Title & author
Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong
Synopsis
In a society shaped by white supremacist standards, values, and beliefs, how does one write for the self, and not for what people expect? Can they ever be separated? And how does one escape the publishing industry’s perpetuation of such stereotypes? In Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, author Cathy Park Hong explores this question through storylines that center her relationships with various women, including with herself.
Who should read this book
Fans of Love is an Ex-Country and Heart Berries
What we’re thinking about
How can we, as readers, continue to challenge the publishing industry to decolonize its practices?
Trigger warning(s)
Physical violence, sexual violence, substance abuse, eating disorders, self-harm, slurs, sexism, mental health, racism, fatphobia, ableism
In a society shaped by white supremacist standards, values, and beliefs, how does one write for the self, and not for what people expect? Can they ever be separated? And how does one escape the publishing industry’s perpetuation of such stereotypes? In Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, author Cathy Park Hong explores this question through storylines that center her relationships with various women, including with herself. She writes to no conclusion, rather to make space for the tragedy, violence, happiness, and progress impacting women of color without sensationalizing the stories or making them the entirety of an individual’s identity.
“Why must writers of color always have to talk about whiteness? Why center it in our work when it’s centered everywhere else?” (Hong, 86). From the start of Minor Feelings, Hong challenges the work of an author and the notion that it must be reliant on the reader. “I have been partly drawn to writing,” she notes, “to judge those who have unfairly judged my family; to prove that I’ve been watching this whole time” (99). As an author, Hong uses her platform to reshape what people have thought about her, her family. But even that, in its reliance on whiteness and white expectations, poses a challenge; it becomes impossible for Hong at times to know what to write and how to write it, as made clear through the stories she chooses to tell and how she chooses to tell them. (One could even say that this write-up is the antithesis of Hong’s story—in focusing on how she attempts to critique whiteness’ centering, we are still centering whiteness.)
“From invisible girlhood, the Asian American woman will blossom into a fetish object. When she is at last visible—at last desired—she realizes much to her chagrin that this desire for her is treated like a perversion,” writes Hong (174). Asian American girls and women are rendered invisible in the United States’ society, until they are not; and once they are visible, their lives and bodies are hypervisible, treated as objects instead of as their own. And Hong struggles with this in her own writing, too. “How can I dig into myself without talking about my mother? Does an Asian American narrative always have to return to the mother?” (118). And so she sets writing about her mother aside, turning instead to focus on her friendships. But yet, even here, she runs into challenges, deferring to her friend’s memory. “‘I need to make Helen more well rounded,’” Hong recalls telling her friend Erin, wishing to make their old friend Helen more of a character in this very text. “‘Do you remember any funny things she said in college?’” (137). Hong desires to make her depictions of characters, whether real or fictional, full, avoiding the two dimensional and stereotypical portrayals too often seen in media.
Through Hong’s open questioning, Minor Feelings becomes a three dimensional memoir that causes every reader to challenge their own perceptions, and those of the publishing industry. Hong herself unabashedly calls attention to the thought processes that plague readers, writers, and editors. “White publishers want ‘the Muslim experience’ or ‘the black experience.’ They want ethnicity to be siloed because it’s easier to understand, easier to brand” (104). The memoir is a call to action for us readers, encouraging us to think all the more critically about what we are consuming and how we are consuming it. But, perhaps even more so, Minor Feelings depicts the necessity of visible, decolonized literature. It underscores the importance of writing, reading, and publishing that breaks out of white, western values and norms— writing that neither limits authors nor forces characters and stories into two dimensional caricatures, rather values lives.
“On the train ride back home from the museum, I thought of my grandmother who lost three children before they reached eighteen. If I tell her story, will it just be denatured into a sad story, a story to tape up on that wall to accent its whiteness?”
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What stories have you read that utilize a decolonized framework or non-western writing style, as Hong champions?
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