Minor Feelings: A Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition

What happens when an immigrant believes the lies they’re told about their own racial identity? For Cathy Park Hong, they experience the shame and difficulty of minor feelings.

The daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up in America steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these minor feelings occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality. With sly humour and a poet’s searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness.

This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and artmaking, and to family 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.

‘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 be a classic’ - Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts