Minor Feelings: a Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition

From a white perspective, Hong’s father is an example of the “so-called model immigrant” who has been called “a gentleman for his quiet charisma and kindness, a personality he cultivated from years of selling life insurance and dry-cleaning supplies to Americans of all manner of race and class” (14). He became so financially successful that he was able to provide Hong and her sister with private high school and college educations.

However, Hong knows that he harbors anger owing to his lived experiences of hardship. These include extreme childhood poverty in Korea and enduring traumatic incidents in the Korean War, such as seeing his father held at gunpoint by American soldiers because he was mistaken for a Communist. Hong’s father forged his way into the United States by pretending to be a mechanic. He worked as an assistant mechanic and a Koreatown life insurance salesman before finally opening his own dry-cleaning supplies business. The cost of working so many hours led to heavy drinking and problems with his wife.

Hong’s relationship with her father has been mixed; she feels some affinity with him because he is a hard worker who wanted to be a poet like her. However, as a child she resented his long absences which forced her to spend more time with her mother, and was even suspicious of his activities. She writes that she scrutinized her father as a white racist might when she mistook his Korean herbal medicine for drugs and imagined that his long absences from home were caused by his involvement in the drug trade.

Hong’s mother emigrated with Hong’s father to the United States. However, she never integrated to the same level and spoke English imperfectly. Her first baby, a boy, died in infancy and part of Hong’s feeling of indebtedness stems from feeling that “I was born into a deficit because I was a daughter rather than the son to replace my parents’ dead son” (185). Hong’s difficult relationship with her mother and her desire to forget her is reflected in the fragmentary nature of the latter’s appearance in the text. Hong admits that her mother was behind much of her adolescent unhappiness and resists the notion that “an Asian American narrative always [has] to return to the mother” (118). Hong would prefer to tell her narrative through her own experiences and her relationships with other Asian women. This is a measure that protects Hong and her narrative from being hijacked by the force of her mother. Nevertheless, Hong’s mother’s impact is conveyed in interludes of shocking facts, which are not explained or elaborated on. For example, her mother “beat my sister and me with a fury intended for my father” (14). There are also indications that Hong’s mother battled severe undiagnosed mental health issues—evident in dangerous, erratic actions such as “nearly crashing into another car” while Hong was in the passenger seat “threatening she was going to kill us both” (119). A traumatized Hong reacted to her mother’s behavior by seeking refuge in art.

Hong’s mother is also evident in the text through her absence. For example, when Hong becomes a mother herself, she has to begin such maternal traditions as reading and playing with her daughter, because these were absent from her own childhood. She considers that while she is “staging happy memories” for her daughter rather than passing them on, her parents were engaged in a similar task, although “their idea of providing for me was vastly more fundamental: food, shelter, school” (67).

The African American standup comedian Richard Pryor (1940-2005) was a role model to Hong during her tenure as a trainee poet. Pryor, who grew up the son of a sex worker, became famous for comedy acts which addressed racial issues head-on. Unlike the modernist poets of Hong’s curriculum who were venerated for erasing their identity, Pryor experimented with character while remaining unequivocally Black. He also directly addressed the audience, rather than neglecting them in the manner of poets, “drawing on the audience’s responses and discomfort for material” (43). After many attempts, Hong realized that the white anonymizing model would not function well for an Asian woman who was conspicuous for her race. Pryor’s more confrontational attitude modeled how to go beyond seeking white people’s approval. This gave Hong license to experiment with novel literary forms in order to better suit her subject matter.

Erin is “a tall Taiwanese goth girl with an asymmetrical bob who wore a full-length charcoal vintage negligee” (110). She first caught Hong’s eye at an art summer camp in Maine when they were both still in high school. Erin grew up in the Long Island suburbs and her parents, computer programmers, were the same type of “strict immigrants” as Hong’s (111). A talented visual artist, Erin was influenced by Surrealists like Max Ernst and painted humanoid bird figures.

However, it was not until Oberlin College that Erin and Hong formed an artistic collective along with Helen, another Asian student. Erin and Helen were the stars of the art department who ended up adored by their professors and “feared” by their white classmates who “without caring that it was racially insensitive […] passive-aggressively mixed up Erin for Helen or Helen for Erin”, labelling them “the Twins” (121). On graduating, Erin forged a career for herself and showed her work in galleries around Europe.

While Erin seemed confident and outspoken, there were aspects to her behavior that suggested the opposite. For example, she had a series of codependent relationships with white men in college, who were possessive and expected her to do their domestic chores. Also, Erin, who goes by a pseudonym in Hong’s book, insisted that the latter did not mention her family tragedy in the manuscript. Erin felt that it was so important that as an artist of color, her work does not get conflated with her biography, that she threatened to revoke her friendship if Hong revealed her secret. While Hong wanted to expose Erin’s secret in order to make a case for Asian vulnerability, Erin’s impassioned refusal instead exposes a personality that is just as strong and determined as Hong’s.

Helen, the third member of Erin and Hong’s artistic trio had a volatile temperament that effectively ended her friendship with Hong as soon as college was over. Helen was a Korean international student who lived in six different countries and initially came to Oberlin to train as a classical violinist; however, she soon exchanged this vocation for visual art. While Helen was a brilliant artist, who made white, luminous sculptures and was able to reconstruct her artworks within a month after they were accidentally disposed of, she was personally insecure. She copied Erin’s look for years until senior year, when she “came into her own glamorously butch look” (117). She consistently tried to starve herself to live up to her own waifish ideal, experimented with drugs and different types of relationships, and threatened to commit suicide many times. She suffered from a variously diagnosed mental health issue, which bordered on bipolar and borderline personality disorder. While Hong felt uncannily close to Helen, confiding in her feelings about her mother, Helen’s unpredictable, often dangerous behavior became an extreme source of anxiety.

While Hong secretly wished to distance herself from Helen in order to look after herself, she admitted that Helen’s “temperament was distinctly familial to me. She could be me, if I could unzip my skin and release all my fury” (128). Hong was relieved when Helen vanished from her life after graduation; however, she still has nightmares where Helen is angry at her.

Born in 1957, Myung Mi Kim is a Korean American poet who was born in Seoul and emigrated to the United States at age nine. She is known for her post-modern avant-garde poetry which explores notions of dislocation and colonialization. She was a visiting professor at the poetry workshop Hong and Erin enrolled in at Oberlin College. At the time, she was “in her late thirties, a ministerial-looking woman with closely cropped hair and a long black skirt” (139). Kim was a pivotal figure for Hong’s poetry, and even many years later after Hong had attended the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop, she stood out to her as a mentor. Kim inspired Hong for her “talk on silence that ripped the page of literary history in half for me” (139). She was also the first mentor who suggested the radical idea that Hong did not need to sound white or “‘translate’ my experiences so that they sounded accessible to a white audience” (139). Hong admits that for years she tried to imitate Kim’s style, and when Kim introduced her to the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Hong began to trace a lineage of Korean American poets through Cha, Kim, and herself.