Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

by Cathy Park Hong

MY DEPRESSION BEGAN WITH AN imaginary tic.

First line

It was at Iowa that I was diagnosed with hemifacial spasm disorder. My tic, which I attributed to caffeine, grew worse, enough so that I believed people noticed, though no one said anything. I remember rising up early in the morning for my CAT scan appointment. I lay on the motorized gurney that slid into the machine. The interior was smooth, white, and cylindrical. I felt like I was inside a gigantic hollowed-out dildo. I am the body electric, I thought, and my brain is going haywire.

This is not the last time she will execute great metaphors

han, a combination of bitterness, wistfulness, shame, melancholy, and vengefulness, accumulated from years of brutal colonialism, war, and U.S.-supported dictatorships that have never been politically redressed. Han is so ongoing that it can even be passed down: to be Korean is to feel han.

racial trauma is not a competitive sport.

Pain is not a competitive sport, either

Trump’s presidency has triggered a flashback to childhood. Children are cruel. They will parrot whatever racist shit their parents tell them in private in the bluntest way imaginable. Racism is “out in the open” among kids in the way racism is now “out in the open” under Trump’s administration. But this trigger does not necessarily mean recalling a specific racist incident but a flashback to a feeling: a thrum of fear and shame, a tight animal alertness. Childhood is a state of mind, whether it’s a nostalgic return to innocence or a sudden flashback to unease and dread. If the innocence of childhood is being protected and comforted, the precarity of childhood is when one feels the least protected and comfortable.

In 2011, academics Samuel R. Sommers and Michael I. Norton conducted a survey in which they found that whenever whites reported a decrease in perceived antiblack bias, they reported an increase in antiwhite bias. It was as if they thought racism was a zero-sum game, encapsulated in the paraphrased comment by former attorney general Jeff Sessions: Less against you means more against me. At the time of the study, white Americans actually thought that antiwhite bias was a bigger societal problem than antiblack bias. They believed this despite the fact that all but one of our presidents have been white, 90 percent of our Congress has been historically white, and the average net worth of whites is ten to thirteen times greater than the net worth of nonwhites. In fact, the income gap between races is only becoming greater.

I HAD A SPECIAL, ALMOST EROTIC, relationship with my stationery when I was young. I collected stationery items the way other kids collect dolls or action figures.

Great sentence for starting a chapter!!!!

A friend and poet, Eugene Ostashevsky, said that “if you knock English enough, it becomes a door to another language.” This is what Myung Mi Kim first taught me: to knock at English, using what I considered my ineloquence—my bilingualism, my childhood struggles with English—and fuse that into my own collection of lexemes that came closest to my conflicted consciousness.

In 1968, students at UC Berkeley invented the term Asian American to inaugurate a new political identity. Radicalized by the black power movement and anti-colonial movement, the students invented that name as a refusal to apologize for being who they were. It’s hard to imagine that the origin of Asian America came from a radical place, because the moniker is now flattened and emptied of any blazing political rhetoric.