Minor Feelings: a Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition

The author Cathy Park Hong was born in 1976 in California. She is currently a poet, a professor at Rutgers University, and married with a daughter. However, these recent biographical details are fleetingly mentioned in Minor Feelings, which centers more on Hong’s experience as a first-generation Korean American and the challenges she has encountered as a young woman. She grew up in Koreatown, Los Angeles, before moving to a more affluent suburb when the family rose in wealth. She was privately schooled and, unlike most first-generation Asian Americans, was allowed to pursue the subject of her choice in college. Her position growing up was typical of Asian Americans of her generation; she associated with both white people and other ethnic groups while feeling that she did not exactly belong amongst either. In the past, Hong’s non-white appearance caused her to feel insecure, especially at majority-white poetry readings where she “pretended like I wasn’t the only Asian woman in the room, which […] freighted the air with tension as if my body were the setup to a joke that never became defused by a punchline” (45). As she grows in outspokenness, Hong rebels against the stereotype of the passive, Asian woman.