Minor Feelings

What happens when your emotions are treated as invisible—when your confusion, anger, or shame about race are dismissed as being all in your head? In Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong confronts this question with searing honesty, redefining how we talk about race, identity, and belonging in America. She argues that Asian Americans live in a state of emotional dissonance, caught between being invisible and hyper-visible, praised as the so-called “model minority” while enduring microaggressions that invalidate their reality.

Hong calls this condition minor feelings—the cognitive dissonance that comes from being told by the dominant culture that you’re accepted, while every experience says otherwise. It’s a mix of shame, irritation, melancholy, and paranoia that exposes the gap between what America promises and what it delivers. Through essays that blend memoir, cultural criticism, and political manifesto, Hong turns these minor feelings into a theory of art and awareness—one that forces both herself and her readers to face uncomfortable truths about race and emotion.

Redefining the Asian American Condition

Hong challenges the myth of the passive, hardworking Asian American. She describes how Asian Americans are often seen as interchangeable and devoid of individuality—“the carpenter ants of the service industry,” as she puts it. This stereotype not only invalidates their humanity but pits them against other racial groups. The book’s title captures the emotional toll of this false neutrality: Asian Americans aren’t “minorities” in the typical sense, but they live within a network of minor feelings that stem from persistent exclusion.

By excavating her own lived experiences—from childhood in Los Angeles to graduate school in Iowa—Hong intertwines personal narrative with broader history. She examines the trauma of immigration, the pressure of assimilation, and the corrosive impact of “racial self-hatred.” The result is both intimate and political, exploring how internalized racism becomes a survival mechanism in a society designed to erase difference.

Speaking Through Shame

Shame, for Hong, is both a poison and a prism. She recalls her mother dressing her unknowingly in a Playboy T-shirt at age seven, a moment that crystallized the wordless shame of visibility. Later, she connects this feeling to larger systems of domination. To look Asian in America is to be seen through stereotypes that disfigure perception. She writes, “Shame squats over my face and sits,” describing how this emotion colonizes the body itself.

Yet shame can also become illumination. By dissecting it, Hong transforms it into testimony—the very act of speaking minor feelings aloud resists their erasure. As she notes, “Our feelings are overreactions because our lived experiences of structural inequity are not commensurate with their deluded reality.” In that gap between perception and reality, art and truth emerge.

History, Art, and Reckoning

Throughout Minor Feelings, Hong situates her personal history within collective ones: the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese internment, the 1992 L.A. Riots, the murder of Vietnamese doctor David Dao by United Airlines security officers. Each story sharpens her argument that America’s racial narrative erases Asians—sometimes as victims, sometimes as perpetrators, but always as peripheral.

Hong also reclaims art as a weapon of truth-telling. Drawing from comedians like Richard Pryor, artists like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and poets like Myung Mi Kim, she reveals how marginalized creators channel rage, humor, and linguistic experimentation to expose society’s blind spots. Like Pryor’s raw comedy, Hong’s prose flays niceties to reveal the violence behind politeness.

Why It Matters

Hong’s reckoning arrives in a time when many Americans still imagine race as black and white. Her book gives language to Asian American experiences that have been flattened by stereotypes of hard work or silence. She insists that to be fully human, you must allow minor feelings to surface—to speak them, write them, and inhabit them without apology.

Hong’s concept of minor feelings is the ignition point for her entire book. She borrows from theorist Sianne Ngai’s study of “ugly feelings”—those low-grade, undramatic emotions like envy, irritation, and paranoia—and applies them to the racialized condition of Asian Americans. Minor feelings, she writes, “arise from the contradictory state of being promised equality while living through inequality.”

Paranoia and Self-Doubt

If you’ve ever wondered whether a comment was racist or just your imagination, you’ve felt minor feelings. Hong recounts this emotional whiplash with vivid honesty: the moment she’s talked over in a room, or when a white man assumes she doesn’t speak English. Each time, she’s told she’s overreacting. Over time, she internalizes this gaslighting—until self-doubt becomes second nature. “I am an unreliable narrator,” she admits, “hypervigilant to the point of being paranoid.”

Against American Optimism

Minor feelings are rendered even sharper by what Hong calls “American optimism”—the cultural expectation that everyone should be cheerful and grateful, particularly immigrants. This optimism assumes racial progress, forcing minorities to see inequality as a personal failure rather than a structural one. Hong cites a study where children of color in U.S. schools blame themselves for systemic injustices because they’re taught America is fair.

When you live under such optimism, to feel anger or despair is seen as betrayal. Minor feelings therefore become acts of rebellion—they refuse assimilation’s anesthetic promises. In occupying moods like bitterness or disillusionment, Hong shows that discomfort is evidence of truth, not pathology.

Minor Feelings as Literature

Hong aligns her work with writers like Claudia Rankine and Paul Beatty, whose works (Citizen and The Sellout) turn the repetitive nature of racial trauma into art. But unlike typical redemption narratives, she resists closure. Minor feelings don’t lead to catharsis; they linger, replicate, simmer. By refusing to resolve them, Hong pushes readers to sit with the slow violence of invisibility. This accumulation of small wounds becomes its own kind of epic.

Hong dissects one of the most corrosive legacies of race in America: the idea of the “model minority.” This myth suggests that Asian Americans succeed because they work hard and stay quiet, presenting them as proof that racism can be overcome by merit alone. But for Hong, this is not flattery—it’s a trap.

The Self-Hating Asian

Hong explores how this myth translates into racial self-hatred. It’s not self-hatred in the psychological sense, but an internalized gaze—the habit of seeing yourself as white people see you. She recalls her own tendency to cringe when she sees other Asians, the feeling of “Who let all the Asians in?” It’s a brutal honesty that many children of immigrants will recognize.

This self-hatred becomes a defense mechanism, she argues—a way to stay one step ahead of humiliation by preemptively belittling yourself. But it also severs solidarity, making it harder for Asian Americans to stand together politically.

Model Minority as Divide-and-Conquer

The model minority myth was designed, Hong reminds us, as Cold War propaganda. In the 1960s, after the U.S. loosened immigration restrictions for highly educated Asians, officials proudly pointed to their success stories as evidence that racism was over—using them to undermine Black civil rights movements. By turning Asians into proof of meritocracy, white America reinforced its own innocence.

Hong draws on her father’s story—a poor Korean immigrant who lied about being a mechanic to enter the U.S.—to show how selective immigration shaped the stereotype of industrious Asians. What looked like cultural virtue was state engineering: America only let in those most likely to excel, then claimed their success as national moral vindication.

The Cost of Compliance

Behind the smiling façade of hard work lies repression. In the corporate world, Hong observes, Asians are the “apparatchiks” who keep the wheels turning but rarely lead. In art, they are praised only when their pain is digestible for white audiences. She calls this “the single story” problem, aligning with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s critique: when you tell only one type of minority story—the obedient one—you erase complexity.

To renounce the model minority myth, then, is not to reject success; it’s to reclaim agency over how success is defined. Hong’s own act of revolt is unflinching honesty. Her art is messy, self-critical, even angry—the opposite of the dutiful Asian she was raised to be.

Observing her own creative stagnation, Hong turned to stand-up comedy—specifically the performances of Richard Pryor—to understand how truth and discomfort coexist. Pryor, she writes, “blowtorched the beige from my eyes.” Unlike poets who hide behind abstraction, comedians stand bare before their audience, forced to reveal uncomfortable truths in real time.

Richard Pryor’s Radical Honesty

Pryor’s humor, full of profanity and pain, becomes for Hong a model of resistance. In his routines, he shifts between voices—white, Black, human, animal—turning storytelling into an act of shapeshifting empathy. He dramatizes both the abuser and the abused, creating what Hong calls a “racialized range of emotions” rarely acknowledged elsewhere. His jokes about heart attacks and childhood violence are less about laughter than revelation: “He was more honest about race than most poems,” she writes.

Finding Her Own Voice

Inspired by Pryor, Hong experimented with doing her own comedy at poetry readings. At first, she recited other comedians’ jokes, but soon her humor became a means of self-exposure. She found that when she turned her racial pain into jokes, audiences didn’t know whether to laugh or feel uncomfortable. That tension, she realized, is precisely where truth resides. By “bombing spectacularly,” she gained clarity: performing discomfort was more authentic than performing healing.

Laughter as Survival

For Hong, laughter carries the history of oppression. She references Ralph Ellison’s story of “laughing barrels” in the segregated South, where Black people were forced to stifle their laughter in public—proof that laughter itself can be rebellion. Similarly, Hong argues that racial humor reveals the gap between survival and dignity. Like Pryor, she uses awkwardness, self-mockery, and anger to expose power structures and reclaim voice.

One of Hong’s most talked-about essays dissects the myth of white innocence—the belief that whiteness is neutral, timeless, and untouched by history. Through memoir and cultural critique, she dismantles the cultural nostalgia woven into American art, childhood, and politics.

Childhood and Envy

Hong recalls growing up in the 1980s, peering into the “menagerie of white children.” Their homes seemed balanced and bright, unlike her “tense and petless” immigrant household. This sideways gaze—what she calls looking “sideways at childhood”—captures an immigrant’s position: neither inside nor outside innocence, always aware of difference. While white children are protected by innocence, children of color grow up fast, learning the world’s cruelty early.

Cultural Innocence and Erasure

To illustrate white innocence, Hong analyzes Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, set in an idyllic 1965. Beneath its pastel charm, she notes, lies the erasure of history: that same year, civil rights activists were being beaten in Selma. The film’s nostalgia, like much of American pop culture, sanitizes whiteness by fetishizing eras when innocence depended on exclusion. As scholar Lauren Berlant calls it, these “screen memories” preserve myths of purity by forgetting violence.

Shame as Political Emotion

If innocence is whiteness’s armor, shame is the minority’s inheritance. Hong connects shame to both visibility and invisibility—the wound of being seen wrong and the ache of not being seen at all. She recounts her seven-year-old self being scolded for wearing a Playboy shirt she didn’t understand, a moment that fused sexuality, foreignness, and humiliation into lifelong vigilance.

She then expands shame into a political register: it’s what happens when you become hyper-aware of where you stand in the social hierarchy. To exist under that gaze is to constantly anticipate condescension. “Shame gives me the ability to split myself into the first and third person,” she writes—seeing yourself as the Other sees you.

For Hong, language itself is political terrain. In her chapter “Bad English,” she embraces “broken” language—the hybrid, awkward, mismatched speech of immigrants—as a creative rebellion. Growing up in Los Angeles, she spoke both Korean and slang-inflected English, absorbing the linguistic patchwork of K-town, hip-hop, and church English. She calls this her real heritage.

Owning Brokenness

Hong recalls collecting “Engrish” T-shirts and mistranslated signs as poetry. On one shirt: “I feel a happiness when I eat Him.” For her, this line is not just mistranslation but accidental revelation—proof that error can produce new meaning. Bad English, she argues, is “my mother tongue’s revenge,” a way to expose how English carries imperial power. By bending it, immigrants make English strange again, turning domination into creation.

Language, Power, and Shame

She recalls watching white people’s pitying faces when her mother spoke halting English, and how she’d rush to translate, performing fluency to reclaim dignity. Later, she realized her impatience was learned from whiteness: “I was embarrassed by my mother’s accent because I was taught her voice was wrong.” The shame of “bad English” becomes both wound and weapon—proof that assimilation demands erasure.

Speaking Nearby

Drawing from filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha, Hong argues we should “speak nearby,” not “speak for.” To write across cultures is to acknowledge distance, not claim mastery. This ethic becomes her method: rather than defining the Asian experience, she writes beside it, using porous language that leaves gaps for readers to fill. Bad English resists confinement, creating a space where shared hybridity thrives.

Hong’s essay “An Education” explores how artistic friendships can forge identity as powerfully as family or race. She recounts her college years with two Asian American artists—Erin and Helen—whose talent, rivalry, and shared ambition shaped her intellectual growth. Through their story, Hong meditates on mentorship, jealousy, and the politics of art-making as women of color.

Sisterhood and Competition

At Oberlin, Erin’s goth aesthetic and avant-garde art inspired Hong, while Helen’s volatility and brilliance terrified her. They encouraged each other to make bold, conceptual art, but competition simmered beneath intimacy. Helen’s later plagiarism of Hong’s poems exposed how admiration can blur into appropriation—a painful reminder that communal creation demands boundaries. Yet these betrayals, Hong admits, made her a writer. “I would have had a happier four years,” she confesses, “but not become who I am.”

Teaching and the Politics of Aesthetics

A transformative figure was poet Myung Mi Kim, who taught that silence, fragmentation, and illegibility could be politically defiant. Don’t write like white poets, she told her students—own your struggle with language. That insight freed Hong to see artistic difficulty not as failure but as resistance. It was a revelation that aesthetics are not neutral: form is history embodied.

This realization also reframed friendship. Erin and Helen’s art wasn’t just personal—it was part of a lineage of feminist innovation, from artists like Ann Hamilton to writers like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Their shared intensity mirrored what Freud once called the “heated male colloquy” that has historically fueled artistic movements—but here, it’s female, Asian, and subversive.

Hong’s essay on the artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is both elegy and investigation. Cha, the author of the cult classic Dictee, was raped and murdered in 1982, just days after her book was published. Hong unearths the details of her death, uncovering how even in art history, violence against Asian women is quietly erased.

Recovering a Silenced Artist

Dictee was revolutionary: a textual collage about language, exile, and the female body. But Hong realized that almost no critics dared to mention Cha’s murder. In academia, they treated her killing as irrelevant, perhaps to avoid sensationalism—but also out of discomfort with her body, her race, and her sexuality. Hong breaks that silence, arguing that erasure of violence is itself violence.

Language as Wound

Hong reads Cha as both symptom and prophet. In Dictee, Cha treats English as the colonizer’s tool—using punctuation, repetition, and multilingual fragments to mirror oppression. Her style inspired generations of Asian American writers, including Hong herself. But when Hong learns how Cha’s family discovered her killer’s identity, she feels both fury and recognition: invisible women remain vulnerable in life and in memory.

Witnessing Without Consuming

In retelling Cha’s story, Hong wrestles with ethics: how to honor pain without exploiting it. She contrasts the obsessive mythmaking around Sylvia Plath with the silence around Cha. “Where does silence that respects end, and silence that neglects begin?” she asks. Her solution is to name what has been buried, not as spectacle, but as solidarity.

Hong ends her book with a meditation on debt—what we owe our families, our countries, and our histories. Asian Americans, she writes, are raised to feel indebted: to their immigrant parents for sacrifice, to America for opportunity. But gratitude easily curdles into servitude.

The Trap of Gratitude

Indebtedness teaches silence. To be the “good immigrant” is to repay suffering through obedience—to smile through discrimination, to call racism a misunderstanding. Hong argues that such gratitude sustains white supremacy by soothing collective guilt. Her rebellion is to be ungrateful, or rather, to transform gratitude into awareness.

Reclaiming History

Through vivid history, Hong connects U.S. imperialism in Korea and Vietnam to present-day alienation. She recalls her father’s fascination with English candy given by American soldiers during war—a sweet symbol of conquest. By tracing these histories, she reframes Asian American identity not as a role model minority but as a community emerging from empire’s wreckage.

A Radical We

Hong finds hope in figures like Yuri Kochiyama, the Japanese American activist who cradled Malcolm X as he died and later fought for reparations for interned Japanese Americans. Kochiyama’s solidarity across racial lines exemplifies what Hong calls “a porous and large we.” Against neoliberal individualism, she urges a collective reckoning where marginalized people see their struggles as connected.