It’s a book of essays.’ ” Minor Feelings is now in its 19th print run with 175,000 copies in circulation. “She thought she had to beat out all this other competition,” Hong told me. And in the spring of 2020, the actor Greta Lee messaged Hong over Instagram because she was interested in optioning her book and playing Hong for an A24 television series. The book was especially resonant for a certain professional, liberal-leaning, educated class of young Asians, from MIT students who reviewed it in their school paper, to data scientists tweeting their love for it, to the comedian Ali Wong, who wrote that reading it “felt like I was being shaken awake to something I had convinced myself wasn’t real.” When celebrity chef Alison Roman was asked on Ziwe’s Instagram Live show to list five Asian people, Hong was one of two writers she named. At a vigil against anti-Asian hate this past spring, an Asian woman held up a sign with a passage from Hong’s book (“For as long as I could remember, I have struggled to prove myself into existence,” the quotation began). “And infinitely better than placing the responsibility on an Asian friend to educate you.”) It made its way into Good Morning America’s book club, the New York Times best-seller list, and the Pulitzer-finalists list. ![]() (“Self-education is a great first step to combat internalized and institutionalized anti-Asian paradigms,” starts a Bustle reading list on which Minor Feelings is No. Universities and publications put the book on their anti-Asian-racism resource lists. The affect fit,” said Min Hyoung Song, the director of the Asian American Studies program at Boston College. “It’s a book that is angry about all the things we should be angry about. Minor Feelings had been on track to have a normal release, but - through a combination of some acclamatory reviews, word of mouth, and pure timing - it was perfectly positioned to meet the moment. Donald Trump soon began tweeting about the “Chinese Virus.” In the ensuing months, Asian Americans reported being spat on and screamed at by strangers the hashtag #StopAsianHate took off, and anti-Asian racism became visible in a way it never had before. Hong’s planned tour went to Zoom, and she anticipated that her book would get buried like so many others.Įarlier that month, New York City had seen its first reports of anti-Asian violence brought on by COVID in one instance, a masked Asian woman was allegedly attacked and called “diseased” on the subway. The book’s title was borrowed from the cultural theorist Sianne Ngai’s “ugly feelings” in Hong’s essay about stand-up comedian Richard Pryor, she defines “minor feelings” as “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic.” The collection came out four days before the first case of COVID-19 was confirmed in New York. In one essay, about her relationships with other Asian women, Hong tries to show Asian friendships that are messy and flawed, while another, about the rape and murder of poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, becomes an exploration of the erasure of Asian American women artists. The book, Hong said, was an attempt to “articulate Asian American interiority” as well as a broader effort to recast and refine conversations about Asian Americanness. But in 2020, her career changed radically with the release of Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, a collection of essays that explore her experience as a Korean American and a poet. ![]() Since 2002, she has published three collections themed around empire, civilizations, and invented languages, which have earned her a small, dedicated fandom in the world of avant-garde poetry. “I don’t know how to make her understand my identity as a queer person. “My mother is super-toxic,” the student told Hong. Once, when she was giving a talk in South Korea, a college student came up to the mic during the Q&A. Asian people want to know what they should do when they are microaggressed: “What should I say to someone who says, ‘Where do you come from?’ ” White people ask her how to be a better ally: “What do I do if I witness a microaggression against one of my co-workers who is Asian American?” Podcast hosts ask her what it means for Asian history to be erased in America. Here is a sample of the questions Cathy Park Hong has been asked in the past two years.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |