Minor Feelings - Cathy Park Hong

The problem with silence is that it can't speak up

I found this an impressive collection of essays. Cathy Park Hong speaks about how she experienced life as an Asian American in the US. She does not spare herself, like in the first essay where she talks about her depression. This makes her vulnerable and at times not very likeable.

We all have a personal story with a book. I wanted to read this because my brother was adopted from Korea when he was three. I was ten at the time. Although he hardly has any memory of being in Korea, he still felt this. As Cathy Park Hong describes in the last essay, which is why I keep returning to Seoul in my memories. As she says in I think almost the last page Even if we have been here for four generations, our status remains conditional, belonging is always promised and just out of reach. I can relate to sentences as I always second guest myself, questioning why I was being paranoid.

Cathy Park Hong lives in a world where whiteness is the norm. I still see my life in relation to whiteness, she tells in the essay The end of white innocence. Here she talks about the current world of devide we live in. In feeling wrong they feel wronged. In being asked to made aware of racial oppression, they feel oppressed. We are to think about our white identity and this makes us feel our identity is under thread. I think that this is for a large part why we react as we react.

An insight also was One charecteristic of rascism is that children are treated like adults and adults are treated like children. I think we can't image the feeling of a child seeing their parent treated like a child. I think this can be something you take with you our whole life. Like ugly feelings, Minor Feelings are non-carthartic states of emotion with a remarkable capacity for duration.

I really liked the essay Bad English, where she tells about the relationship she has with the language, she did not learn till the age of five. In her life as a child in Koreatown English was always borrowed, from hip-hop to Spanglish to The Simpsons, she tells. The borrowed language became significant for her as a poet, which she does recognize as being privileged to be able to study. A study she talks about in 'An Education', a deeply personal story about three young people destined to become artists, and becoming friends, being sucked up by each other and repelled by each other. It is like a coming of age essay. She had trouble finding her own voice, admitting what her own was. In the past, I was encouraged to write about my Asian experience but I still had to write it in the way a white poet would. Something she recognized when reading the book Dictee for class. About the writer of Dictee, Teresa Cha, is the essay 'Portrait of an artist'. I really liked the first pages of this essay, there is a magnificed drive in this, where you see Teresa Cha do her things and walk in the town, not knowing where this would lead to in the end.

The last chapter 'The indebted' is about post-colonialism and the effect this has had on her. The most damaging legacy of the West has been its power to decide who our enemies are, turning us not only against our own people, like North and South Korea, but turning me against myself.