Minor Feelings

I'm sad about it but this book just didn't work for me. I LOVED the first ~100 pages but then it just lost me. I wish it had been more of a memoir, but in many moments it felt like something I would have been assigned in grad school - which isn't necessarily a negative, but it's a specific kind of reading. I really disliked the section focused on Erin and Helen, I felt like it lost a lot of momentum picked up in the first half of the book, and I just generally have a very limited appetite for thinking about the political climate of 2016 - it's still too charged for me. Also a lot of art-specific stuff that went over my head.

Stuff I personally would have liked to pre-read in order to best digest this book: Jhumpa Lahiri, Ocean Vuong, Claudia Rankine's Citizen, Catcher in the Rye, Wordsworth, and the Wes Anderson film Moonrise Kingdom

In this collection of essays Cathy Park Hong examines her racial identity as an Asian, cis female, professional, atheist living in the United States. Immediately she's struck by how minor and non-urgent this feels. Compared to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and the shooting of Jacob Blake her specific griefs can feel small. She wrestles with this and the presumptuousness to think she could invoke any sort of Asian we.

These minor feelings in response to micro-aggressions are easily dismissed. We're the model minority, the next in line to be white as she puts it. Asians don't take up space, we're still relatively non-existent in the political and cultural discourse. We're an emergency relief valve when things get too hot to resort to anti-black sentiment.

But Hong, tired of writing for an imagined white audience of academia, poetry prize panels and fellowships, decides to lay it bare, acknowledging her racial identity and playing it personal - giving some credit to Richard Pryor and stand-up comedy in the process.

Hits and misses in this collection of essays but when it hits, it packs a punch. Acknowledging her Asian-American identity and exploring what it means to inhabit that space in this moment - this is what it feels like to be seen in such a specific way. It's not something that I'm used to. That alone is a revelation and worthy of a read and I'm sure subsequent re-reads.