“Minor Feelings” by Cathy Park Hong creates her essays as part memoir and part cultural criticism. Her collection is “vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world”. Humor and Poetry are the tools Hong uses to tell her own story as a “portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today”. This book tracks her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to literature and female friendship. “A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche—and of a writer’s search to both uncover and speak the truth”.
Cathy Park Hong is a Korean American poet, writer, and professor who has published three volumes of poetry. Much of her work includes mixed language and serialized narrative.The poet Cathy Park Hong delivers a fatalistic state-of-the-race survey. She describes “frantically paddling my feet underwater, always overcompensating to hide my devouring feelings of inadequacy.” Not enough has been said, Hong thinks, about the self-hatred that Asian-Americans experience. She writes that it is often “a comfort...“to peck yourself to death”
Created by Pooja Manjakandy. Graphics created by Haley Ma.