Minor Feelings: A Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition

by Cathy Park Hong

I saw someone channel what I call minor feelings: 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.

Our feelings are overreactions because our lived experiences of structural inequity are not commensurate with their deluded reality.

Every family I grew up with struggled. Small businesses failed, families went bankrupt. Divorce, mental illness, and alcoholism afflicted almost everyone I knew. I was frustrated when Nicholas Kristof cheerily wrote an op-ed in 2015 about wholesome Asian family values that gave us an economic “Asian advantage,” because he was yet another white “authority” who gaslit my reality.

I kept waiting to fall in love with Salinger’s cramped, desultory writing until I was annoyed. Holden Caulfield was just some rich prep school kid who cursed like an old man, spent money like water, and took taxis everywhere. He was an entitled asshole who was as supercilious as the classmates he calls “phony.”

I share the same sentiment on Catcher in the Rye.

Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom is just one of countless contemporary films, works of literature, pieces of music, and lifestyle choices where wishing for innocent times means fetishizing an era when the nation was violently hostile to anyone different.

But the Asian woman is reminded every day that her attractiveness is a perversion, in instances ranging from skin-crawling Tinder messages (“I’d like to try my first Asian woman”) to microaggressions from white friends.