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Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (One World Essentials) Kindle Edition
鶹
“Brilliant . . . To read this book is to become more human.”—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen
In development as a television series starring and adapted by Greta Lee • One of Time’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Year • Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, New Statesman, BuzzFeed, Esquire, The New York Public Library, and Book Riot
Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.
Binding these essays together is Hong’s theory of “minor feelings.” As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these “minor feelings” occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you’re told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they’re dissonant—and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her.
With sly humor and a poet’s searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche—and of a writer’s search to both uncover and speak the truth.
Praise for Minor Feelings
“Hong begins her new book of essays with a bang. . . .The essays wander a variegated terrain of memoir, criticism and polemic, oscillating between smooth proclamations of certainty and twitches of self-doubt. . . . Minor Feelings is studded with moments [of] candor and dark humor shot through with glittering self-awareness.”—The New York Times
“Hong uses her own experiences as a jumping off point to examine race and emotion in the United States.”—Newsweek
“Powerful . . . [Hong] brings together memoiristic personal essay and reflection, historical accounts and modern reporting, and other works of art and writing, in order to amplify a multitude of voices and capture Asian America as a collection of contradictions. She does so with sharp wit and radical transparency.”—Salon
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherOne World
- Publication dateFeb. 25 2020
- File size5.5 MB

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Sold by: Random House Canada, Incorp.
Sold by: Random House Canada, Incorp.
Sold by: Random House Canada, Incorp.
Sold by: Random House Canada, Incorp.
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- minor feelings: 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.Highlighted by 5,363 Kindle readers
- Minor feelings occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance.Highlighted by 4,780 Kindle readers
- Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy.Highlighted by 4,660 Kindle readers
- Whatever power struggle your nation had with other Asian nations—most of it the fallout of Western imperialism and the Cold War—is steamrolled flat by Americans who don’t know the difference.Highlighted by 2,933 Kindle readers
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Review
“Minor Feelings is a major reckoning, pulling no punches as the author uses her life’s flashpoints to give voice to a wider Asian American experience, one with cascading consequences.”—Nʸ
“Hong dissects her experiences as an Asian American to create an intricate meditation on racial awareness in the U.S. Through a combination of cultural criticism and personal stories, Hong, a poet, lays bare the shame and confusion she felt in her youth as the daughter of Korean immigrants, and the way those feelings morphed as she grew older. From analyzing Richard Pryor’s stand-up to interrogating her relationship with the English language, Hong underscores essential themes of identity and otherness.”—Time
“Cathy Park Hong’s new memoir confronts the tough questions of Asian American identity. Drawing its title from Hong’s theory regarding the impact of racial stereotypes and lies on ethnic minorities, this memoir-in-essays is a must-read at a time of rising racist violence and distrust.”—Bustle
“An incendiary nonfiction book about a pressing social issue of the day . . . With its mix of the personal and political, Minor Feelings is the kind of trenchant social critique that’s bound to get people talking.”—BuzzFeed
“Hong busts out of the closed loop of Asian American discourse and takes off at a run. It’s not that she doesn’t address the model minority myth, the brutality of casual racism, or the mortifications of a first-gen childhood; she writes passionately about how Asians are dismissed, the lowly ‘carpenter ants of the service industry.’ It’s just that she also makes every ‘immigrant talking point,’ as she calls them, viscerally specific. . . . Hong’s essays make a case for solidarity that begins at self-awareness.”—GEN
“At-times funny, often deeply thought-provoking work . . . Minor Feelings is an urgent consideration of identity, social structures, and artistic practice. It’s a necessary intervention in a world burgeoning with creativity but stymied by a lack of language and ability to grapple with nuance. Hong takes a step in remedying that.”—Chicago Review of Books
“Self aware and relentlessly sharp essays. Nimble, smart, and deliberate, Minor Feelings is a major conversation starter.”—Marie Claire
“With radical candor, Cathy Hong Park critically examines what it means to be Asian American today and challenges herself and her readers to abandon the idea of a monolithic Asian American experience and instead acknowledge a range of racialized emotions which have been heretofore dismissed.”—Ms.
“Part memoir, part cultural criticism, the poet and essayist’s Cathy Park Hong’s first book of prose had me underlining and annotating nearly every page.”—R. O. Kwon, Electric Literature
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
My depression began with an imaginary tic.
For an hour, I stared at the mirror, waiting for my eyelid to flutter or the corner of my mouth to tingle.
“Do you see my tic?” I asked my husband.
“N.”
“Do you see my tic now?” I asked my husband.
“N.”
“Do you see my tic now?” I asked my husband.
“N!”
In my early twenties, I used to have an actual tic in my right eyelid that spread so that my right facial muscles contracted my eye into an occasional Popeye squint. I found out I had a rare neuromuscular condition called hemifacial spasm, triggered by two cranial nerves behind my ear that became twisted. In 2004, when I was twenty-six years old, a doctor in Pittsburgh corrected my spasms by inserting a tiny sponge to separate the two entwined nerves.
Now, seven years later, I was convinced my spasms had returned—that somehow the sponge had slipped and my nerves had knotted themselves up again. My face was no longer my face but a mask of trembling nerves threatening to mutiny. There was a glitch in the machine. Any second, a nerve could misfire and spasm like a snaking hose hissing water. I thought about my face so much I could feel my nerves, and my nerves felt ticklish. The face is the most naked part of ourselves, but we don’t realize it until the face is somehow injured, and then all we think of is its naked condition.
My self-conscious habits returned. I found elaborate ruses to hide my face in public, cradling my cheek against my hand as if I were in constant dismay, or looking away to quietly ponder a question about the weather when all I could think of was my ticklish nerves that could, any second, seize my face into a tic.
There was no tic.
It was my mind threatening mutiny. I was turning paranoid, obsessive. I wanted someone to unscrew my head and screw on a less neurotic head.
“Stinking thinking,” my husband called my thinking.
To try to fall asleep, I ingested whiskey, then whiskey with Ambien, then whiskey with Ambien, Xanax, and weed, but nothing could make me sleep. When I could not sleep, I could not think. When I could not think, I could not write nor could I socialize and carry on a conversation. I was the child again. The child who could not speak English.
I lived in a beautiful rent-stabilized loft on an unremarkable corridor of Lower Broadway known for its retail jeans stores that pumped out a wallpaper of Hot 97 hits. I was finally living the New York life I wanted. I was recently married and had just finished writing a book. There was no reason for me to be depressed. But anytime I was happy, the fear of an awful catastrophe would follow, so I made myself feel awful to preempt the catastrophe from hitting. Overtaxed by this anxiety, I sank into deep depression. A friend said that when she was depressed, she felt like a “sloth that fell from its tree.” An apt description. I was dull, depleted, until I had to go out and interface with the public, and then I felt flayed.
I decided to see a therapist to treat my depression. I wanted a Korean American therapist because I wouldn’t have to explain myself as much. She’d look at me and just know where I was coming from. Out of the hundreds of New York therapists available on the Aetna database of mental health care providers, I found exactly one therapist with a Korean surname. I left a message for her and she called me back. We set up a consultation.
Her small, dimly lit waiting room had a framed Diego Rivera poster of a kneeling woman holding a giant basket of calla lilies. The whole room was furnished in Rivera’s tranquilizing palette: the brown vase of cattails, the caramel leather armchair, a rug the color of dying coral.
The therapist opened her door. The first thing I noticed was the size of her face. The therapist had an enormous face. I wondered if this was a problem for her, since Korean women are so self-conscious about the size of their faces that they will go under the knife to shave their jawlines down (a common Korean compliment: “Your face is so small it’s the size of a fist!”).
I went into her office and sat down on her couch. She told me she was going to begin with some standard consultation questions. The questions she asked were indeed standard: Was I hearing voices in my head? Having suicidal thoughts? I was soothed by how standard these questions were since it assured me that my depression was not in fact me but a condition that was typical. I answered her consultation questions despondently; I might have even hammed up my despondency, to prove to her, and myself, that I needed to be there. But when she asked, “Was there ever a time in childhood where you felt comfort?” I searched for a memory, and when I couldn’t recall a time, I collapsed into sobs. I told her the beginning of everything—my depression, my family history—and when our consultation was over, I felt remarkably cleansed. I told her I’d like to see her again.
“I’m not sure I’m taking any more patients with Aetna,” the therapist said neutrally. “I’ll contact you soon.”
The day after, I went ahead and called her office phone to set up another appointment. When I didn’t hear from her after twenty-four hours, I left two more messages. The following day, she left a voicemail, telling me she couldn’t take me as a patient since she’d decided to stop taking Aetna insurance. I immediately called back and left my own voicemail explaining that Aetna would reimburse me 80 percent for all out-of-pocket costs. She didn’t return my call. Throughout the week, I left four more voicemails, each one more desperate than the last, begging for her cell number so we could text about this. Then I began to randomly call her and hang up when I got her machine, hoping to catch her between appointments. I did this half a dozen times per day, until it dawned on me that she might very well have caller ID, which shamed me so badly I slunk into bed and didn’t come out for the rest of the day. Finally, she left another terse message: “It’s a lot of paperwork for you to be reimbursed.” I speed-dialed her number and shouted into her machine: “I can handle the paperwork!”
While I was waiting for her to call back, I had to attend a reading at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. At this point, I was severely depressed. It was a miracle that I managed to board a plane when all I wanted to do was cut my face off. As expected, the reading went badly. To recite my poems to an audience is to be slapped awake by my limitations. I confront the infinite chasm between the audience’s conception of Poet and the underwhelming evidence of me as that poet. I just don’t look the part. Asians lack presence. Asians take up apologetic space. We don’t even have enough presence to be considered real minorities. We’re not racial enough to be token. We’re so post-racial we’re silicon. I recited my poems in the kazoo that is my voice. After my reading, everyone rushed for the exit.
At a layover in the Denver airport on my way back to New York, I saw the therapist’s number on my phone. “Eunice!” I shouted into the phone. “Eunice!” Was it rude to call her by her first name? Should I have called her Dr. Cho? I asked her when I could make my next appointment. Her voice was cold. “Cathy, I appreciate your enthusiasm,” she said, “but it’s best you find another therapist.”
“I’ll handle the paperwork! I love paperwork!”
“I can’t be your therapist.”
“Why not?”
“We’re not right for each other.”
I was shocked. Every pore in my skin sang with hurt. I had no idea that therapists could reject patients like this.
“Can you tell me why?” I asked feebly.
“I’m sorry, I cannot.”
“You’re not going to give me a reason?”
“N.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not allowed to reveal that information.”
“Are you serious?”
Ԩ.”
“Is it because I left too many voicemails?”
“No,” she said.
“Are you seeing someone I know?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Then it’s because I’m too f***ed up for you, isn’t it?”
“Of course not,” she said.
“Well, that’s how I’m going to feel if you don’t tell me why. You’re making me feel like I should never open up and never share my feelings because I’m going to scare everyone away with my problems! Isn’t this the opposite of what a therapist is supposed to do?”
“I understand how you feel,” she said blandly.
“If I do anything drastic after this phone call, it will be all your fault.”
“This is your depression talking.”
“It’s me talking,” I said.
“I have another patient waiting,” she said.
“Don’t f*** her up too,” I said.
“GǴǻ-.”
Product details
- ASIN : B07VP1SJ4F
- Publisher : One World
- Accessibility : Learn more
- Publication date : Feb. 25 2020
- Language : English
- File size : 5.5 MB
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 225 pages
- ISBN-13 : 978-1984820372
- Page Flip : Enabled
- Part of series : One World Essentials
- 鶹 Rank: #120,622 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

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Customer reviews
Top reviews from Canada
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- Reviewed in Canada on November 20, 2022Verified Purchaseinspiring ideas and perfect delivery!
- Reviewed in Canada on November 13, 2020One of the best books of 2020
- Reviewed in Canada on July 30, 2022In 2020 Vancouver BC my home was called the anti-asian hate crime capital in North America. With 1 out of 2 asian descendants reporting a hate crime.*
Cathy Park Hong takes the time to provide personal stories from her early 20s in university to today in her 40s stating how she started thinking about writing this book because of her daughter.
The book title came from theorist Sianne Ngai who wrote extensively about negative emotions, and how minor feelings are "non-cathartic states of emotion." Another example is when she is told that "Things are so much better here" and "Asians are so successful," when she feels like a failure.
In the chapter called “The end of white innocence” she shares how there was a lot of shame in her life. She also provides an example of living in the USA and not realizing the cultural nuances. Cathy was in grade 4 when she went to school wearing a red shirt with a white silhouette of a bunny. During school a student came up to her to ask "do you know what that means?" The author said no and saw the student smirk and walk away. Cathy is filled with shame and doesn’t know why. It was a playboy bunny shirt. This is common for immigrant children to be made fun of over something that is beyond them.
I discussed this book with my partner Alex who is Filipino and he shared how he was told to always be good and don’t cause a scene. These comments stick with us and start to affect our identity as "the good asian student."
This book is raw and real and I am grateful for the author to share her experience with the world.
- Reviewed in Canada on December 28, 2020Verified PurchaseThis is a high standard novel, it needs a good knowlege of English to understand the content.It is no good for ordinary people try to comprehend.
Top reviews from other countries
- EenaReviewed in Belgium on January 24, 2023
4.0 out of 5 stars Haven’t read the book yet, reviewing for the condition
Verified PurchaseBook arrived fast and glad it’s on discount, but there’s a crease on the cover. Can’t wait to read this tho
EenaHaven’t read the book yet, reviewing for the condition
Reviewed in Belgium on January 24, 2023
Images in this review
- Ninaom1Reviewed in the Netherlands on April 11, 2022
4.0 out of 5 stars painful and necessary
Verified PurchaseThis wasn’t an easy read, but it was a worthwhile one. Cathy reckons with all the complexities regarding race and privilege without providing a clear cut answer and while always keeping humanity in mind.
- Kindle CustomerReviewed in India on August 23, 2022
1.0 out of 5 stars Do not buy the Indian edition. It's extremely poor quality!
Verified PurchasePublished by Hachette India for South Asia this is one of the cheapest cover and paper I've seen sold for rs 500. Avoid. And there's no way to get a refund!
- SuzetteReviewed in the United Kingdom on June 17, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars A powerful meditation on what it means to be Asian in the white western world
Verified PurchaseMinor Feelings is remarkable and does exactly what it says on the tin. Hong describes the small, hard-to-reach nooks of how it really feels to be an Asian person living in the white western world, and exposes them with laser-fine and startling accuracy. She blends a mixture of anecdote, history and autobiography with wonderful mastery. As an Asian person, you'll feel vindicated for every time you *felt* that something that happened to you was about race, as a non-Asian person you'll have your eyes opened to the subtlety of Asian-racism; its systemic-ness, its invisibility and the notion of it being acceptable (hey, the nail bar lady wants your money after all, if she gets your polish wrong you've the right to be rude, right? right?). Everybody should read it and I'll be telling everyone about it.
-
patisserieReviewed in France on October 10, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars Belle pièce sur un thème bien complex
Verified PurchaseÉcrit clairement, avec beaucoup d'esprit, de perspicacité et le sérieux que le thème mérite, ce livre est pour ceux qui se demandent ce qui se cache derrière cette frustration individuelle et collective ressentie par de nombreux Américains d'origine asiatique à qui on dit si souvent que leurs sentiments sont mineurs. Il met en évidence pourquoi leur frustration, malgré le fait que leur histoire le niveau de violence auquel sont confrontés d'autres groupes minoritaires, est néanmoins profonde pour des raisons qui leur sont propres.