MINOR FEELINGS AND THE LIMITS OF SELF-CRITICISM
I picked up this book as part of a larger New Years Resolution: to be less precious about what I read in an effort to read more consistently. Like many Asian Americans on the left, I’ve come to view anything neatly packaged as “Asian American” with hesitation, especially when the creator or subject is, like me, an English-speaking, college-educated person of East Asian descent. Many of us feel a frustrating push and pull with this term — there’s the desire for it to reference a politically active affinity group representing the broad array of economic classes, ethnicities, relations to borders, etc, and the disappointment in its perpetual appropriation as a brand that centers the most privileged among us. Therefore, the subtitle “An Asian American Reckoning” poses a high bar.
The book comprises seven essays on art, culture and Hong’s personal life, each of which comprise main narratives along with smaller, more fragmented, discontinuous asides. As a result, the essays wind together like a wooden snake toy— its many gaps creating the flexibility for it to curve in on itself, making smooth, continuous motion. It’s this smoothness that prevents the book from being forced into drawing any hard lines on its stated subject — “I admit that I sometimes still find the subject, Asian America, to be so shamefully tepid that I am eager to change it — which is why I have chosen this episodic form, with its exit routes that permit me to stray.”
This approach allows Hong to touch on hot button issues without pressing all the way. This is particularly true in “Bad English” where, for example, she spends two sentences saying it would never occur to her that the accent Awkwafina uses in Crazy Rich Asians is a form of blackface, but does not clarify whether the wave of criticism has since changed her mind. This makes it rhetorically easier for her to move through cultural touchstones while adhering to a larger idea, in this case, the messiness of cultural exchange across languages and dialects. In “The End of White Innocence” her gestures to cultural artifacts from Moonrise Kingdom, to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to “white tears” happen in beats between truly devastating stories from Hong’s own childhood, weaving a tapestry of scenes that attempts to almost cinematically show forth rather than state something like a polemical stance.
Experiences of reading this type of narrative will vary heavily depending on how much the reader trusts Hong as a narrator to lead them down this winding path. Right off the bat, Hong seems to provide as much autobiographical disclaimer on this as she can. In one anecdote she describes an interaction between herself and a young Vietnamese teenager working at a nail salon, in which she becomes enraged at his pain-inducing clumsiness as he attempts to give her a pedicure, and yells out, hoping to get the boy in trouble with his father, the owner. “I am an unreliable narrator… I can’t even recall if I actually felt that pain or imagined it, since I have rewritten this memory so many times…erasing him down until he was a smudge of resentment while I was a smudge of entitlement until we both smudged into me.” These are “minor feelings” (a concept she derives from Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings) in that they “non-cathartic,” enduring, and offer no obvious corresponding action.
This story about the nail salon exemplifies one of Hong’s central conflicts in the book — how her privilege and entitlement, combined with her shame and guilt, chase each other in circles down a deadly rabbit hole. The further we get through the book, the more we come to understand how Hong’s desire to be taken seriously in the elite, white-dominated literary world has led her to get bashed and molded by an atmosphere that did not value her as she came. “By the time I was at [the Iowa Writers Workshop], I had already decided that writing about my Asian identity was juvenile…confident that despite my identity, I would be recognized for my formal innovations.” She writes Minor Feelings at what seems like the end of the beginning of her journey to straighten out her relationship to writing and identity. But because she has already been pickled in the thing she now wants to dismantle, the enemy is now inside and outside, and she feels paralyzed by this, never knowing whether to strike in or out.
This abundance of ugly feelings that are knotted up into each other, that have no appropriate outlet, no way of being yelled out proudly or acted upon in a straightforward way, gives Hong a lot of emotional material to describe in intimate, poetic detail. As Ngai writes in Ugly Feelings, “The unsuitability of these weakly intentional feelings for forceful or unambiguous action is precisely what amplifies their power to diagnose situations” (UF, 27). At the same time, it’s this personal history that makes Hong so uniquely unprepared to tell a collective story about Asian Americanness. In her penultimate essay she writes, “I wished I had the confidence to bludgeon the public with we like a thousand trumpets against them. But I feared the weight of my experiences — as East Asian, professional class, cis female, atheist, contrarian…” While she wants so badly to take on the straightforward role of advocate, she knows she can’t yet stomach the contradictions.
The success of Minor Feelings as an “An Asian American Reckoning” depends in part on which definition of “reckoning” you go by. While I, like I assume many people, think of reckoning as “the avenging or punishing of past mistakes or misdeeds” upon googling you’ll find that Oxford’s primary definition is “the action or process of calculating or estimating something.” It’s this definition that better characterizes what Hong has done in Minor Feelings, which weaves in and around contradictions rather than attempting to eat them whole. Furthermore, it is a reckoning far more so for Hong, and other Asian American writers who have already attained access about which to feel conflicted about, than it is for anyone else.
It makes sense then that Hong’s two penultimate essays “An Education” and “Portrait of an Artist,” both of which zero in on the lives of young, brilliant Korean women writers and artists struggling to survive within majority-white American institutions, feel the most candid to me. She writes of her and her best friends at Oberlin in the mid-90s, “We had the confidence of white men, which was swiftly cut down after graduation, upon our separation, when each of us had to prove ourselves again and again.” It’s this ugly feeling, this tension between the privileged intellectual environment you came of age in, and the harsh, violent reality of institutionalized racism in the real world that lies at the heart of Minor Feelings. It’s a true, poignantly told, and to me, resonant story. However, it is also a highly exceptional one, and one that, if idled in for too long, could convince many readers that to be Asian American is to be stuck.
For Ngai, ugly feelings represent not a source of, but an affective bridge to change. On envy, she writes that “it is only once the ideal object is envied that it becomes viewed as persecutory — a view that in turn mobilizes the subject’s efforts to criticize and transform its value or status as property in particular, spoiling it” (UF, 163). What I fear is that readers will take Minor Feelings as a destination, rather than the driveway we back into so we can get turned around. If Minor Feeling’s central object of envy is freedom from the non-cathartic brambles of shame and anxiety, then, for those of us who feel stuck, now is the time to seize it, and run with it.
