Minor Feelings

An Asian American Reckoning

By: Cathy Park Hong

Narrated by: Cathy Park Hong

Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's Summary

A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian-American consciousness and the struggle to be human

"Brilliant... To read this book is to become more human." (Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen)

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography

Named one of the Best Books of the Year by Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times • The Washington Post • NPR • Time • New Statesman • BuzzFeed • Esquire • The New York Public Library • Book Riot

Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this 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.

Binding these essays together is Hong’s theory of "minor feelings". As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality - when you believe the lies you’re told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they’re dissonant - and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her. 

With sly humor and a poet’s searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry 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.

Praise for Minor Feelings

"Hong begins her new book of essays with a bang.... The essays wander a variegated terrain of memoir, criticism and polemic, oscillating between smooth proclamations of certainty and twitches of self-doubt.... Minor Feelings is studded with moments [of] candor and dark humor shot through with glittering self-awareness." (The New York Times)

"Hong uses her own experiences as a jumping off point to examine race and emotion in the United States." (Newsweek, 40 Must-Read Fiction and Nonfiction Books to Savor this Spring)

"Powerful...[Hong] brings together memoiristic personal essay and reflection, historical accounts and modern reporting, and other works of art and writing, in order to amplify a multitude of voices and capture Asian America as a collection of contradictions. She does so with sharp wit and radical transparency." (Salon)

©2020 Cathy Park Hong (P)2020 Random House Audio

Critic Reviews

"Cathy Park Hong’s brilliant, penetrating, and unforgettable Minor Feelings is what was missing from our shelf of classics. She brings acute intelligence, scholarly knowledge, and recognizable vulnerability to the formation of a new school of thought she names minor feelings. In conversation with Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings, Hong charts her emotional life as a Korean American immigrant woman, thereby shattering the concept of a single story of the Asian experience. Minor Feelings builds through what Hong names a ‘racialized range of emotions,’ which are routinely dismissed by others. To read this book is to become more human." (Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen)

"Minor Feelings is anything but minor. In these provocative and passionate essays, Cathy Park Hong gives us an incendiary account of what it means to be and to feel Asian American today. Minor Feelings is absolutely necessary." (Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer and The Refugees)

"Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings truly delivers news we can use. It will educate some and inspire hallelujahs from others; people will productively argue with it, be inspired by it, think and feel with and around it. Hong says the book was ‘a dare to herself,’ and she makes good on it: by writing into the heart of her own discomfort, she emerges with a reckoning destined to become a classic." (Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts and Bluets)

Reverse Racism

I had to stop reading. As a proud Asian American, I so hoped for a different story. Born in Seoul, Korea, I came to America as a very young girl. I became to know why my parents came here, because of the very difficult life they left behind. And though America has its problems, & we encountered tough times, we were grateful for a land that allowed us in & to make our own opportunities... not expect it to make it for us. And when met w/ challenges, we sought to overcome it..not blame. I feel the author blamed the white people & American "standards" for her setbacks & road blocks. Meanwhile she's been blessed w/ the gift of writing & being successfully acclaimed for it here in America!

Essential

As an Asian American, the author was like a voice in my head personified. Park Hong brilliantly articulates and elegantly weaves personal history and precise research into a deftly written testament to the Asian American experience, and in turn illuminates the dark corners of what it means to be an American today. It's clear the author is a poet and we get to benefit from that in this audio format . Bravo.

highly recommend

Honest, unafraid, vital, beautiful. Thank you, Cathy Park Hong for writing this book. The balance of history and memoir is profoundly impactful

Spot On

Never has a book been able to pinpoint my experiences. Tears, chicken skin and anger all called up so strongly. This is what you want to read.

I've been waiting for this book

Thank you for capturing so much of my experience as an Asian person with such precise language and texture.

Required reading for Asian Americans Who Seek

I will not only be listening to this over and over again, but I will be buying the physical copy to get more of the information seeped into my bones. So much history that I have never been exposed to, helping me to understand who I am as an Asian woman, and how I fit into the fight for racial justice for other minorities. The Asian American culture is fortified by Hong.

New and Different

Such an easy listen and great to hear a different perspective on race and feelings.

This is more than a book

I’ve been looking for a book like this so long, in hopes to hear the transparent and honest voice of Asian American. Cathy Park Hong delivers not only personal experiences and opinions of the scope of racism in the US, but she ignites the fuel that’s been tampered down. Minor Feelings is more than a book.

Every Asian American Should Read This

Cathy Park Hong weaves the Asian American into the fabric of American history in places where I thought we were invisible. A battle cry if you want it to be, but mostly an eye opening take on our shared experience and the experiences of those who were forgotten or ignored. Loved this book for making me think differently and deliberately.

I have to listen to this multiple times

the writing puts a lot of meaning into just a few words, so I have to listen to it several times: I think a lot of the concepts are ringing true to me but I am not sure if this because the content is true and accurate or if this is just because the content only feels true and accurate. either way, the writing is definitely worth going over several times.