Minor Feelings: a Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition

Tension between self-expression and self-erasure is a dominant motif in the lives of the Asian American female artists Hong references in her book, including herself. On the one hand, art—which can be defined as the expression of self, vision, and inner-life—would seem like the solution for Hong’s lifelong quest to “prove myself into existence” and to not be “interchangeable as lint” in accordance with the perceptions of racist white people (8). However, this affirmation to be bold and stand out as an individual is accompanied by a more elusive element that relies on absence and silence. This element is prominent in both the lives and art of Hong’s case studies.

Absence marks an important figure in Hong’s artistic development when she cites that the most formative poetry lecture that she attended was Myung Mi Kim’s “talk on silence” whereby “the circuits of a poetic form are not charged on what you say, but what you hold back” (139). This negation corresponds to Hong’s feeling that her first language, Korean, is tuned into a minor key as opposed to the major, more impersonal key of English. Arguably, Hong’s recourse to silence and omission enables her to approximate the “intimacy and melancholy” of Korean, and thus find a more authentic mode of expression (155). By holding back on certain elements, what is present appears to greater effect.

A prominent female absence from the text is Hong’s mother — a violent, mentally unstable woman who threatens to “breach[…] the walls of these essays, until it is only her” (118). Hong refuses the custom that every Asian woman’s narrative must be dominated by her mother, while implying through this pointed omission that her mother was a crucial, if destructive, force in her development. While Hong seeks to take control of her narrative by replacing her mother’s formative role with that of the girls in her artistic colloquy, unstable Helen resurrected the “stain of violence” that Hong’s mother perpetrated, and which afflicted their ancestors throughout the family’s history (119). Hong finds Helen’s temperament “distinctly familial […] she could be me, if I could unzip my skin and release all my fury” (128). There is a sense that Helen embodies Hong’s worse fears about her mother and about herself also. Although Helen’s input encouraged Hong to be ambitious as an artist, she is relieved when Helen vanishes from her life. The disappearance of this character, whose name has been changed, is similar to the expulsion of Hong’s mother from the narrative and enables Hong to protect herself and emerge as an individual. Still, like Hong’s mother, Helen makes episodic returns to Hong’s life—in dreams where Helen is furious at Hong and in Hong’s unreliable memories where she tends to “villainize or romanticize” her former friend (128). As with Hong’s mother, the brevity and unfinished sensation of Helen’s presence in the narrative, gives the impression that she is an enduring figure whom Hong continues to feel afraid of and indebted to.

Other marked absences in Hong’s text are biographical details concerning the lives of female Asian artists. First, there is Erin’s “family tragedy”, which occurred in the year between her meeting Hong at camp and her first year at Oberlin (122). Hong considers that this event infiltrates Erin’s college artwork to the extent that she cannot write about the art without mentioning it, and so she includes the story in the text until the final edit of Minor Feelings. Erin, however, will not consent to even a sentence being written about this event. While Hong threatens that if she does not write about the event, then she is contributing to myth that Asians are unfeeling “robots” who never suffer injustices and trauma, Erin counters that female artists of color are the most prone to having their autobiographies collapsed in with their art (124). Although Erin admits that in college her “loss was a deep part of me,” she has “worked really hard to separate my work and identity from that loss, and I will not be knocked back down” (124). Erin’s insistence that she will not be seen as a victim of loss is so vehement that she threatens to withdraw her friendship if Hong compromises her reputation. Here, Erin’s campaign to ensure that the biographical detail remains absent makes her seem less the passive Asian stereotype that Hong is writing against and more a strong-willed, independent artist who has ideas of her own. In her refusal, Erin shows that Asian female strength can take on multiple forms.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s curators have tried to perform something similar, in downplaying the brutal details of the artist’s rape and murder to make the work predominate. Hong however finds “the length to which scholars will argue how Cha is recovering the lives of Korean women silenced by historical atrocities while remaining silent about the atrocity that took Cha’s own life has been baffling” (157). Still, a measure of self-concealment ran alongside Cha’s bold exposition of injustice against women. This was evident in Cha’s use of a dialect of English that “conceals rather than reveals identity” and in permitting her sister’s face to take the place of her own in the video, Permutations (163). As Hong’s investigation uncovers that Cha is less interested “in the sensuous presence of her body than its erasure,” Hong confronts her own battles with body dysmorphia and the promotion of her writer’s identity over her sensuous female one (175). Beneath Hong’s dysmorphia and wish to deny the body lie the harmful racist ideas of popular culture, which state that desire for a non-white body “is a sexual aberration,” in addition to the numerous microaggressions that remind her daily that “her attractiveness is a perversion” (174). Thus, the sight of the Asian female body is one of intense vulnerability; it can be either fetishized or ignored by white people. Hong comes to the painful realization that she often imitates uncaring white people when she refuses to read stories about Asian victims of crime because “I don’t want to pay attention to the fact that no one else is paying attention […] I don’t want to be left stranded in my rage” (173).

Still, while Hong understands the impetus amongst Asian female artists to deny tangible markers such as the body and biography, and to make innovative uses of omission in their work, she considers that overall silence about issues of Asian trauma hurts and disempowers women. Asian women need to speak for themselves, so that others will not ignore them or try to speak for them according to misleading stereotypes.