Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

by Cathy Park Hong

cannot imagine a body reduced to biological fact, like a plant or a hog. If a prostitute died alone without anyone as witness, did she ever exist?

“I wish you’d read your poems,” she said sternly. “We need poems to heal.” “I’m not ready to heal,” I said as gently as I could because I was afraid how she’d respond. She nodded. “I respect that,” she said, and walked away.

For many immigrants, if you move here with trauma, you’re going to do what it takes to get by. You cheat. You beat your wife. You gamble. You’re a survivor and, like most survivors, you are a god-awful parent.

What the fuck am I doing here? Who am I writing for?

But when I did, I began to feel the whiteness in the room. If a neutral background color, say white, turned traffic-cone orange everywhere you went, you’d become chronically stressed and your mind would curdle like a slug in salt. That’s how I felt. Only I had to pretend that I wasn’t seeing traffic-cone orange everywhere.

Poetry readings served no function except to remind me I was dangerously losing faith in poetry.

The ethnic literary project has always been a humanist project in which nonwhite writers must prove they are human beings who feel pain.

Change is measured in the internal “waverings of the mind” or in shape-shifting personae.