Recent Reading: Cathy Park Hong's Minor Feelings

Cathy Park Hong's Minor Feelings is a memoir or, perhaps, a collection of essays about what it means to be an Asian American woman. At least I think that is what the book is about. The essays in the book cover a wide variety of topics and how they relate to Park Hong and her ideas about racial identity. Maybe. Somehow that does not seem quite right. 

Let me borrow someone else's words. In the New Yorker, Jia Toentino says of the book:

Minor feelings are “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic.” One such minor feeling: the deadening sensation of seeing an Asian face on a movie screen and bracing for the ching-chong joke. Another: eating lunch with white schoolmates and perceiving the social tableaux as a frieze in which “everyone else was a relief, while I felt recessed, the declivity that gave everyone else shape.” Minor feelings involve a sense of lack, the knowledge that this lack is a social construction, and resentment of those who constructed it.

I liked a number of things about the book. I also found the book annoying. Let me start with the positive.

I was pleasantly surprised to see an an entire chapter devoted to Richard Pryor since his life and work seems, at least in my opinion, to have little in common with Park Hong's. Again, let me borrow someone else's work for a moment. In her review in the Times, Jennifer Szalai says

A liberating figure for Hong turns out to be the comedian Richard Pryor, whose standup special she watched during her depression, marveling at his freewheeling delivery and his brave attire: a red silk shirt that unforgivingly revealed dark blooms of sweat. She knows that the affiliation she’s claiming is unexpected, but what drew her to Pryor was his ability to channel a range of “minor feelings” that included melancholy and shame. He would strut across the stage one moment, confidently delivering an impression, and in the next he would trail off to let the discomfort linger after a double-edged joke.

Another thing I liked about Park Hong's book was her detailed descriptions of her life as an undergraduate at Oberlin College. The author goes into detail describing her experiences as a art major who felt like she had better ideas in her mind than the ones she was able to produce. Eventually, Park Hong, under the influence of a mentor begins to discover poetry. However, the most interesting part of this chapter is her friendship with her fellow Korean-American undergraduates Erin and Helen. Erin and Helen are unstable -- at one point Helen begins using heroin -- but they form a real triumvirate. The three share their experiences with love and sex, art, and poetry. Here is one paragraph that described their experiences that I liked:

Erin, Helen, and I used to go to J. R. Valentine's, a freestanding diner that always advertised a fried perch special on Tuesdays. The diner had an alpine green roof and a parking lot that collected more brown humps of snow than cars. We were invariably the only college students there, because it was a few miles outside of campus. We stayed for hours as we asked for endless refills of bad coffee and ordered odd dishes off the menu. I wish I'd had a stenographer who followed me so I had transcripts of these quotidian moments that as a whole were more life-changing than losing your virginity or having your heart broken.

Hong writes eloquently of her childhood, first in the Koreatown section of Los Angeles and, later, in a more white suburb. Hong’s home, she writes, “was tense and petless, with sharp witchy stenches, and a mother who hung all our laundry outside, and a grandmother who fertilized our garden plot of scallions with a Folgers can of her own urine.”

Overall, I liked Minor Feelings. But I must say that I was bothered by Park Hong's frequent use of what I think of as English department graduate school theoretical language that, at least for me, took away from the emotional power of the book. Allow me to give a few examples:

These are valid objectives. It was essential early on to foreground the importance of Dictee, to champion her innovations, while deflecting what to her lest the public became diverted by her appalling death.

Maybe I am just tired of Cha's ghostliness. If she's known at all, she's known as this tragic unkowable subaltern subject.

In Seoul, I still found myself cleaved, but at least it wasn't reduced to broad American talking points. At least the "arsenal of complexes" that Franz Fanon talks about was laid bare.

The activist Chris Iijima said, "It was less a marker for what one was and more for what one believed."

The younger version of me would have been appalled by this opinion and argued that biographical narrative is just as artificial as any other form. The younger version of me would have also been annoyed that I'm now imposing a biographical reading onto Dictee as if her life were an answer key to a book that refuses answers.

For me, these examples remind me of the worst elements of graduate school classes while earning a Ph.D. in English. 

So, I would like make clear that I liked Minor Feelings and I am glad I read the book. 

I would like to end with a passage about white fantasy and fear that I enjoyed:

In Hollywood, whites have churned out dystopian fantasies by imagining themselves as slaves and refugees in the future. In Blade Runner 2049...neon billboards flicker interchangeably in Japanese and Korean, villains wear deconstructed kimonos, but with the exception of a manicurist, there is no Asian soul in sight. We have finally vanished. The slaves...are all beautiful white replicants. The orphanage is full of young white boys who dismantle junked circuit boards, a scene taken out of present-day Delhi...Blade Runner 2049 is an example of science fiction as magical thinking: whites fear that all the sins they committed against black and brown people will come back to them tenfold, so they fantasize their own fall as a preventative measure to ensure that the white race will never fall.