Previous
Portrait of an Artist
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
After becoming a mother, Hong feels stuck, unable to travel or get much time alone. She goes swimming in the public pool and tries to write about its beauty as a common space—until she remembers how white communities fought to keep Black people out of them throughout the 20th century. When she was thirteen, a man kicked her out of her aunt’s building’s pool, complaining that Asians were “everywhere.”
In this final essay, Hong returns to the broader questions that have motivated her book as a whole: what does it mean to be Asian in America, and how can Asian American writers define their voice and audience? Her comments on the pool represent how difficult it is to define or write about collective identity in the U.S., where racial conflict and oppression have always been a central feature of political life.
Active
Themes
Today, “we’re everywhere now” is one version of the Asian American story, the one told in movies like Crazy Rich Asians: Asians will fight racism with capitalism, by making enough money to buy white people out. But, Hong asks, is this any different from just becoming white? Writing this book about race was far more difficult than Hong expected. She knows she cannot speak on behalf of “we” Asian Americans, as she only represents a small slice of them.
Hong argues that most Asian Americans have to choose between two starkly different approaches to life in the U.S. In aggregate, individuals’ choices will shape the overall composition and story of “Asian America.” In simple terms, they can try to win at capitalism, or they can try to change capitalism. Winning at capitalism is the default option, and it isn’t available to all Asian Americans (such as working-class refugees). Hong argues that choosing this option is similar to becoming white because it involves both accepting the racist hierarchies that dominate corporate life and profiting off of the exploitation of others—mostly nonwhite people in the U.S. and around the world.
Active
Themes
Hong returns to the moment when the American soldiers nearly murdered her grandfather during the Korean War. The village interpreter said something in English, and the soldiers let him go and gave candy to his young son (Hong’s father). The U.S. military has long handed out candy as a consolation for its brutal violence. Perhaps, Hong suggests, the U.S. thought that, by sowing candy, it would reap Christianity and capitalism. In South Korea, it worked.
Hong feels indebted to her parents, just as her parents feel indebted to the U.S. This sense of debt makes immigrant children “ideal neoliberal subject[s]”—to pay back their parents, they have to succeed at work. Whereas gratitude allows us to appreciate the present, indebtedness means “fixat[ing] on the future.” Good luck starts to look like a loan that needs repayment. But Hong refuses to live like this, even if the only alternative is to be ungrateful.
Get the entire Minor Feelings LitChart as a printable PDF.
"My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." -Graham S.
A famous photo of Malcolm X’s assassination shows him lying on the ground while Yuri Kochiyama holds up his head. Kochiyama grew up as an optimistic, patriotic Japanese American in Los Angeles. During World War II, her father was imprisoned on false espionage charges for several weeks (and died shortly after getting out). Her brother joined the U.S. army, but the rest of the family ended up in an Arkansas concentration camp. After the war, she moved to New York, where Black coworkers started teaching her about the long history of U.S. racism. She became an activist, met Malcolm X at a rally, and began working with him. She was incredibly selfless, and her “sense of we was porous and large.” She fought for causes as diverse as prison reform, Puerto Rican independence, and reparations for Japanese American internment.
Active
Themes
A group of mostly Filipino, Japanese, and Chinese American students at UC Berkeley coined the term “Asian American” in 1968. They were inspired by the Black Power movement and hoped to bring a concern for Vietnamese people into the anti-war movement. Hong didn’t appreciate the radical origins of Asian American identity until years after college—in the 1990s, she just took it for granted that ethnic activism was divisive and pointless. But now, Hong believes that Kochiyama’s “model of mutual aid and alliance” holds crucial lessons for activists.
Hong hasn’t been to Seoul since 2008, when her grandmother died there in a miserable nursing home. She could never live in Seoul, where women regularly get plastic surgery to look more European, the school system and labor market are hypercompetitive, and the air is severely polluted. She celebrated her 28th birthday with a group of avant-garde musicians at her sister’s apartment in Seoul. They started playing “Never Have I Ever,” but the game only lasted a few seconds because the musicians all immediately admitted that they had attempted suicide.
Active
Themes
Hong is in the U.S. because the U.S. was in Korea. The U.S. army mercilessly bombed it, arbitrarily partitioned the peninsula in two, and even invented the double-eyelid surgery that is wildly popular today. The U.S. has done similar damage to dozens of other countries whose people have then migrated to the U.S., including the Philippines, Iraq, El Salvador, and many others.
Hong hates the cliché that immigrants feel out of place in the U.S. and need to rediscover themselves in the homeland. But she does find a sense of perspective whenever she’s in Seoul. And when she returns to the U.S., she feels flattened out, like she’s being “returned to [a] silicon mold.” This is why she writes poetry: to communicate her humanity through her words, and her pain through the silences between them. Yet she has written this book in prose in order to address the issue directly.
Hong argues that writers of color must move beyond “racial containment,” or the norm of writing only for their own narrowly defined racial groups. White perspectives are still viewed as the universal, neutral default, even though formerly colonized people are a large majority in the world today. It’s telling that Hollywood dystopias usually show white people turning into refugees or slaves, living in the kind of conditions that are common in formerly colonized countries today.
In Ken Burns’s famous documentary about the war in Vietnam, a Japanese American veteran recalls his service in the countryside near Saigon. An elderly Vietnamese woman gave him a bowl of fish and rice, but then he found a tunnel under her house and threw a grenade inside. He killed several people, who may or may not have been soldiers, and his commanding officer praised him. Upon seeing this interview, Hong thinks of the word “traitor.” But the soldier was doing exactly what the U.S. asked him to. She wishes the documentary mentioned the trauma Vietnamese people felt, instead of focusing exclusively on the Americans. It also never mentioned the 300,000 Korean soldiers who fought for the U.S. in the war.
Active
Themes
No matter what Hong writes, violence always seeps back into her work. She knows that her comfortable life today is deeply tied to Korea’s long legacy of violence: occupation by the Japanese, the Korean War, repressive dictatorship, and even the South Korean troops who fought in Vietnam—and brutally murdered at least 8,000 innocent civilians. She feels deeply indebted to activists like Yuri Kochiyama, other writers like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and her parents. But she has decided not to repay her parents in the usual way by chasing the “privatized dream” of riches under capitalism.
Active
Themes
White supremacy conscripts Asian Americans to do much of its dirty work, whether by fighting wars, discriminating against other racial groups, or staffing corporate offices. For affluent Asian Americans, this conscription is a “default way of life.” And this makes sense: Asian Americans are made to feel like conditional citizens, but they’re promised that they will truly belong once they copy mainstream white culture. This is a lie—in reality, Asian Americans will only free their consciousness once they change the mainstream culture. They must defend and collaborate with other Americans of color. For instance, Japanese internment camp survivors are protesting the government plan to reopen the camps as immigration detention centers. “We were always here,” Hong concludes.
Active
Themes
