Minor Feelings: Coming to Terms with the Asian American Identity in a Major Way

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (One World, 2020). Cathy Park Hong.

I only recently found out what my last name meant. Truthfully, I was never inclined to read about my family’s cultural history until it was directly revealed to me. My name, Han, is defined as such: a Korean word that encapsulates all negative emotion—the bitterness, the shame, the hateful desire for vengeance—until it snowballs into a trauma that defines an entire nation. Cathy Park Hong brought this definition to my attention in her collection of essays titled Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. A cultural awakening, Hong’s memoir gives a voice to a community that has for too long been pushed to the sidelines. 

Published in February of 2020, Minor Feelings establishes itself as one of the most pertinent reads of our time. Climbing to the top of the New York Times Bestseller list, Hong’s collection of essays carries a newfound magnitude as violence rises amongst the Asian community. A seemingly prophetic telling given the times, Hong’s memoir asks Asian Americans to question their identities. What part do we play in this world, one that refuses to accept our racial identities while simultaneously holding us to a standard that is used to put other minorities down? How do we navigate these “minor feelings”—feelings that we are unable to express so we continue on in silent damnation? These questions are not to be answered outright; rather, they force us to reflect on our lives, our choices, and our actions. In speaking about her experiences as an Asian American artist, poet, and daughter, Hong sums up what it means to be Asian in a political climate that rejects our existence as a whole. 

With the Asian American at the forefront of the conversation, the white framework around which all racial identities have been structured slowly chips away. Putting into words a universal experience amongst the AAPI community, she speaks on the difficulties of talking about race with the white population: “It’s more than a chat about race… it’s proving to a person why you exist.” In the past, I spent much of my youth content to hide my existence; I wasn’t going to make my identity known to others if I could survive by concealing my Asianness. Growing up in a predominantly white, conservative town, I was forced to assimilate for acceptance. Buying clothes I didn’t like, talking in a manner that wasn’t my own, refusing to eat certain foods—I became a caricature of what the white majority wanted me to be. Stooping so low as to make fun of my own culture with jokes about tiger moms and eating dogs, I twisted their laughing mockery into approval. Over time, I began to realize that masking my Asian identity didn’t make me a better person. I was only fostering self-hatred to be a more digestible version of myself—a sentiment that was engendered by Hong’s writing. She reveals that there is no such thing as unconditional belonging for Asian Americans, or simply people of color in general. It is impossible to assimilate for others’ comfort when people will forever be uncomfortable with authenticity.  

But we try anyway. For many Asian immigrants, we blindly follow the American dream, this unwavering optimism that insists upon the straightforward pipeline of hard work to success. The reality of this dream, however, is far from what we imagine. In school, there is an overwhelming pressure to achieve intellectual greatness due to unrealistic stereotypes that associate Asians with academic prowess. This suffocating burden causes Asian American students to work toward an impossible expectation that ultimately leads to many suffering from mental health crises. Like Hong, I am the daughter of immigrants, and I am what would be considered the epitome of the model minority, a horrid stereotype that is ultimately used to criticize other demographics, specifically Black Americans. But what does it mean to have the title of model minority, to be hailed as “next in line to be white”? To be complacent with this racialized ranking, as Hong describes, is to be complacent with forever being shunned into silence. In being calm and quiet, in being law-abiding non-wave-making people, Asian Americans will continually be an exploitative part of the white hierarchy. 

Ironic as it is, I expressed my silence in the way I spoke. My parents never taught me Korean, and as a kid, I had no interest in learning it. My mother would brush off my question of why she didn’t speak to me in Korean, giving trite answers of not wanting me to get confused between languages or develop an accent. But the true explanation was glaring—she was terrified that I would have a childhood like hers. Though living in Florida made me no stranger to being ostracized by virtue of my racial differences, I was lucky enough to never have battled through broken language barriers or fought just for people to understand me. In her years of adjusting to the American way of life, my mother recognized that communication was the key to credibility and, because of it, was willing to sacrifice our culture for a better shot at survival. 

My experience as an Asian American and my mother’s experience exist on two separate planes. We are two parallel lines, destined to never intersect. I will never truly know her pain and suffering, but I believe that Hong’s writing is the closest I will get to understanding her. In her essay “Bad English,” Hong uses poetry as her medium to mold the shame of speaking in fractured sentences into beautiful ineloquence. She erases the shame that accompanies speaking in accents; Asians are no longer the butt of so many ill-conceived jokes, but rather the star of the show. With all the times I have seen my mother be spoken down to, all the times that the words “Do. You. Speak. English?” have oozed out of the mouths of her white colleagues like tar (even though she speaks it fluently), I’ve realized that I’ve been taught to detest bad English. I craved fluency, anything to avoid criticism and judgment from others, and thus I turned my resentment not toward the perpetrators of the mockery, but toward my own people. But Hong flipped the script for me. Bad English isn’t a sign of weakness; no, to say that the bad English speaker is powerless incorrectly places whiteness at the center of the Asian experience. Bad English is strength. It is resilience. It is a symbol that announces to everyone that we have the courage to speak even when the world is begging us to stay silent. 

Using our voices to disrupt the comfort of those around us is a step in the right direction, but there is more to be done. The culture of silence that condemns Asian Americans from unleashing their true emotions needs to be dismantled. There is a need to be tame, to be idealized and civilized into the most pristine version of ourselves in order to be presentable to the public eye. But in pacifying the mind with this attitude, you pacify the tongue, censoring generations and generations with this belief: If something is considered taboo, it must remain unspoken. We cannot vocalize our feelings for fear of burdening those around us with unwanted tragedy. This undefined quiet that permeates throughout the Asian American community brings me back to my name. Han is a grief that comes as a consequence of years of cruel colonization, which is only furthered by a loss of identity once the Asian immigrant makes their way to America. It is a sorrow so deep that it cannot be put to words lest it unearth a trauma that won’t ever go away. We go gently into that good night, holding onto our suffering because, ultimately, who will listen to us? 

Throughout her memoir, Hong confronts this question by writing about the brutal rape and murder of artist and poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. During her life, Cha embodied the goodness of the Asian American. She was everything that she was supposed to be, reserved and demure, not instigating any controversy save for her poetry. In her death, she was treated just the same. People were silent. Her murder was very quietly publicized, and, even then, her sexual assault was omitted. Through this story, Hong underlines the horrifying statistics that surround Asian American women and sexual assault. The numbers vary, some showing a very broad range of percentages for physical and sexual violence, and others showing an extraordinarily low percentage. These numbers, however, are rendered unreliable, with Hong herself stating that she has “a hard time trusting any of these findings” due to the stigma that shames traumatized Asians into silence. 

I never wanted to report my own sexual assault, and, even now, writing this feels like a betrayal to the code of silence I never asked to take. I reported it anyway. I can’t say that I feel better about the fact that I did—maybe things would have been different had I shut up and repressed it. Who knows? The one thing that I can say for certain is that I am allowed to use my voice any way I wish. I don’t have to press my hand over my mouth to prevent words of pain that “would not only retraumatize me but traumatize everyone I love,” as Hong puts it. It is understandable to feed into this facade of protection. I don’t want to taint my family with the shame of my own misfortune. But I can’t just let the words die in my throat, never to be spoken. When stories are not told, they disappear. They go out of publication, their pages are torn, they fade to nothing. Hong gives Cha the justice and closure she deserves—her real story gets told despite the false passivity that outsiders tried to frame her with. Cha was a fighter until the very end. 

The Asian way is to suffer secretly. Minor Feelings shatters that idea by giving a voice to a community that has been both stripped of its integrity and praised for its adaptation to American life. I feel that Hong sums it up perfectly with a line referring to a friend from her college days: “Stronger than her will to die was her will to endure.” We suffer, we watch our parents suffer, but we keep going. Hong’s recounting of the Asian American experience is utterly profound. She speaks with a refreshing honesty about the tension that exists in the space between being Asian and being American. Minor Feelings does not carry with it the shame of silence that encompasses the consciousness of so many Asian Americans. Rather, it bares its existence loudly and shouts from the rooftops: “We were always here.”