"So Many Feelings About Cathy Park Hong's MINOR FEELINGS" by Cyrena Lee

One day I got a text from a friend in a chat group called ‘Yellow Peril’: Have you read Minor Feelings?

I haven’t yet, I replied. The book was everywhere in the literary world; it had popped up incessantly in my Twitter feed. I wrote back that I would read it, and headed out to Shakespeare and Co. to purchase a copy. 

When I was a teenager, I used to claim proudly that I didn’t have many Asian friends. This was either symptomatic of having grown up in suburban New Jersey, where, out of a class of six hundred, there were fewer Asian kids in my grade than I have fingers, or because I used to be the self-hating Asian Cathy Park Hong describes in the opening to her book, MINOR FEELINGS. I tried my best to assimilate; I refused to speak in Mandarin back to my parents, begged to wear Abercrombie & Fitch, didn’t have many Asian friends, and complained constantly that we ate Chinese food all the time. I came by such self-consciousness honestly. I was always identified as the little Asian girl. My race was pointedly attached to me, whether as a joke or as a constant qualifier or a Halloween costume: once, my best friend at the time wore a qipao and put cheap, splintered take-out chopsticks in her hair, declaring to everyone that her costume was myself. 

Years later, I still have never worn a qipao, but I now have tons of Asian friends. We gravitate toward one another, seeking and providing comfort. We can sit in silence. We never have to explain what we are ordering at dim sum. We understand what it is like to exist as an other in spaces dominated by white people. 

Hong writes in her opening essay, “For as long as I can remember, I have struggled to prove myself into existence.” This instantly recalled for me what my father always said to my sister and me when we were kids: Because you are Chinese, you’ll have to work ten times harder to get recognition. We were constantly aware of being perceived as less than. Later, Hong describes racial self-hatred as “seeing yourself the way whites see you…. You think your Asian features are undefined, like God started pinching out your features and then abandoned you.” I thought of my mother, who, picking up where God left off, would pinch my nose as if to create a higher, more Western nose bridge. Internalized racism was literally pressed into my body. Double eyelid surgery was always only a thought experiment away. 

Despite the fact that I am an East Coast Chinese-Taiwnese-American, and not a West Coast Korean like Hong, I too have felt wary of being dismissed as an Asian writer and pigeonholed into some kind of Joy Luck Club. And yet, particularly given the recent uptick in awareness of racial injustice in this country, like Hong I have felt like I have no right to complain: 

Minor feelings are also the emotions we are accused of having when we decide to be difficult—in other words, when we decide to be honest. When minor feelings are finally externalized, they are interpreted as hostile, ungrateful, jealous, depressing, and belligerent, effects ascribed to racialized behavior that whites consider out of line. Our feelings are overreactions because our lived experiences of structural inequity are not commensurate with their deluded reality.

If I’m going to be honest, when I read in her book that the largest mass lynching in America was of eighteen Chinese men and boys, what I felt most instead of shock and horror was validation. The lived experience I had of being disliked, or seen as less than, because of my race, was as real as eighteen bodies hanging from a tree. 

It’s a fool’s game, though, to want to come out on top as the most marginalized or oppressed minority group in America, just as it’s silly to perceive racism as a zero-sum game in which there are only winners and losers. Hong cites a 2011 study that found “wherever whites reported a decrease in perceived antiblack bias, they reported an increase in antiwhite bias.” The implication is that the immediate response to a step towards equality is one of fear, that equality for all also means vengeance upon those who were previously on top. This study and the sentiment are painfully and quite literally black and white, just as the racial debate in America often is. If you are of neither race, you simply fall into a gray abyss that everyone seems to ignore, a “purgatorial status: neither white enough nor black enough, unmentioned in most conversations about racial identity.”

What’s left unmentioned is often telling, and I found this to be true for the gaps in MINOR FEELINGS. In Hong’s essay on her fraught relationships with female friends during college, the topic of mental illness goes largely unaddressed—as it often is in Asian American culture; the focus is instead on having the “confidence of white men.” Though Hong mentions how widely diverse the Asian American identity is, she doesn’t really address inter-Asian feuds and hate. My mother, for instance, has never forgotten the Rape of Nanjing, and mentions what she sees as the colonialist, sadistic tendencies of the Japanese at every opportunity. And the controversy over Awkwafina’s ‘blaccent’ in the 2018 film Crazy Rich Asians is glossed over: Hong briefly compares Awkafina’s exaggerated speech to an accent she heard growing up in LA: “It never occurred to me that those K-town girls were doing blackface. I thought they were just talking the way other teens around them talked.” 

But isn’t that the case? Once, a Black coworker at a retail job dismissively told me that on the phone, I’d “just sound like a white girl.” That interaction left me with minor feelings. I rushed off the floor, upset. Am I perpetually in whiteface? When is it and when isn’t okay to imitate and soak up the culture you grew up in? Are we only allowed to imitate the oppressors, not the oppressed? Are we only ever either the oppressors or the oppressed? 

In the last pages of the book, Hong hints at a future in which one does not have to be white to embody a colonialist, capitalist mindset by juxtaposing Lorraine O’Grady’s idea that, “In the future, white supremacy will not need white people” with Baldwin’s prediction that the sun has set on white people. While Baldwin’s foretelling emboldens her, O’Grady’s haunts and implicates her: 

Whiteness has already recruited us to become their junior partners in genocidal wars; conscripted us to be antiblack and colorist; to work for, and even head, corporations that scythe off immigrant jobs like heads of wheat. Conscription is every day and unconscious. It is the default way of life among those of us who live in relative comfort, unless we make an effort to choose otherwise.

If the Asian American reckoning, of which Hong’s work is a part, is a sign of the times, and of more changes to come, it gives me hope. When we recognize that not everyone and not everything is black or white, it won’t be so easy to decry one race as unfailingly defined by privilege and another as wrecked by hardship. My hope is that this cultural reckoning will prompt another, individual one: a reckoning with ourselves—regardless of our individual racial identities—and a deep examination of all our internalized white supremacy.

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Cyrena Lee is a writer based in Paris. Her work has been published in Into the Void, Rigorous Mag, and the anthology Writing for Life. The author of A Little Bit of Lucid Dreaming, she is currently at work on a novel and a collection of short stories.