30 Jan / Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong [in Booklist]
*STARRED REVIEW
Title aside, nothing is minor about Cathy Park Hong’s taut, sharp collection. The award-winning poet’s prose debut will elicit comparisons to contemporary race-conscious luminaries – think Claudine Rankine, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Roxane Gay – but Hong’s singular voice expresses both reclamation and declaration: “For as long as I can remember, I have struggled to prove myself into existence … Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status: not white enough nor black enough.”
Seven stupendous essays mark her journey toward claiming agency. She exposes collective Asian American history and spotlights today’s racially charged complicity in “United.” She channels Richard Pryor’s raw energy and the manipulations of L.A.’s 1992 race riots in “Stand Up.” She unmasks white fragility in “End of White Innocence,” and she subverts language in “Bad English.” Hong reveals intimate female friendships in “An Education,” confronts the brutal rape and murder of iconic artist Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha in “Portrait of an Artist,” and refuses to be grateful in “The Indebted.”
L.A.-born to Korean immigrant parents, Hong creates a fierce amalgamation comprised of careful memoir, radical history, sociopolitical treatise, and revolutionary call-out. Being “woke,” she notes, is already “a hashtag that’s now mocked, when being awake is not a singular revelation but a long-term commitment fueled by constant reevaluation.” Apologetic no more, Hong proves, “We’re everywhere now.”
Review: “Nonfiction,” Booklist, January 1, 2020
Readers: Adult
Published: 2020