Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (One World Essentials)
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST - NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER - ONE OF TIME'S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE - A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian American consciousness
"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
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Community Reviews
The second half of the essays were less relatable to me, and those were the ones that dragged out my reading time, since they were more about her friendships, experiences with art, and such. I mean, the writing was fine. I just couldn't really get into a few of them and felt a little less present when I was reading them.
This book was truly so intense. At times cathartic, at others maddening or sickening, and still at others funny. I was on a rollercoaster ride through most of it. She adds a lot of really painful and shocking history (recent and old) in the book, I think those parts were the hardest to read.
She also phrased some things about racism and feelings of racism as an Asian-American so well, and those were the parts I felt catharsis from. For example, how we feel about our parents as less and less of heroes and more as people we need to protect in this country because of their inability to fit in perfectly or fight against racism. There were so many points made that had me feeling like I needed to read it over and over and reflect on it for longer.
I want to recommend this book to everyone, but at the same time it was so heartbreaking, infuriating, and shocking, that I need to disclose trigger warnings with the recommendation. If you have not read this book yet, please know that it’s been a life-changing book for many many people, and is truly an important work of modern American literary history.
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