Book Club – Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong

Join the final instalment of the Book Club for the 2021-2022 year with presenters Senior Fellow Lily Cho and Alum Tina Park. Moderated by Niyosha Keyzad.

Please register to attend in person below.

Click here to attend via Zoom. Passcode: 414084

You are welcome to join in for formal dinner at 6:30pm. Register to attend by emailing porter@masseycollege.ca – subject: April 4th formal dinner

About the Book

Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.

Binding these essays together is Hong’s theory of “minor feelings.” As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these “minor feelings” occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you’re told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they’re dissonant—and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her.

With sly humor and a poet’s searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche—and of a writer’s search to both uncover and speak the truth.