![]() ![]() She obsessively asks her husband whether a facial tic that she had in her 20s has returned (it hasn’t) she mixes whiskey, Ambien, Xanax, and weed but still can’t fall asleep. At one point, she describes falling into a deep depression. “ Why are you pissed! You’re next in line to be white! As if we’re iPads queued up in an assembly line.”ĭry and delightfully off-key, Hong’s sense of humor is anchored in self-mockery, if not self-flagellation. It ended in 1943.) Hong’s clipped language makes her rage palpable. (The ban would be expanded to apply to all of Asia in 1917. “We were here since 1587! So what’s the hold-up? Where’s our white Groupon?” She relays a painful slice of the history of Asian immigration to the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries, from the staggering numbers of Chinese laborers who died laying the track for the transcontinental railroad to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese laborers from coming to the United States - famously, the first immigration law to exclude an ethnic group. The stranger proudly tells her that he is enrolled in a “racial awareness seminar.” His racial awareness mediator, he informs her, says that “Asians are next in line to be white.” Exhibiting l’esprit de l’escalier familiar to many writers, Hong dedicates several subsequent pages to her imagined response. Outside of a gallery in Crown Heights where she had just done a reading, Hong was approached by a bearded, tattooed white man who probably considered himself woke. Indeed, a recurrent theme in Hong’s essays is the excruciatingly slow pace of change of racial politics, as racism toward Asian Americans is often deemed to be inconsequential or nonexistent. ![]() ![]() However, “nlike the organizing principles of a bildungsroman,” Hong writes, “minor feelings are not generated from major change but from lack of change, in particular, structural racial and economic change.” The notion that mobility is individual rather than structural is the backbone of the bildungsroman, the personal development novel that has been a staple in American literature since the mid-19th century. ![]() The “model minority” - a role in which Asian Americans such as Hong’s father, a financially successful vendor of dry-cleaning supplies, are often cast - is wielded as proof that social mobility is attainable for anyone in America’s capitalist infrastructure, provided they adhere to certain behaviors. She compares her experience with the claim that Asian Americans are not real racial minorities, a presupposition that erases not only a racialized existence but also the possibility of racism. Minor feelings, however, are also explicitly racialized, described by Hong as “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.”įor Hong, who is American-born with Korean immigrant parents, minor feelings proliferate in the friction between her lived, racialized reality and the reality that the tenacious dogma of American optimism insists that she is inhabiting. Like ugly feelings, minor feelings are sustained undesirable emotions. Seemingly trivial affects like irritation, boredom, and anxiety, ugly feelings are often eclipsed by more baroque emotions in the collective consciousness but can in fact provide important insight into social and material inequalities. What are minor feelings? Hong explains that her neologism is indebted to the critical theorist Sianne Ngai, who wrote about “ugly feelings” in 2005. An encounter with a book of poems becomes a commentary on the dearth of biographies on Asian-American artists and writers a story about escaping to a municipal pool to avoid mothering duties transforms into a rumination about pools as theaters of segregation. At once memoir, cultural criticism, and social criticism, the book intersperses personal experience and family history with tracts on art and literature and historical and current events. Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning is the Korean-American writer’s first essay collection. CATHY PARK HONG, the poetry editor at The New Republic, has published three critically acclaimed books of poetry, the second of which was awarded the Barnard Women Poets Prize by Adrienne Rich. ![]()
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