It was the most confusing book I've read in a while. The sentiment and the intent made sense. The writing threw me off. The stories about the two friends felt very unnecessary. There was constant switching between a family story to a macro topic with a lot of rambling.

“Will there be a future where I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain?”

honestly, i don’t really care about whether or not the white people in my life get around to reading this, but i’m absolutely going to beg all of my fellow asian friends—and especially my korean friends—to read minor feelings so they can experience what i just experienced. over the past few days i spent reading this book, i laughed out loud and wanted to cry and scream and throw it across the room because of how known it made me feel. and because of the sadness i felt at realizing that so many of us live with all of this inside of us, all at once.

at so many different points, cathy park hong forced me to recognize the pain that i often push to the side, and i felt overwhelmed by my anger, my despair, my helplessness—but also my pride, and a prevailing sense of dignity and perseverance. essentially, this mishmash of primal and contradictory feelings made me feel the most wholly Korean i’ve felt in a long time. right after i finish writing this review, i’m going to see if i can hunt down cathy park hong’s email to say thank you. a thank you for taking a gamble in writing things that we’ve [Asians] all felt but have never dared to speak aloud, or even admit to ourselves. and in that gamble, she made me feel known and validated and even vindicated. now i can say that i’m finally over and done with gaslighting myself and my own experiences, my own racial pain and trauma. enough.

HIGHLY political but really interesting (especially while reading "The Women" at the same time). A lot of (pretty frightening) history that I was ignorant about prior to reading these two books.
I am a Korean adoptee, raised by Irish and Polish/German parents. They made my heritage a priority growing up. But, I still very much identified as more Irish than Korean any day. Even so, in today's politically and racially charged world, I'm now sometimes afraid to look Asian, to be Asian...

A must read

If there was a time machine, only whites would be able to go back in time in this country. Most everyone else would get enslaved, slain, maimed, or chased after by feral children.

I have a confession to make. Minor Feelings sat on my shelf for months after I bought it. Whenever I'd pick it up and look at the table of contents, I'd see the chapter titled "The End of White Innocence" and think: I don't have the emotional energy for this right now. What triggers that reaction? It doesn't come from being reminded of the numerous and ongoing sins of white people. Nor does it come from being accused of flaws in my own behavior (at least, not primarily). But when I suspect that someone holds me responsible for things I have no control over, it is difficult not to become defensive. Fundamentally, it's the fear of someone treating me first and foremost as the representative of a group - a group I did not choose - and only secondarily as a person. Each of us wants to be treated as a human with intrinsic worth whose hopes and sufferings matter.

I do recognize the absurdity and irony in this reaction. Whites have done unfathomable physical, economic, and emotional harm to countless people and treated the members of so many groups as less than human. For me to be subject to some resentment is a very trivial concern by comparison. And of course, my fear that such resentment indicates that the person expressing it refuses to see me as an individual may be no more than that: a fear, reflecting my insecurities rather than reality. Hong makes a relevant distinction:

Two thousand and sixteen was the year of white tears. Memes circulated around the Internet of a black, brown, or Asian woman taking a long leisurely sip from a white mug embossed with the words "White Tears." Implied in the meme is that people of color are utterly indifferent to white tears. Not only that, they feel a certain delicious Schadenfreude in response to white tears. Of course, "white tears" does not refer to all pain but to the particular emotional fragility a white person experiences when they find racial stress so intolerable they become hypersensitive and defensive, focusing the stress back to their own bruised ego.

It's reasonable that people of color would expect white people to just get over such feelings. But it's also predictable that many will instead either become defensive or retreat from conversation entirely; it's a natural human response to having one's feelings scorned or ridiculed. I'm not sure to what extent (if at all) Hong hopes for this book to encourage change in white readers, but if that is among her goals, statements like "you vivisected my ancestral country in two" seem likely to substantially narrow the audience that she can reach. It suggests that young and middle-aged white readers are stained from birth with a guilt that we neither could have avoided nor have any clear path to absolving. This book is suffused with loathing for the contemporary world, but does not offer a vision of how the future ought to be, let alone how to get there. Anger that offers no achievable terms for reconciliation encourages continued alienation.

Nevertheless, it's surely not healthy to ask the victims of racism to censor their true feelings just because some of those feelings are undiplomatic. Hong indicates throughout this book that she and many other Asian Americans feel an intense pressure to self-censor. That's an excruciating way to live and I'm glad she's been willing and able to put her thoughts onto paper.

One thing this book helped me understand better is how some seemingly positive stereotypes associated with Asian Americans are reflective of traumatic demands made by white society. Hong's discussion of the 2017 incident when David Dao was violently forced off a flight highlights this:

Asian friends of mine and Asian American journalists who wrote about Dao said the same thing: "Dao reminds me of my father." It wasn't just that he was the same age as our fathers. It was also his trim and discreet appearance that made him familiar. His nondescript appearance was as much for camouflage as it was for comfort, cultivated to project a benign and anonymous professionalism. His appearance said: I am not one to take up space nor make a scene.
...
While I agree with his defenders that his rap sheet is irrelevant to the United Airlines incident, it's relevant to me, since it helps us to see Dao in a more complex, realistic light. Dao is not a criminal nor is he some industrious automaton who could escape the devastation of his homeland and, through a miraculous arc of resilience, become an upstanding doctor whose kids are also doctors. For many immigrants, if you move here with trauma, you're going to do what it takes to get by.

Another heartbreaking tidbit that stood out to me:

...Korean women are so self-conscious about the size of their faces that they will go under the knife to shave their jawlines down (a common Korean compliment: "Your face is so small it's the size of a fist!").

There's also a lot in this book that I just don't know what to do with. Hong seems to have a great deal of angst focused on questions of identity: of who she is, of who she should think of as "we", of how to live in a way that rejects "whiteness" without thereby being defined in relation to whiteness. To me, such questions hint at a fundamentally essentialist outlook, as if people and cultures had pure original forms which must be excavated and disentangled. But each of us is largely the product of our experiences and interactions. We can react against the negative parts of our pasts, we can use our experiences to decide what would make a better future; but to imagine who we would have been if a major strand of influence had never touched us is effectively just to imagine that entirely different people had existed instead of us. That may be a fruitful creative exercise, but to set it up as the only way to locate your true identity sounds like a recipe for unending frustration.

Part memoir, part collection of essays, part self reflections as a writer, and by default, a writer on the Asian American experience. This was really unexpected… and profound. Cathy Park Hong writes prose, like a poet. And at its essence, I found I was reading poetry in the form of prose. If that makes sense…

She sets up for what she wants to accomplish but knows what she is limited by.

“Literature supposedly bridges cultural divides, an axiom that rang false once I understood the inequities of the publishing industry.” (47)
“… I also hope that we can seize this opportunity and change American literature completely. Overhaul the tired ethnic narratives that have automated our identities; that have made our lives palatable to a white audience but removed them from our own lived realities— and stop spelling out in the alphabet given to us.”

“I began this book as a dare to myself… This was harder than I thought, like butterflying my brain out onto a dissection table to tweeze out the nerves that are my inhibitions.” (183)

“To be indebted is to fixate on the future… I have rebelled against all that. As a result, I have developed the worst human trait: I am ungrateful. This book too is ungrateful. In my defense, a writer who feels indebted often writes ingratiating stories. Indebted, that is, to this country— to whom I, on the other hand, will always be ungrateful.” (186)

She touches upon so many minor feelings, without feeling indebted to explore them all fully. The Korean War, the history of private pools and South Korean eyelid surgery, the Asian American activists and writers that impacted her.

From beginning to end, there’s this constant tension of the urgency to not be silent, but rebelling against any fixed form of narrative or story telling; of using language to communicate, while recognizing that the same language has been a harmful weapon used against her; of creating context, but not burdening herself to over contextualize. I appreciated her introspection, her full(?) disclosure, on the process of writing this book. Almost felt stream of consciousness at times, but obviously with intense editing in order to get to publication, which makes herself and reader come to the realization of: “Who am I writing for?” (40)

It didn’t begin or end. It may feel cluttered, but it exists. And that’s enough. I think she summed it up herself, pretty well:

“I used to think I’d rather leave a blank space for my pain than have it easily summed up for consumption. But by turning to prose, I am cluttering that silence to try to anatomize my feelings about a racial identity that I still can’t examine as a writer without fretting that I have caved to my containment.” (197)

Angry. Ab.