Book Review: "Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning" by Cathy Park Hong

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020)
Cathy Park Hong (1976)
203 pages

Given that poet Cathy Park Hong has presented a very personal exploration of her life in her remarkable collection of essays Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, I’ll open my review in a personal vein, as a path leading to why I found her book so powerful a contribution to the fraught topic of life in the United States as a minority.

I’ll preface my remarks by stating that I’m a white male, and that I attended an all-white, rather rural suburban midwestern school system through high school. So, beyond being raised to treat everyone with respect, I was mostly isolated from questions of race.

Once in college this changed, of course, and one particular idea I recall wrestling with is that someone who was a minority could feel uncomfortable in a setting in which they were the only, or one of only a few, “like them.” It seemed to me – through a blunt, rational analysis – that if others in the room were not unfriendly or standoffish (or, of course, worse) then it didn’t make sense to feel uncomfortable in such a setting. It seemed ‘irrational’ to ‘invent’ such feelings of discomfort.

But then I became friends with someone who is Asian American (a friendship that has lasted to the present), and he invited me to dance parties put on by the campus Asian American Association. It wasn’t long before a majority of my friends were Asian American, and I eventually dated a woman who became president of AAA. At that point, as boyfriend-of-the-president, I became even more deeply involved in the organization, doing whatever was needed around supporting the events being put on.

Despite all the Asian American friends I had, however, whenever I was at an AAA event such as a dance I would have a feeling of anxiety or uncomfortableness – a feeling of being noticed and judged somehow for being there. I tried to shake it off as irrational, knowing I was surrounded by quite a few friends and recognizing that the larger group mostly knew who I was and how I ‘belonged.’ Undoubtedly some there felt I didn’t belong and shouldn’t have been there – and shouldn’t have been dating an Asian American woman for that matter – but nonetheless, my closest friends at school were in the room with me.

It was from those experiences that I came to understand the reality of the tension that can exist for someone in the situation of being a minority surrounded by a majority culture – even when there is no overt hostility. The presence of this unshakable feeling that everyone is looking, judging, rejecting, even if there is no direct evidence of it at that moment.

To be clear, I’m not saying this gave me an understanding of the minority experience. Obviously, I could take a few steps any time I wanted and be back on the larger campus environment that looked mostly like me. And, as mentioned, my earlier experiences were based on growing up in an even more homogenous environment.

Rather, the point is that these experiences opened my thinking, enabling me to acknowledge the validity of the feelings that can arise in such situations. It made clear to me that a simplistic analysis of ‘what should happen’ or ‘what should be felt’ fails to acknowledge reality – that a person’s impressions about and reaction to a situation or something that happens are informed by both the explicit elements of the moment, as well as completely unavoidable subconscious expectations based on previous experiences, both one’s own and those of others one knows. Perhaps an obvious statement, but one that, back those decades ago, I had to arrive at.

And it is in fact exactly these kinds of inner conflicts that Hong explores through her essays in Minor Feelings – the conflicts that have arisen for her out of the complexity of living as a second generation American, a Korean American, an Asian American and more generally part of a minority in the United States.

Early on, Hong defines her term Minor Feelings as:

the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed. Minor feelings arise, for instance, upon hearing a slight, knowing it’s racial, and being told, Oh, that’s all in your head. (55) 

Through her essays, Hong demonstrates how the buildup for her of these “sediments of every day racial experience” has occurred, and how they have subsequently rippled through the events and encounters of her life. What distinguishes her telling is her willingness to describe the full complexity of her experience, her recognition and acknowledgement of the murky gray area she must contend with in distinguishing between slights that really are racially motivated, and others that may not be, but that given the thickness of the “sediment” can nonetheless still cause a reaction, still leave a mark.

Thus, Hong describes a variety of clearly racially motivated aggressions and outright attacks that she both experienced and witnessed as she grew up. But then she recalls a recent flight to Michigan for a reading of one of her books of poetry:

After the plane landed, while I was struggling to extract my rollaboard from the overhead, a bull-necked white guy in a Michigan football jersey growled “Excuse me” and shoved past me. Was he just being rude or was he acting like this because I was Asian? (29) 

This recollection crystalizes the impact of the minor feelings Hong describes. It would be easy for someone who is not a minority – who has never had even the momentary experience of being in a situation where they are in some sense a minority – to dismiss such a story with words to the effect of “that’s all in your head.” Even Hong herself wonders this, as she points out in her description of the situation. Nevertheless, her lifetime of personal experiences, and her awareness of the experiences of other minorities, make it impossible to discount the possibility that race played a role. How could they not?

In a similar vein, Hong challenges the tendency of the dominant culture to generalize about minorities, as if the fact there are relatively few of a group somehow makes it acceptable to stereotype them. In particular, she rails against the idea of Asian Americans as model minorities, the idea that Asians are next in line to be white, or even that there can be considered to be any kind of coherent generalization of Asian Americans:

Most Americans … don’t understand that [Asian Americans] are this tenuous alliance of many nationalities. There are so many qualifications weighing the “we” in Asian America. Do I mean Southeast Asian, South Asian, East Asian, and Pacific Islander, queer and straight, Muslim and non-Muslim, rich and poor? (19)

Out of frustration, she takes a rather blunt approach to exploding the simplistic notion of Asian Americans as the model minority – hard working, studious, quiet – by giving specific examples of degenerative, aggressive and even criminal behavior among Asian Americans she knows. That she must resort to such a direct approach of demonstrating that people come in all types whether they belong to the majority or a minority seems, unfortunately, like an extremely necessary dope smack: it’s disturbing to think it needs said, much less demonstrated so concretely, but it clearly must needs be.

The middle series of essays loosely tracks Hong’s experiences from childhood through her years at college, including the sometimes subtle, sometimes painfully explicit and aggressive racism she has endured, and has observed her family endure. She describes how the challenge and impact of living with the resulting minor feelings go beyond her reactions to random encounters with strangers, such as the bull-necked airplane passenger in the quote above. More broadly, the impact of these minor feelings has confounded her thinking about herself and her life, as well as her work as an artist and writer, leading her to question who even her audience should be, and what themes she should engage. As she explores these struggles, she digs her way through the “sediments” of her experiences in search of answers.

In her final essay Hong explores the question of the level of indebtedness immigrants to the United States, and their American-born children, should feel to their adopted country. Here, again, the simplistic traps those in the majority culture tend to fall into are many, such as calling for minorities to go back home, if you don’t like it here – attacks already occurring long before the previous resident in the White House made it more politically and socially acceptable to do so.

Even ignoring the fact that going back home for Hong would mean returning to her birthplace of Los Angeles, she describes the challenges she would face if she were to actually move to her ancestral home of Korea. But this does not, she makes clear, imply that she must feel gratitude that she can stay in the US, since her family came here in the first place to escape the devastation of the US war in Korea and the US-guided social and political aftermath in South Korea.

More generally, she ties this question to the broader dilemma of immigrants escaping the traumas of the global conflicts of the past century and a half. In so doing, she turns directly to face readers among the majority culture, observing:

I bring up Korea to collapse the proximity between here and there. Or as activists use to say, “I am here because you are there.” ... My ancestral country is just one small example of the millions of lives and resources you have sucked from the Philippines, Cambodia, Honduras, Mexico, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, El Salvador, and many, many other nations through your forever wars and transnational capitalism that have mostly enriched shareholders in the States. Don’t talk to me about gratitude. (195)

Unfortunately, knowledge of this history seems largely unknown in the United States; as historian Jill Lepore laments in her essay This America, our understanding of our history as a nation has declined dramatically over the past century and a half. This came about, she notes, as historians developed an extremely negative view of nationalism, and so shied away from writing national histories, even though,

Nations, to make sense of themselves, need some kind of agreed-upon past. They can get it from scholars or they can get it from demagogues, but get it they will. (19-20, This America) 

With scholars ceding the writing of our history to others, demagogues have seized the opportunity to invent and promulgate historical narratives tailored to their goals, built around destructive images of nativist purity and hatred of others, and calls for violent action to defend a mythical heritage.

Lepore argues that, to counteract this, historians must re-engage in the telling the story of our nation – its full history, warts and all. The return to having a complete, commonly understood history will, according to Lepore, reinvigorate our nation’s ability to act as a defender of a shared set of civic values, and so create a social and political environment that can enable the acceptance and inclusion of minorities into the full set of rights and privileges of our society. (My review of Lepore’s essay linked to at right.)  At the very least it could begin to dispel the misconceptions that drive some of the behavior and attitudes Hong describes.

Ultimately, what stands out about the essays in Minor Feelings, beyond the often harrowing honesty with which Hong speaks about her lifetime of dealing with the racial complexities she has faced and worked through, is her clear message that the point of telling all this is to create a level of understanding about the impact of not only aggressive, obvious racism, but the many subtle versions of it that form such a challenging backdrop to daily life: the implications of constantly encountering the naivete of I’m not racist because I have fill-in-the-blank-minority friends, or Asians are the next whites, or a seemingly endless string of other examples.

And also, as she writes, to make the point that of such an understanding is not to generate feelings of shame or guilt that cause one to become “awkwardly silent” (87), or, worse, to actively segregate from those different from themselves in order to avoid these feelings. Rather, by exploring and exposing the complexities of her life, Hong hopes to create a recognition in at least some of her readers of the complexity of her experiences, and to get us to see past the generalizations and assumptions that lead to a fundamental misunderstanding of the minority experience in the United State, and so a profound inability to successfully engage in improving it.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "The New Wilderness" by Diane Cook

The New Wilderness (2020)
Diane Cook (1976)
398 pages

An enduring fantasy in reaction to the challenges of modern life has been that of escaping to a form of living more closely aligned with the rhythms of the natural world. It can be easy to imagine that exchanging the concrete dissatisfactions of one’s daily life for the seeming simplicity of a more rustic existence could be a worthwhile trade. But is this perhaps rather more a case of needing to be careful what one wishes for?

In Diane Cook’s novel The New Wilderness, a couple of dozen people make precisely this choice, volunteering to leave their established lives behind and move to an uninhabited area to live off the land as nomads. Nominally taking part in a study on the impact of people on the wilderness, the group, known as the Community, must follow strict guidelines outlined in a book called the Manual; to ensure they leave no impact beyond taking what’s needed for food, clothing and shelter, a team of Rangers closely monitors their activities.

Cook motivates the situation by setting the story in a not-too-distant future of worsening ecological conditions and growing economic disruption. She implicates a combination of global warming and increasing pollution as the culprits but leaves ambiguous the origins and extent of what has happened to the world. The members of the Community make clear, however, that they had found their lives, in a place referred to simply as the City, becoming increasingly intolerable, and so had eagerly embraced joining the study and moving to a region called the Wilderness State.

The novel opens several years into the Community’s time in the wilderness, by which point they have already lost several members, with some dying in accidents and others giving up and returning to the City. The group has also worn out most of its original clothing and equipment, settling into a life of producing what they need out of what they can make for themselves from hunting and gathering. Along with the ongoing challenges of the natural world, however, they also find themselves repeatedly at odds with the Rangers, whose aggressive tracking of the Community’s impact on the Wilderness State represents a constant irritation for the Community, never allowing it to settle down or find peace.

Within the broader context of these daily challenges faced by the Community in the Wilderness State, the story develops around the relationship of two its members, Bea and her nine-year-old daughter Agnes. Agnes had grown up sickly, her body unable to cope with the heavily polluted air in the City. When her stepfather, a professor of archeology, learns of plans for a study involving a group living in the wilderness, he and Bea decide to volunteer in the hope that the fresh air will offer Agnes a chance to become healthy.

Now, four years later, Agnes only dimly remembers her former life in the city; she has grown up in the Wilderness State and feels comfortable and in-tune with the nature around her. For Bea, however, life in the wilderness with the Community has been a mixed blessing: though happy that her daughter has become healthy, she misses her own mother terribly and remains conflicted about the sacrifices she’s made, reflecting that although “she loved Agnes fiercely, … motherhood felt like a heavy coat she was compelled to put on each day no matter the weather.” (18)

Agnes, for her part, recognizes this ambivalence within her mother.  Late in the novel, when the two are speaking about Agnes’ childhood, Agnes realizes that “she didn’t need her mother to tell her that it was both nice and not nice to have a child. It was always there on her face.” (327) 

Too young, however, to make sense of her mother’s feelings – and her mother unwilling to explain them – Agnes struggles to understand her mother’s choices and behavior. In the structured life of the City this may have led to the typical kind of mother-daughter drama, boiling at or near the surface, until eventually Agnes would have grown up and moved away. But here, Bea’s cryptic behavior leaves Agnes ever more trapped between her love for her mother and a deepening alienation from her, exacerbated by Agnes’ own growing connection to and harmony with the natural world. With the engagement and cooperation of the entire Community required in the constant struggle to survive, the estrangement between the two inexorably comes to a head.

The disastrous environmental changes that define the world of the novel have apparently occurred in the relatively recent past and seem to have worsened quickly. While Bea describes her mother as having grown up in a house and community that seems very much like our present day, she herself seems to have no direct memory of that time. Even her familiarity with the current world outside the City and the Wilderness State seems surprisingly limited, as if the ongoing environmental and social decline has narrowed her focus down to her local, daily life – or, more ominously, has been actively curtailed by the ruling elite, through a government referred to cryptically as the Administration. Thus, when Bea and Agnes one day see geese at a pond near which the Community has settled, and Agnes asks whether there are geese in other places:

Bea assumed there must be geese elsewhere, just not in the City. But now she didn’t know. And what of those other lands in heavy use? The cities of greenhouses, the rolling landfills, the sea of windmills, the Woodlots, the Server Farms. What of the lands that had long ago been abandoned? The Heat Belt, the Fallow Lands, the New Coast. (79-80) 

This uncertainty is reflected too, in the repeated speculation among the members of the Community about rumored Private Lands, where those rich enough to avoid the deteriorating conditions in the City supposedly live in clean and comfortable conditions.

Cook’s ambiguousness about the origins of this dystopian future and its full implications recalls her approach to many of the wonderful stories in her collection Man V. Nature, which I described in my review (linked to at right) as a delightfully strange brew. In those stories, like that of The New Wilderness, Cook introduced a dystopic alternate reality or future without revealing much about its causes or full implications – dropping a reader into a kind of Twilight Zone setting. As was done in that old TV series, Cook focuses more in her stories on exploring the reactions of the characters to the world in which they find themselves, the impact on their lives and relationships, rather than explaining how that world came about.

However, what worked so engagingly in the short story setting – a twisted present with little or no indication of how it came about – disappoints in
The New Wilderness: the world that Cook creates supports the psychological drama that plays out but seems distractingly improbable. Certainly, dystopian stories that leave the details of their origins hazy or even completely undefined are legion – in author Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Good Morning, Midnight, as a particularly extreme case, the main character finds himself alone at an Arctic outpost with no hint at all of what has happened to the outside world beyond that he appears to be the last remaining survivor (my review linked to at right); Brooks-Dalton leaves what has happened to the rest of the world completely to the reader’s imagination.

But what we learn about the world Cook has created in The New Wilderness seems oddly unconvincing. Thus, although some kind of developing environmental catastrophe is occurring, Cook’s description of life in the City is an odd combination of seeming normality along with intense pollution, worsening lines for food and other extreme situations. And then there is the implication that there is only one City, which is not explained and seems unlikely in any reasonable scenario. Are there truly no other cities? How could such a civilizational contraction occur without a complete collapse of society? The story suffers a bit from what could be called the uncanny valley problem: different from our present-day society, but sufficiently similar that the differences subconsciously distract.

Taken as a psychological drama of characters struggling to survive the whims of nature and their fellow man, however, The New Wilderness works well, an engaging story of a group of people who carry on against difficult odds. Beyond this strength of will, however, Cook paints a dark future for our civilization. The world she has created has a haunting resemblance to the disturbing future historian Yuval Noah Harari warns of in his book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Harari worries that current advances in “biotech” (medicine and genetics) and “infotech” (data mining, AI and robotics) risk, if we are not careful, pushing us toward a society in which biologically enhanced super-rich isolate themselves ever more completely from the rest of humanity. Those others who gradually become less and less needed to perform the work the super-rich need to live will discover themselves to have become irrelevant, in Harari’s words, and so the recipients of declining civic and economic support. (My review to Harari’s book at right.)

For Harari’s bleak, if startlingly plausible view of our future, the world of Cook’s novel, with its increasingly dysfunctional City and mythical Private Lands, seems a disturbingly fitting and all too imminent waypoint.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf