Jia Tolentino Reads Cathy Park Hong's Latest

Tolentino's essay published at the New Yorker stretches from Cathy Park Hong's new collection of essays, Minor Feelings, to the origins of the term "Asian-American" to Tolentino's own experiences growing up in the United States. "'Minor Feelings' bled a dormant discomfort out of me with surgical precision," she writes. From there: 

Hong is deeply wary of living and writing to earn the favor of white institutions; like many of us, she has been raised and educated to earn white approval, and the book is an attempt to both acknowledge and excise such tendencies in real time. “Even to declare that I’m writing for myself would still mean I’m writing to a part of me that wants to please white people,” she explains. She’s circling the edges of a trap that often appears in Asian-American consciousness, in which love is suspicious and being unloved is even worse. The editors of “Aiiieeeee!,” one of the first anthologies of Asian-American literature—it was published in 1974—argued that “euphemized white racist love” had combined with legislative racism to mire the Asian-American psyche in a swamp of “self-contempt, self-rejection, and disintegration.” A quarter century later, in her book “The Melancholy of Race,” the literary theorist Anne Anlin Cheng described “the double bind that fetters the racially and ethnically denigrated subject: How is one to love oneself and the other when the very movement toward love is conditioned by the anticipation of denial and failure?” In the introduction to his essay collection “The Souls of Yellow Folk,” published in 2018, Wesley Yang writes about a realization that he regards as “unspeakable precisely because it need never be spoken: that as the bearer of an Asian face in America, you paid some incremental penalty, never absolute, but always omnipresent, that meant that you were default unlovable and unloved.”

The question of lovability, and desirability, is freighted for Asian men and Asian women in very different ways—and “Minor Feelings” serves as a case study in how a feminist point of view can both deepen an inquiry and widen its resonances to something like universality. Essays and articles about Asian-American consciousness often invoke issues of dominance and submission, and they often frame these issues according to the experiences of disenfranchised men. The editors of “Aiiieeeee!” call the stereotypical Asian-American “contemptible because he is womanly”; Yang often identifies the Asian-American condition with male rejection and disaffection. Hong reframes the quandary of negotiating dominance and submission—of desiring dominance, of hating the terms of that dominance, of submitting in the hopes of achieving some facsimile of dominance anyway—as a capitalist dilemma. I found myself thinking about how the interest and favor of white people, white men in particular, both professionally and personally, have insulated me from the feeling of being sidelined by America while compromising my instincts at a level I can barely access. Hong writes, “My ego is in free fall while my superego is boundless, railing that my existence is not enough, never enough, so I become compulsive in my efforts to do better, be better, blindly following this country’s gospel of self-interest, proving my individual worth by expanding my net worth, until I vanish.”

Continue reading at the New Yorker.