I have dedicated quite a lot of my reading time over the past year and change to reading about racial issues in the U.S. It’s something I wish I’d begun doing sooner, but there’s no time like the present. Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning was already on my short list thanks to a recommendation from a friend, but when another friend, Jackie, who runs The Immigrant Book Club, chose it as June’s read, I couldn’t have been happier. It’s the sort of book that demands discussion, so if you’re not in an official book club, try to round up a few of your closest bookish friends to read it with you so that you can pull it apart later.
Minor Feelings’ form belies categorization: a memoir in essays; narrative nonfiction from a poet. It dances around the edges of many of the issues author Cathy Park Hong is addressing, but Hong knows exactly what she’s doing in her artful omissions, even employing typological clues when she’s eliding something purposefully. After all, much of what she’s exploring is about things that are never said: about the experience of Asian-Americans in America, but also within many Asian-American families, hers included.
Some of my favorite chapters in the book come straight from Hong’s personal experience. They’re the ones with the least clear-cut resolution, but they’re also the ones that feel the most visceral and human and real. They show a panoply of struggles and joys, and they delve deep into the linguistic and cultural cues and clues that Hong has tasked herself with attempting to parse with the goal of delving ever deeper into her own experience as an Asian American woman, artist, and writer navigating modern life.