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Summary
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
“An imaginary tic” sparks Cathy Park Hong’s depression. Her husband doesn’t see anything, but she’s convinced that her face is spasming—like it used to, until a surgeon fixed it seven years ago. Over the following days, she grows anxious and self-conscious. She tries to hide her face and struggles to sleep, which affects her work. Despite living her dream—writing full-time, happily married, and living in New York—she’s too depressed to function.
Hong begins with her tic because it serves as a powerful metaphor for the concept at the heart of her book: many Asian Americans develop “minor feelings” in reaction to American racism. For Hong, these feelings are rooted in the contradiction between the narratives told about Asian Americans, which highlight their wealth and assimilation, as well as their actual experiences of living in the U.S.—experiences defined by invisibility. Indeed, Hong presents her own situation as representative of this common (but not universal) experience among Asian Americans. Namely, despite their outward appearance of success, many Asian Americans’ actual experiences are defined by anxiety and doubt. Just as Hong’s spasm seizes control of her own face, racism seizes control of her identity and image.
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Hong decides to find a therapist. She finds the only Korean American name in her insurance company’s database—Eunice Cho—and sets up an appointment. When Cho asks if Hong ever felt comfort as a child, Hong bursts into tears and tells her whole life story. She feels relieved, but Cho calls her two days later to say she isn’t accepting Hong’s insurance anymore. Hong keeps calling to get another appointment. Cho calls her back a few days later, when she’s at the airport on her way home from a lackluster poetry reading. Cho says that she can’t treat Hong—she has a good reason but can’t mention it. Hong yells at her over the phone.
Hong’s saga with Eunice Cho speaks to the tenuous solidarity that Asian Americans feel with one another: they know that they share certain experiences, but they can never be sure to what extent. In this case, Hong doesn’t know if Cho rejected her because their experiences were too similar, because Cho thought she was leaning too heavily on their shared Korean culture, or for some other reason. This also foreshadows a key comparison that Hong makes at the end of this chapter: being Asian American is like being ghosted, facing rejection and invisibility without knowing exactly why.
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Hong has always “struggled to prove [herself] into existence.” She has always felt inadequate, no matter how hard she has worked. She notes that Asian Americans have a “vague purgatorial status” in the U.S.—they are neither white nor Black, assumed to be competent as workers but also uncharismatic and incapable of leadership. Many become self-hating because they think of themselves from a white perspective. In her classes, Hong sees many young Asian women break the stereotype, but many others continue to fulfill it.
Once, in graduate school, Hong got a pedicure at a shop owned by a Vietnamese family. The only available pedicurist was the owner’s surly teenage son, who ignored Hong’s instructions and painfully tore off her cuticles. Hong stood up and left without paying. Today, Hong thinks that she and the boy clashed because they were both self-hating, but also recognizes that she has no idea what he was actually thinking or feeling.
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In Korea, Hong’s father grew up poor but succeeded in school. In 1965, the U.S. began allowing a few highly qualified Asian professionals to immigrate—the origin of the model minority myth today. Hong’s father pretended to be a mechanic and obtained visas for himself and Hong’s mother. At his first job in Pennsylvania, when a workplace accident left him with a broken leg, the company fired him. So Hong’s parents moved to Los Angeles, where her father became an insurance salesman. He worked long hours and constantly fought with Hong’s mother, but he managed to succeed financially.
Hong’s father may sound like the kind of “model immigrant” who wouldn’t care about race, but actually, he is highly aware of it, often to the point of blaming every slight on racism. When Hong started at graduate school in Iowa, her father pointed out the lack of Black people and warned her not to feed into stereotypes about bad Asian drivers.
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In graduate school, Hong learned that one of her classmates wrote an anonymous blog post criticizing her work and joking about murdering minority writers like her. She felt not anger but shame: she blamed herself for being an “unintellectual identitarian.” In her classes, she learned to avoid discussing racial identity, and she came to see writing about race as “a sign of weakness.” Her original tic developed around the same time.
When Hong reads a selection from this book at a New York gallery, the gallery owner, a white man, proudly tells her about his racial awareness classes, which have taught him that “minorities can’t be racist” and “Asians are next in line to be white.” Hong disagrees, but he insists she is wrong. Educating white people about race is exhausting, Hong explains, because it’s fundamentally about getting them to recognize her existence. U.S. culture generally ignores Asians and fails to appreciate that they are a diverse group who come from many different countries and face vastly different economic circumstances.
After the Civil War, the first Chinese laborers came to the U.S. to work in plantations and build the transcontinental railroad. Their stories have almost never been told. The first Chinese women in the U.S. were trafficked there and forced to work as sex workers. They had no rights. In the 1800s, anti-Chinese sentiment led to constant murders, bombings, and the Chinese Exclusion Act. In 1917, the U.S. banned all immigration from Asia, a policy it only reversed in 1965 due to the Cold War. The U.S. needed skilled workers, and paradoxically, it wanted to look more racially tolerant while also using “compliant and hardworking” Asian professionals as an example to undermine Communism and the civil rights movement.
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The model minority myth promises Asian immigrants inclusion and equality, but it’s never unconditional. For instance, since 9/11, Indian Americans have been “downgraded” to the same racial category as Muslims from the Middle East. Indeed, most white Americans just don’t know or care about the stories of different Asian immigrant groups.
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The University of Montana hired Hong’s friend, the poet Prageeta Sharma, to direct its creative writing program. During a party at Sharma’s house, another professor and two graduate students broke into her room, stole her clothing, and took pictures of themselves wearing it. When Sharma reported the incident, the university blamed her, claiming that she wasn’t “Montana enough,” wasn’t well-known enough as a poet, and wasn’t versed in “women’s leadership.” It even revoked her directorship. To Sharma, this response was clearly about race and gender. Something similar happened to her father: when he became a college president, white colleagues spread racist rumors about his management style and forced him out of his job.
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Hong admits that readers might instinctively question whether racism is really at play in this story. Asian Americans are used to hiding their stories, thinking that white people won’t believe them. As a child, Hong even distrusted fellow Asians, including her family members. For instance, she convinced herself that the balls of black gum in her dad’s closet were heroin, not herbal medicine. When her college roommate’s father introduced himself as a Korean War veteran, her father refused to respond—and she scolded him in the car afterwards. He angrily asked if he was supposed to thank the man for the war. Now, Hong understands how he felt.
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Jeong is a Korean word for a special kind of “instantaneous deep connection.” This is what Hong imagined feeling with Eunice Cho. In fact, she really hoped that working with a Korean therapist would let her skip “the long, slow work of psychotherapy” and just chalk everything up to culture. When Hong’s new therapist agrees that Cho handled the situation badly, Hong starts wondering if perhaps her own story struck too close to home for Cho. Hong writes Cho an angry review on a therapist rating site—in it, she complains that Koreans are repressed and unfit to be therapists. Hong asks what “us” means for Asian Americans, and whether they will ever form a shared political consciousness.
After Donald Trump’s election, Hong gives a reading in Michigan. In response to Trump’s planned Muslim registry, she discusses Japanese internment and then reads an essay. Several students tell her how her reading helped them. One white woman praises her for mentioning the internment, but asks why she didn’t just read her poems, which would help everyone heal. Hong anxiously says that she’s “not ready to heal.” Fortunately, the woman understands.
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Three million people, including countless innocent civilians, died in the Korean War. American soldiers broke into Hong’s family’s home, destroyed all of their possessions, and dragged Hong’s grandfather outside to execute him. He only survived because the village translator walked by and told the soldiers that they had the wrong people.
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Hong remembers this story when she sees a video of airport security violently dragging Vietnamese doctor David Dao off an overbooked plane to open up more space. Like Hong’s father, Dao dresses conservatively “to project a benign and anonymous professionalism.” While the media avoids the topic of Dao’s race, Hong knows that the security guards would not have dared to brutalize a white man in the same way. They gave him such a severe concussion that he ran back onto the plane, confused and hallucinating, whispering that he needed to go home. Dao fled Vietnam as a refugee in 1975, and years later, he lost his medical license for allegedly trading drugs for sex. This complex story humanizes Dao: like most refugees—and like Hong’s father—he carried trauma into his new life.
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When people say, “Asians are next in line to be white,” Hong thinks, “Asians are next in line to disappear.” The U.S. wants them to stay invisible—except when their success can be held up as proof that racism doesn’t matter. Hong compares being erased like this to being ghosted—getting rejected, without having any social cues to explain why. This leads her to lose trust in her own perceptions. To compensate for her doubt and self-hatred, she works harder, endlessly, until she’s invisible.
