Cathy Park Hong Converses With Guernica

Prefacing their discussion, Guernica's Sejal Shah explains, "I first saw poet and critic Cathy Park Hong read at a staged performance of the late Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s cross-genre memoir Dictee in 2011, on what would have been that poet’s sixtieth birthday." More: 

A few years later in her 2014 essay, “Delusions of Whiteness and the Avant-Garde,” Hong declared, “To encounter the history of avant-garde poetry is to encounter a racist tradition.” Noting that the reputations of many poets of color, including Cha, “have long been battened under the banner of ethnic studies but are rarely regarded as core figures in experimental poetry,” Hong embarked on a vibrant and righteous campaign to correct the record and rebuke the poetic tradition that had long ignored, erased, and marginalized these writers and their contributions. Among others, she credited poet and scholar Evie Shockley’s work on writers of the Black Arts Movement, contemporary poets of color including the Black Took Collective and Bhanu Kapil, and the late visionary artist, Cha. Hong’s essay concludes: “Fuck the avant-garde. We must hew our own path.”

In Hong’s most recent book, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (One World, 2020), she has accomplished just that. Following three poetry books and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Hong’s first book of essays ranks as an essential text for this cultural and political moment. 

Hong’s notion of  “minor feelings” complicates the trope of “grateful immigrant” and the myth of the “model minority” before dismantling them entirely. Hong defines minor feelings as “the racialized range of 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.” In seven sharp, expansive, and thoughtfully digressive essays, she explores Richard Pryor’s comedy and the problematics of internalizing a white audience (“Stand Up”); she reflects on discrimination in academia and describes the news coverage of Asian American United passenger David Dao (“United”); she muses on her important friendships with other Asian American artists at Oberlin (“An Education”) and details the search for a culturally competent therapist (also in “United”). The exacting brilliance and forceful truth on display here will earn Minor Feelings a place alongside the work of  Sara Ahmed, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Claudia Rankine, and Adrienne Rich. In the book’s penultimate essay, “Portrait of the Artist,” Hong writes in greater depth about Cha’s life, death, and work. Hong’s words read as vital, prophetic, and corrective, calling forth the writers of color who have been excised from artistic lineages and the Asian Americans and BIPOC who were omitted from the history books: “We were always here.” 

I knew Hong from the years I taught creative writing in New York City. As Asian American writers of the same generation in the same city, our circles overlapped. Hanging Loose Press, which published Hong’s first book, Translating Mo’um, also published my first poems in their journal. In 2013, I ran into Hong on the F Train in Brooklyn. We struck up a conversation that included the strangeness of talking about (and around) race in western Massachusetts, where we had both spent time. Our conversation stayed with me, because I had never seen that attitude and environment acknowledged by another writer. In Minor Feelings, Hong articulates the racism we and others experienced, first in graduate school during the early aughts and later in other, larger literary circles.  

Hong is currently a professor in the MFA program at Rutgers University in Newark and lives in Brooklyn, New York. During a wide-ranging phone conversation, we spoke about the visibility and legibility of Asian Americans; the essay as a coalitional form; the films of Wes Anderson and Mira Nair; harassment in academia; the problematics and potential of the term, “Asian American,” and the story behind Minor Feelings’ subtitle.

—Sejal Shah for Guernica

Read the complete interview at Guernica.