Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Minor Feelings, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Asian American Politics
Art, Voice, and Audience
History, Ignorance, and Racism
Friendship and Solidarity
Summary
Analysis
During her year of depression, Hong spends most of her time lying down in her apartment and struggling to eat, sleep, or write. She and her husband watch a special by the comedian Richard Pryor, who boldly sweats through his silk shirt and makes fun of his audience members using separate white and Black voices. Pryor captures the truth about race in the U.S. through what Freud called “tendentious humor” and through what Black comedians in the 1940s called “lies”—stories that use aggression and obscenity to point out repressed truths. Pryor’s sets inspire Hong, who starts transcribing them. She realizes that they’re funny and moving because of his delivery, not his language.
Hong contrasts her own uncertainty and artistic paralysis when confronting questions of race with Richard Pryor’s bold, incisive comedy. Of course, this is precisely the kind of art that Hong wants to create. Pryor tells the truth directly, speaking from a clear and authentic point of view. Through humor, he gets his message through to audiences of all races, without compromising its content. He also connects with a longer Black comedy tradition. Hong struggles to find (but hopes to build) a comparable tradition in Asian American literature. (This is why, for instance, she dedicates her penultimate chapter to the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.)
Themes
Pryor started out imitating “clean, wholesome” comedians like Bill Cosby—until he realized that this didn’t at all represent who he was. Hong feels the same: she asks, “Who am I writing for?” Poets often pretend that they don’t care about audience, but in reality, they tend to write for the academic institutions that give them employment, awards, and status. By watching Pryor, Hong realizes that she has also “been raised and educated to please white people.”
Pryor models the process of artistic self-discovery for Hong. She chronicles her own process over the course of her book. Here, she emphasizes how this process is inseparable from determining one’s audience. After all, a defining feature of Asian American literature is that writers have to explain and justify their existence to white readers. This is similar to how Bill Cosby’s “clean, wholesome” comedy for the Black community still indirectly caters to white people: rather than rejecting racist stereotypes about Black people, it accepts those stereotypes and then tries to change the way that Black people behave.
Themes
Hong first started writing poetry in high school after reading classmates’ work and deciding that she could do better. In her day-to-day life, she felt lost and isolated, but when she wrote poetry, she felt incredibly free. However, upon publishing her work, she started feeling the limits of her identity. Everyone began asking her to write about being Asian, and she worried that nobody would read her work if she wrote about anything else. This is why comedy intrigues her: unlike poets, comedians can’t hide their identities and have to speak directly to their audience.
Hong points out a contrast between the way poetry makes her feel privately when writing it (free) and publicly when publishing it (constrained by her racial identity). The white-dominated U.S. reading public treats white writers as neutral and objective, so it celebrates them for publishing on practically any topic. This affirms their artistic freedom. But the reading public treats writers of color as exotic oddities who are only qualified to report on issues corresponding to their own particular identities. Of course, the same holds true for many other industries, from restaurants to fashion—and Hong’s search for solutions can apply to them, too.
Themes
When Hong was young, the crowds at her poetry readings were always mostly white. It took her a long time to realize this, but once she did, she started feeling humiliated every time. She couldn’t stand the thought that her work’s true audience was “a roomful of bored white people.” So, instead of reading her work, she started doing stand-up comedy about her life. Writing about racism was too uncomfortable but joking about it was much easier.
Hong’s white audiences underline why she feels so alienated and devalued as an Asian American poet: they suggest that, whether she likes it or not, her work’s true purpose is simply to give white people a report about how Asian people behave, think, and feel. She switches to comedy because the irony of the situation is too painful: the racial dynamics of her readings replicate the same racial dynamics she’s writing about in society.
Themes
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Writers of color have long been expected to tell their stories in a way that fits white people’s expectations rather than their real experience. And the publishing industry has long deemed their work too risky to buy unless it fits established templates. The template for immigrant stories has been Jhumpa Lahiri’s work, which consistently focuses on characters’ actions at the expense of their interior lives. And when they do depict interior life, ethnic writers have long been expected to represent their entire group, confess their pain, and assure the white public that the causes of that pain are foreign (like Asian parenting) or squarely in the past. For instance, the media consistently paints the poet Ocean Vuong as “the tragic Vietnamese refugee,” while overlooking his analysis of the Vietnam War and his queer identity.
Hong argues that white readers want to read stories that fit and affirm their stereotypes about Asian Americans rather than stories that actually showcase what Asian American artists and writers have to say. Put differently, they are interested in meeting Asian Americans as exoticized objects—immobilized characters on the page—but not as subjects with their own perspectives and agency. To achieve popularity, then, Asian American writers often have to portray themselves the way white people see them—they have to develop what Black American sociologist W. E. B. DuBois famously called a “double consciousness.” Hong absolutely respects Jhumpa Lahiri and Ocean Vuong’s work—she just suggests that one reason for their wild popularity is the way that their work happened to (at least partially) fit with the white reading public’s expectations.
Themes
Richard Pryor’s comedy is so powerful in part because of how it responds to templates. He recognizes that white audiences expect Black performers to tell sob stories about oppression, so instead, he turns his stories about trauma into hilarious, self-deprecating comedy. He brought the Black American tradition of coping with violence through humor to a national audience. He caricatures and takes apart stereotypes by, for instance, talking about having sex with both white and Black women but declaring that he can’t satisfy either.
Hong specifies precisely why Pryor’s comedy is so inspiring. It would be easy for him to simply satisfy white audiences by replicating racist stereotypes. But instead, Pryor carefully engages and then undermines these stereotypes, which allows him to point out their falsity and their limits. Hong hopes to adapt the same strategy to her own purposes in this book: rather than pandering to stereotypes about Asian Americans or simply pretending they don’t exist, she will try to actively deconstruct them.
Themes
Hong identifies with Pryor because his work reminds her of the Korean concept of han—the sense of “bitterness, wistfulness, shame, melancholy, and vengefulness” that Koreans associate with the weight of their history. Pryor gives voice to minor feelings: the everyday shame, sadness, and anger that people feel when everyone around them dismisses their reality. Most ethnic literature overlooks these feelings because they’re incompatible with stereotypical stories of resilience, survival, and growth. And yet minor feelings are rooted in reality’s failure to live up to the rosy template.
Hong introduces the concept at the heart of her book: the “minor feelings” that plague people of color because of the contradiction between their real experiences and other people’s firmly held but mistaken ideas about them. Pryor’s comedy draws attention to these minor feelings by pointing out how exhausting, absurd, and frustrating it is to live in a country where the majority of people only view him through the lens of racist stereotypes. Of course, Hong also uses the concept of han to draw connections between Korean history and Black American history—both of which illustrate how U.S. imperialism and violence created long-term downstream consequences for the people who suffered it.
Themes
When Hong was young, Koreatown was the center of her family’s universe. But white people never went—to them, there was nothing there. Contrary to the stereotype that Asian Americans are all successful and have strong family values, Hong saw her neighbors’ families and professional lives constantly falling apart. Her father’s best friend (and her dentist) drank himself to death; another was murdered by his tenant.
The turmoil in Hong’s community again refutes the “model minority” myth, which suggests that the U.S. is a fair meritocracy and Asian immigrants succeed economically because they are morally virtuous (peaceful, family-oriented, and so on). In reality, Hong suggests, the emotional lives of the immigrants she knows are largely defined by the “minor feelings” associated with adapting to the U.S.
Themes
In 1992, riots broke out between Los Angeles’s Black and Korean residents, and Hong saw firsthand how racist her community could be. In fact, many Korean immigrants ran successful businesses in Black neighborhoods precisely because banks would lend to them and not to Black people. By blaming the riots primarily on communal tensions, the media avoided confronting the structural causes of Black unrest. Hong once tried to write a novel about the riots, which represented the U.S.’s racial failures, but she gave up. She preferred stand-up comedy, which allowed her to pass on her feelings—including embarrassment and shame—to a captive audience.
Hong revisits her old project on the Los Angeles riots because she thinks that, with her analysis of Richard Pryor and minor feelings, she finally has the tools necessary to do justice to the riots’ complexity. She notes that the media has explained the riots by depending on the tired, racist cliché that nonwhite people are irrational, violent, and full of hate. But she believes that, by focusing on the riots’ structural roots and the minor feelings associated with it, she can faithfully depict all sides of the violence without simply portraying one side as the perpetrator and the other as the victim.
Themes
During the riots, a mother told her teenaged son to be careful. The next morning, she saw a photo of his dead body in the newspaper. He was the only Korean who died in the violence. But when Hong saw his mother describe her experience in a documentary, she remembered women in her own family. The violent weight of Korean history had left them enraged and despondent, and they saw that same “dark force of power” at work in the U.S., too. After the riots, the U.S. refused to support the Korean immigrants who lost their businesses, and the neighborhood never recovered. The riots’ Latinx victims are also forgotten when the story is reduced to “the ‘good’ Korean merchants versus the ‘bad’ black community.”
Hong sees a direct connection between violence in the distant and recent past. In this sense, for Koreans, immigrating to the U.S. represents a continuation of their history, and not a break from it—as the model minority myth would suggest. Hong uses the phrase “dark force of power” to describe how powerful people and governments (especially the U.S.) have consistently treated ordinary Koreans as collateral damage, as if they’re meaningless pawns in the government’s merciless quest for wealth and control. Ultimately, by emphasizing the minor feelings that Korean immigrants feel in response to this “dark force,” Hong does what she hoped: she tells a story about the individual experience of racial violence without losing sight of the structural factors that make it possible.
Themes
Hong’s writing requires her to confront the political and personal dimensions of racism at the same time. There is some truth in clichés about immigrant suffering and racial progress, but they also seriously limit writers like Hong because, as she puts it, “how I am perceived inheres to who I am.” She must resist stereotypes to tell the truth. When it comes to events like the L.A. riots, minor feelings offer a compelling alternative close-up perspective, an alternative to the media’s tired platitudes. Whereas most Americans learned about the L.A. riots from the perspective of a news helicopter flying over the city, Hong imagines zooming in and listening to a Korean shopkeeper, who cries out about the police’s indifference.
Hong summarizes her argument about how investigating minor feelings can yield a new kind of Asian American literature—one that engages and moves beyond stereotypes, rather than being constrained by them or simply pretending they don’t exist. Writing about minor feelings is a way to bridge the personal and the sociological, which Hong argues is sorely needed. Simply examining the dynamics of racial groups from a detached sociological perspective often leads us to unfairly blame and dehumanize the people in question, Hong argues, while focusing exclusively on personal experiences of racism can lead us to overlook its broader root causes. But minor feelings are personal experiences that point to broader sociological phenomena, so they can help bridge this gap.
Themes
