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.