk of Western history and culture proves that people like her do not exist, implies that the accepted universality of the Western perspective obliterates all others; and without a voice of her own to describe her own experience, Hong does not exist.

“Most Americans know nothing about Asian Americans. They think Chinese is synecdoche for Asians the way Kleenex is for tissues. They don’t understand that we’re this tenuous alliance of many nationalities.”

Here, Hong alludes to the racist and inaccurate tendency of white Americans to view Asians as a conglomerate group. The comparison of using the synecdoche Chinese for Asians, the way one uses Kleenex for tissues, makes use of bathos to show how white people think it is not a big deal to lump all Asians under the banner of China. Just as the distinction between Kleenex and tissues seems little worth bothering with, so does the distinction between people of different nationalities within Asia, to many whites. This is a form of casual racism.

“I’ve been raised and educated to please white people and this desire to please has become ingrained in my consciousness. Even to declare that I’m writing for myself would still mean I’m writing to a part of me that wants to please white people. I didn’t know how to escape it.”

As a poet who was educated in white institutions and performs before white-majority audiences, Hong feels unable to escape the tastes and judgment of white people. Even the desire to write for herself would be to align with the white modernist notion that the poet writes to explore internal states rather than to please an audience. She feels trapped and disturbed by this insidious part of her that wants to please white people and aligns with the Asian feeling of indebtedness to America.

“When I became a published poet, I couldn’t suspend my Asian female identity no matter what I wrote. Even in the absence of my body, my spectral authorial identity hampered the magnitude and range in which my voice reached readers […] If Whitman’s I contained multitudes, my I contained 5.6 percent of this country.”

Whereas the white male poets of the American canon, such as Walt Whitman, are able to be anonymous and speak on universal terms, Hong finds that as an Asian woman she cannot liberate herself from markers of identity. The juxtaposition of her precise 5.6 percent statistic with Whitman’s lofty and nebulous conception of multitudes indicates that Hong feels herself to be limited as a poet. Whereas Whitman has the potential to reach readers across the generations, her relevance is limited to the extent that it can be calibrated.

“Readers, teachers, and editors told me in so many words that I should write whatever felt true to my heart but that since I was Asian, I might as well stick to the subject of Asians, even though no one cared about Asians, but what choice did I have since if I wrote about, say, nature, no one would care because I was an Asian person writing about nature.

This run-on sentence, with its multiple concepts and lack of periods, formally expresses the contradictory advice Hong receives at the hands of her white mentors and audiences. They want to grant her the white poet’s privilege of writing what is in her heart, while at the same time projecting their racist doubts that she is capable of speaking to experiences outside of the Asian one. Were Hong to write about nature, a subject common to much poetry, her work would be irrelevant to prejudiced white people who think that an Asian person would have nothing to say on a topic that was not about being Asian. This is a form of unintentional racism

“As suspicious as I am, I also hope that we can seize this opportunity and change American literature completely. 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—and stop spelling ourselves out in the alphabet given to us.” 

Hong sets out a manifesto for Asian American literature. She considers that the literary forms to date are defunct and only serve to automate Asian American identity—a tendency that conforms to racist white prejudices about Asians. Instead of seeking palatable forms that are easily digestible to white American audiences, Asian Americans should seek new ones that describe the idiosyncrasies of their day-to-day lives, even as they use the alphabet that was imposed on them through war and migration.

“In Pryor, I saw someone channel what I call minor feelings: the racialized 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. Minor feelings arise, for instance, upon hearing a slight, knowing it’s racial, and being told, Oh, that’s all in your head.” 

This extract defines the title concept of Hong’s book: minor feelings. The word minor refers to the melancholy side of the musical scale, which is opposed to the major, optimistic side most favored in American self-mythologizing. These feelings are the shadow side to what Asian American immigrants who were lucky enough to be given the chance to live in America are supposed to feel. Minor also denotes triviality, as minor feelings are those that are dismissed as unimportant by white Americans, who treat Asians’ subjectivity as being of secondary importance to their own. By being repeatedly told that these feelings do not exist, Asians experience cognitive dissonance.

“I marveled at the harmonious balance of order and play: the parents who spoke to each other in a reasonable tone of voice, the unruly terrier who blustered his way into the home and was given a biscuit. Not at all like my home, which was tense and petless, with sharp witchy stenches, and a mother who hung all our laundry outside, and a grandmother who fertilized our garden plot of scallions with a Folgers can of her own urine.” 

Hong considers that she was excluded from the sheltered haven of white childhood. Instead, her allusions to witchcraft indicate her perception that she inhabited a far more hostile place of smells that did not make her feel at home. She judges her family’s habits and behavior as harshly as a white outsider might and considers that she has missed out on the carefree innocence that is proper to children.

“Because my parents never read to me, I first felt a deficit of weight instead of being flooded with nostalgic memories when I began reading to my daughter at bedtime. There should be a word for this neurological sensation, this uncanny weightlessness, where a universally beloved ritual tricks your synapses to fire back to the past, but finding no reserve of memories, your mind gropes dumbly, like the feelers of a mollusk groping the empty ocean floor.” 

Performing the rituals of white, middle-class parenthood with her daughter, Hong experiences a loss that is akin to a sense of amnesia as she gropes desperately for memories of similar times with her own parents. As she begins a new maternal tradition, she feels a deficit from everything she lacked in her own upbringing. This feeling is so rare and unique that Hong considers it has not yet been properly defined by neuroscientists. This is another example of Asians feeling that their experiences are overlooked in mainstream American culture.

“Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom is just one of countless contemporary films, works of literature, pieces of music, and lifestyle choices where wishing for innocent times means fetishizing an era when the nation was violently hostile to anyone different.” 

Hong here exposes the dark side of the nostalgic past-leaning utopias projected in white art such as Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom. The lack of non-white faces in the film gives white people a reprieve from their complicated relationship with the ethnic Others who are entering the country at an accelerated pace. In such utopias white people do not have to face the weight of their historical responsibility to the people they have exploited.

“Asian Americans have yet to truly reckon with where we stand in the capitalist white supremacist hierarchy of this country. We are so far from reckoning with it some Asians think that race has no bearing on their lives, that it doesn’t ‘come up,’ which is as misguided as white people saying the same thing about themselves, not only because of discrimination we have faced but because of the entitlements we’ve been granted due to our racial identity.” 

Hong argues that Asians risk falling into the same type of race denial as white people. This is partly because of the privileges they have received for not being Black or Latinx, and partly because of an unwillingness to look at the history of their discrimination. This results in Asians having both a false sense of security about their position in American society, while simultaneously absolving themselves of the responsibility to make life better for less privileged non-white groups.

“The Korean girls I knew were so moody they made Sylvia Plath seem as dull as C-SPAN.” 

Here, Hong describes the Korean girls that graced her Koreatown neighborhood. They had colorful temperaments that make the much lauded, suicidal 20th century white poet, Sylvia Plath, seem dull by comparison. The disenchanted trait of moodiness in particular goes against the racist stereotypes that Asians are emotionless and compliant.

“Pity the Asian accent. It is such a degraded accent, one of the last accents acceptable to mock. How hard it is to speak through it to make yourself heard.” 

Hong’s self-consciousness about her Asian accent and by extension those of other Asian people, connects to her insecurities regarding her presence and voice. Rather than having the content of her expressions heard, others only hear the tone of what she is saying and so mishear her. Consciousness about accents and being heard in the first place contribute to Asian silence.

“I admit that sometimes I still find the subject, Asian America, to be so shamefully tepid that I am eager to change it—which is why I have chosen this episodic form, with its exit routes that permit me to stray. But I always return, from a different angle, which is my own way of inching closer to it.” 

Hong admits that her timidity regarding the importance of her subject was crucial in her preference of the essay form. The episodic nature of essays, which follow no singular narrative, thus give her the license to stray off topic and in so doing, allows her to get back to Asianness at leisure. This straying off topic and then returning also reflects the fact that Asianness is not siloed off from other parts of life, but rather informed by them.

“History has to recognize the artist’s transgressions as ‘art,’ which is then dependent on the artist’s access to power. A female artist rarely ‘gets away with it.’ A black artist rarely ‘gets away with it.’ Like the rich boarding school kid who gets away with a hit-and-run, getting away with it doesn’t mean that you’re lawless but that you are above the law.” 

Hong explains why most transgressive art movements have been white and male. To her, such audacity and the establishment’s acceptance of it, has nothing to do with talent and more to do with how much artists resemble members of the hegemony. If the hegemony dictates certain standards and expectations for art, they are more likely to forgive and even encourage transgressions from those who look like them; hence the transgressors being above the law.

“I’d rather write about my friendship with Asian women first. My mother would take over, breaching the walls of these essays, until it is only her. I have some scores to settle first—with this country, with how we have been scripted. I will only say that my mother was broken then, though I don’t know how.” 

While Hong has decided on the essay as her format for relaying her experiences, the volatile subject of her mother would threaten to break down the form with its episodic shifts off topic. Hong implies that her mother would take over the narrative to the exclusion of other elements. When Hong requests to be allowed to write about her friendships with Asian women first, she argues for the inclusion of multiple elements that have made up her identity without surrendering the whole to her mother.

“I always know when there are too many people like me, because the restaurant is no longer cool, the school no longer well rounded. A space is overrun when there are too many Asians, and ‘too many’ can be as few as three.”

Here, Hong expresses the casual but nonetheless stinging racism in the notion that there are too many Asians in a given institution. The word “overrun” is a dehumanizing concept most commonly associated with pests and vermin. Hong, who internalizes white Americans’ experiences of her, intuitively shares their prejudice against places where there are too many people who look like her. In a sinister manner, this has happened in Oberlin’s art department when three Asian girls become the most prominent students.

“We had the confidence of white men, which was swiftly cut down after graduation, upon our separation, when each of us had to prove ourselves again and again, because we were, at every stage of our careers, underestimated.” 

Hong and the other members of her Asian female art colloquy, Erin and Helen, encouraged each other to be ambitious to the extent that they resembled white men in their confidence. However, on their separation after graduation, they had to readjust their expectations, as new graduates with everything to prove, and as Asian American women who were underestimated owing to racial prejudice. The gap between their expectations and reality seemed at times insurmountable.

“English tuned an experience that should be in the minor key to a major key; there was an intimacy and melancholy in Korean that were lost when I wrote in English, a language which I, from my childhood, associated with customs officers, hectoring teachers, and Hallmark cards.”

Hong considers that the English language disrupts Asian writers’ attempts to convey intimacy and authenticity in their work. English is the language of impersonal phenomena such as authoritative institutions and corny greeting cards. It introduces a dissonant major key to expressions that would more naturally be conveyed in a minor key. The mention of major and minor keys also alludes to the white denial of the mixed and sometimes dysphoric nature of Asian experience in America.

“Because of her nation’s colonial history, Cha treats language as both the wound and the instrument that wounds; hers is a language that conceals rather than reveals identity. In her art projects, she regards words, whether in English or French or Korean, as textural objects, rigid as a rubber stamp, arcane as a stone engraving, not as part of her, but apart from her.” 

In her analysis of the use of language in Cha’s Dictee, Hong shows that language with its systems of power, whether Japanese or English, can be put to uses other than self-expression. The images of rigid rubber stamps and stone engravings indicate that language is more the environment of Cha’s world than the inner workings of her consciousness. She describes what is going on around her and so holds back her private self. This tendency to efface the self is a dominant motif in Asian American female art.

“The indebted Asian American is therefore the ideal neoliberal subject. I accept that the burden of history is solely on my shoulders; that it’s up to me to earn back reparations for the losses my parents incurred, and to do so, I must, without complaint, prove myself in the workforce.” 

Hong considers that many Asian Americans answer the ancestral haunting of indebtedness by trying to prove themselves along white capitalist American lines. As they do well in the workforce and promote themselves along with neoliberalism’s promotion of the individual, they fulfill both their responsibilities to America and to the parents who suffered to put them in this position. Performing such actions “without complaint” is an important part of the process, as the denial of minor feelings enable Asian Americans to aspire towards whiteness.