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Themes
and Colors
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.)
Active
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
