Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

by Cathy Park Hong

To grow up Asian in America is to witness the humiliation of authority figures like your parents and to learn not to depend on them: they cannot protect you.

(the curse of anyone nonwhite is that you are so busy arguing what you’re not that you never arrive at what you are).

How deep can I dig into myself without talking about my mother? Does an Asian American narrative always have to return to the mother?

The man or woman who feels comfortable holding court at a dinner party will speak in long sentences, with heightened dramatic pauses, assured that no one will interject while they’re mid-thought, whereas I, who am grateful to be invited, speak quickly in clipped compressed bursts, so that I can get a word in before I’m interrupted.

Many were disenchanted with the mainstream white anti-war movement because they cared not just about “bringing the troops home” but about the tens of thousands of Southeast Asians abroad who were being killed daily. That period of time, writes the historian Karen Ishizuka, was “an unholy alliance of racism and imperialism, like nothing before or since—the war united Asians in America who, regardless of our various ethnicities, looked more enemy than American.” According to the scholar Daryl J. Maeda, Asian American veterans reported being humiliated and dehumanized by their fellow GIs as “gooks” while their supposed enemies, the Vietnamese, often identified them as their own.

I was never satisfied with those immigrant talking points about “not belonging” and “the sense of in-betweenness.” It seemed rigid and rudimentary, like I just need the right GPS coordinates to find myself. But I also understand the impulse to search for some origin myth of the self, even if it’s shaped by the stories told to us, which is why I keep returning to Seoul in my memories, to historical facts that are obscure to most and obvious to few, to try to find better vantage points to justify my feelings here. In Seoul, I still found myself cleaved, but at least it wasn’t reduced to broad American talking points. At least the “arsenal of complexes” that Frantz Fanon talks about was laid bare.

I used to think I’d rather leave a blank space for my pain than have it be easily summed up for consumption. But by turning to prose, I am cluttering that silence to try to anatomize my feelings about a racial identity that I still can’t examine as a writer without fretting that I have caved to my containment.

Even if we’ve been here for four generations, our status here remains conditional; belonging is always promised and just out of reach so that we behave, whether it’s the insatiable acquisition of material belongings or belonging as a peace of mind where we are absorbed into mainstream society. If the Asian American consciousness must be emancipated, we must free ourselves of our conditional existence.