Washington Post Reviews Cathy Park Hong's Minor Feelings

"When Cathy Park Hong talks about the “minor feelings' that lend her new book its title, she’s talking about the angst of being a nonwhite person in the United States," writes Sophia Nguyen for the Washington Post in a review of Hong's Minor Feelings (Penguin). More:

...Hong briskly brings everyone up to speed. She lays out a historical summary, hitting the usual highlights: the Transcontinental Railroad, the Chinese Exclusion Act, anti-Muslim hate crimes. She explains that Asian Americans are not monolithic but a “tenuous alliance” of many nationalities, with the highest income disparity of any racial group in the country. She narrates “how the whole model minority quackery began”: After the United States lifted its 1965 immigration ban, it granted visas to Asians only if they were highly educated professionals.

Alongside this dutiful exposition, Hong provides episodes from her upbringing in Los Angeles — first in working-class Koreatown, then in the affluent, white Westside. Her tone is astringent, stripping the memories of any ennobling tragedy or nostalgic fuzz. The anger can’t be prettily plated. There’s the time a crowd of white kids reacted to her grandmother’s greeting with taunts and a kick to her rear; later on, the many times a white person replied to her mother’s English with “a fright mask of strained tolerance.” Recalling these incidents, Hong identifies a sharply specific minor feeling: the rage that doesn’t quite swell into righteousness but never totally dissipates.

Despite its subtitle, “An Asian American Reckoning,” the book takes up much of its word count discussing others. “I feel compelled to write nearby other racial experiences,” Hong allows: To “seal off my imagined world so it’s only people of my likeness” would be to give in to the limits of a “segregated imagination.” That makes sense; race doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Eventually, though, this tactic seems avoidant. For example, the chapter on American childhood offers a wandering pop-culture analysis, comparing the insistent innocence of Wes Anderson’s films and “The Catcher in the Rye” with the assumed waywardness of Topsy, the enslaved girl in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” After these discussions of white power and anti-blackness, her analysis stalls out. While Hong does add her own youth to the mix — her summers in Seoul and her “tense and petless” home life — she doesn’t extrapolate from that personal experience to theorize more generally, or ambitiously, about the Asian experience.

The book’s strongest entries have a driving energy, fueled by fierce personal inquiry. “Portrait of an Artist” investigates the legacy of poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha...

The full review is at the Washington Post.