Minor Feelings

"Finalist"

"This is a great example of what I was just talking about, because it was also on the longlist for criticism. Although it has happened before, that a book has ended up on two lists—Claudia Rankine’s Citizen was a finalist for poetry and for criticism. There was great enthusiasm for Hong’s book on my committee. It has a real freshness to it. She talks about being Asian American in a way we haven’t quite heard before. She digs into the personal to get to her political points, and that keeps it really lively. The opening of the book tells about trying to make an appointment with a therapist who is Asian, and there’s only one Asian name in her insurance company’s database. She sees this woman once, and thinks it’s gone great, she’s going to have a great experience working with this therapist. Then the woman refuses to take her on as a patient. Cathy gets, like, obsessed with the woman, is practically stalking her. And this experience seems to be a metaphor for her whole experience of herself in the world. She can’t ever be recognised or listened to—even the Asian American therapist doesn’t want to hear her problems! It’s a charming and unexpected way into the topic. She writes about how Richard Pryor was a really important influence on her, because it was the first time she saw somebody really tell it like it is on race, and not be hampered by ideas of what you can and cannot say. She was so excited about Richard Pryor that she transcribed all his stand-up routines, and even tried stand-up herself, because she felt poetry was too limited. ‘Minor feelings’ is Hong’s term for the whole constellation of alienated and unhappy emotions she experiences as a cultural outlier; she’s springboarding off the idea of ‘ugly feelings,’ written about by Sianne Ngai . For example, Hong writes about the complexity of her relationships with other gifted Asian American girls she was friends with in college. She is so honest and clear, and not afraid to be self-deprecating. There’s plenty of autobiography in the mix here, so I was really glad it made it to our final five."

"Cathy Park Hong defines minor feelings as “when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance.” In this memoir, Hong examines her own conflicting ideas of being an individual versus the idea of the model minority myth that American society forced on to Asian Americans. She explores the trauma she felt growing up in America after immigrating to the U.S. from South Korea; her complex relationship with the English language; and her identity as a mother, a writer, an artist, a friend and a citizen in the U.S."

"I just finished "Minor Feelings," by Cathy Park Hong and it was fantastic."