this book is so good. minor feelings is a meditation on living and creating as a korean american woman via essays that blend memoir, critical race theory, and asian american history. it is poetic and raw and intelligent and sometimes heartbreaking.
cathy park hong traces different individuals' own paths of racial reckoning (richard pryor, yuri kochiyama) and relates them to her own developing sense of identity. she touches on the 'hot button' issues in asian america - representation, mental health, family trauma - but her words never feel stale. abstract theory is effortlessly grounded in the personal and the personal in the abstract. her tone is brutally self-aware, even confessional. hong dances across the spectrum of "minor feelings," the emotional palette for being colored in america: rage, resignation, nostalgia, shame.
ultimately, i read this as a book about the trappings of racial narrative: the way that all racialized creation (including her own) is caught between the artist's desperation for agency and the american consumer's preference for tidy narrative arcs. appropriately, the essays present as an collection of contradictions - revealed yet unresolved - a collage of diary entries, news clippings, and old photographs. synthesis is left as an exercise for the reader.
(may 19, 2020)
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