I really enjoyed this book. I wish this book existed when I was in college because it explained so many things I was feeling and experienced. This is a great book to have and own, but it's not representative of all Asian experiences (it doesn't claim to be). I'm glad more Asian American writers are able to publish. The reason I give it 4 instead of 5 stars is the chronological order and writing sometimes gets boring or drags on. Stylistic approach - nothing wrong with it but I personally didn't like it and thought it made the essays more tedious. Look at the other reviews to get more details.

Absolutely blown away by this book. As an Asian-American, it made me feel seen and gave words to feelings I've had for a while. There was also a lot of Asian-American and pan-Asian history I wasn't familiar with. All of it reinforcing my belief that, for all of the gifts it's given me, America is the evil Empire.

I'll just share my favorite parts of Jia Tolentino's review of this book: "“Minor Feelings” bled a dormant discomfort out of me with surgical precision. Hong is deeply wary of living and writing to earn the favor of white institutions; like many of us, she has been raised and educated to earn white approval, and the book is an attempt to both acknowledge and excise such tendencies in real time..." So yeah, that....

But my favorite part of Tolentino's review is, "The story of their friendship is a story about the way that loving others is often a less complex and more worthy act than loving ourselves—and the way that love can blunt the psychological force of marginalization. If structural oppression is the denial of justice, and if justice is what love looks like in public, then love demonstrated in private sometimes provides what the world doesn’t. Hong is writing in agonized pursuit of a liberation that doesn’t look white—a new sound, a new affect, a new consciousness—and the result feels like what she was waiting for. Her book is a reminder that we can be, and maybe have to be, what others are waiting for, too."

Great collection of essays. Difficult to read at points, but the best and most honest writing usually is.

I liked the opening essays and some of the writing and commentary is good, but it was so scattered and disjointed. Nothing felt fully fleshed out and it jumped around almost every paragraph so by the time I finished a chapter I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how it was all supposed to tie together or if there was relevance in her meandering.

I do not share some of Hong's grander assessments of America's past actions and future likely paths (others are unassailably historically correct or certainly possible) but her lived experience is hers and it is instructive and fascinating. It also supports her opinions. Her story moved the needle on my perception of America and Americans. There is an urgency to it in this time when anti-Asian violence seems to rise each week. Hong tells a story about being assaulted with hate speech in a subway station and having a white friend make it all about her (the friend) and her pain at having experienced this. I am not trying to be that woman. I am just bearing witness that I have never had that happen while with Asian friends until the past 17 months, during which time it has happened twice, both times on the subway, and that I am rarely on the subway these days with work being remote. These assholes diminishing strangers, othering them, should sicken us all. The "minor feelings" of the title are these things and others, the phrase is, I think, roughly synonymous with microaggression (the acts of aggression themselves and the impact of the microaggessions.) Park puts together an analysis of the ethnic Asian experience in the US, through a string of essays intermittently personal, political and historical (all steeped in cultural criticism) that at least for me moved my understanding of microaggression from intellectual understanding to clouds parting empathic and intellectual understanding. I did not know what I did not know.

I appreciated how Park used the stories of others as well as her own. Her deconstruction of Richard Pryor was spectacular as were her narratives and interpretations of the lives and sanitized legacies of other artists and revolutionaries. She may want to lay off the Amiri Baraka. She may have chosen to sanitize that legacy herself, forgetting his violent misogyny and antisemitism. Shame on a poet whose whole life is built on the importance of language for lionizing and quoting as gospel (repeatedly in this book) the words of a man who wrote:

"Smile, jew. Dance, jew. Tell me you love me, jew...I got the extermination blues, jewboys. I got the hitler syndrome figured"

It doesn't mean he did not write and do important things, but he was no antidote to Trump, he was just as malignant, just less powerful.

All in all Minor Feelings is brilliant, wide ranging but still cohesive, instructive, beautifully written. (Her discussions of shaping her second language to her will, assaulting the orthodoxy of language was one of my favorite themes. I have often thought Nabokov did the same, that he created beautiful prose by attacking rather than embracing his new tongue.) I believe building authentic understanding is the greatest thing a writer can do. Park has done that. Every American should read this book.

This was phenomenal. I finished most of the book in January before the library took it back, and i was lucky enough for it to show up back in my loans this week. That means I heard the story of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha after the horrific murders in Atlanta this week. That was... surreal.

Highly recommend, esp for kids of immigrants.