Olivia: What if the most damaging stereotype you could face wasn't an insult, but a compliment? What if being called a 'model minority' was actually a political tool designed to keep you silent, invisible, and ultimately, disposable? Jackson: Whoa, that's a sharp hook. My brain immediately goes, "Wait, how can a compliment be a weapon?" It sounds completely counter-intuitive. But I have a feeling there's a deep and uncomfortable truth hiding in there. Olivia: There is. And it's at the very heart of the book we're diving into today: Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong. Jackson: Okay, I'm already hooked by that title. Olivia: And this isn't just some niche memoir; it won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Hong is a celebrated poet, and you feel that precision, that lyrical fire, on every single page. She’s not just telling stories; she’s dissecting language, history, and emotion with a surgeon's scalpel. Jackson: A poet tackling race and identity... that sounds intense. And that title, Minor Feelings, is so provocative. It immediately makes you ask, what makes a feeling 'minor'? Olivia: That is the perfect question to start with. Because to understand the trap of the 'model minority,' we first have to understand the invisible emotional landscape that Hong so brilliantly maps out.

Olivia: Hong defines 'minor feelings' as the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore 'untelegenic.' Think shame, irritation, paranoia. They build up from the daily friction of having your perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed by the dominant culture. Jackson: It’s like being gaslit, but on a societal scale. That feeling when something racist happens, and you're not sure if you're overreacting, or if it even happened at all, because everyone around you is acting like everything is normal. Olivia: Exactly. It's the cognitive dissonance between the American optimism that's forced on you and your own racialized reality. And Hong illustrates this with a story from her own life that is just haunting. In her early thirties, despite having a successful life in New York, she fell into a deep depression, convinced that a facial tic she’d had surgically corrected years earlier had returned. Jackson: But it hadn't? Olivia: It hadn't. It was entirely imaginary. She would spend hours staring in the mirror, asking her husband if he could see it, and he always said no. She became paranoid, hiding her face in public. She writes, "The face is the most naked part of ourselves, but we don’t realize it until the face is somehow injured." Her face felt injured, even though the wound was invisible. Jackson: Wow. That's a powerful metaphor for how these systemic, invisible pressures can manifest as a very real, personal, and physical-feeling crisis. It's not just in your head; it feels like it's on your face for the world to see. Olivia: Precisely. And this internal conflict can also turn outward, into something even more complicated. Hong calls it 'racial self-hatred.' She tells this incredibly raw story from when she was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She went to get a pedicure at a mall, and the technician was a sullen Vietnamese teenager who was clearly unhappy to be there. Jackson: I think we've all been in that awkward service situation. Olivia: But this was different. The boy was rough, he cut her toenails wrong, and when he pinched her toe with the nippers, she felt he did it on purpose. She got angrier and angrier, feeling this mix of superiority—she was an educated poet, he was a service worker—and a strange, uncomfortable recognition. He looked young and Asian, just like her. Jackson: This is getting very uncomfortable. Olivia: It is. She gets so enraged that she stands up, refuses to pay, and storms out, hoping his father punishes him. But later, she reflects on it and has this devastating realization. She writes, "He treated me badly because he hated himself. I treated him badly because I hated myself." Jackson: Oh, man. That's brutal. So she's saying her anger at him was really a projection of her own internalized racism? Olivia: Exactly. She defines racial self-hatred as "seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy." You become compulsively hard on yourself, and on people who look like you, as a defense mechanism. It's a painful, self-inflicted wound born from the constant pressure of being 'othered.' Jackson: So these 'minor feelings'—this gaslighting, this self-hatred—are the internal damage. That brings me back to your hook. How does the 'model minority' myth, this external pressure, pour gasoline on that fire?

Olivia: Because the model minority myth is the ultimate form of gaslighting. It tells you, "You have it good! You're successful, you're smart, you're law-abiding. You're next in line to be white!" And if you dare to complain or point out racism, the response is, as Hong puts it, "Why are you pissed! You’re next in line to be white! As if we’re iPads queued up in an assembly line." Jackson: It completely invalidates any negative experience you might have. It erases your right to be angry or to even have problems. But hold on, isn't being seen as successful and hardworking a good thing? How does that become a trap? Olivia: Hong argues it's a trap because the acceptance is conditional. It's a gilded cage. You are accepted as long as you are quiet, productive, and powerless. The moment you step out of that role, the myth is weaponized against you. She tells the story of her friend, the poet Prageeta Sharma. Jackson: Okay, what happened to her? Olivia: Sharma, an accomplished Indian American poet, was hired to direct the creative writing program at the University of Montana. She was a model minority success story. But when she filed a sexual harassment complaint after a visiting professor and students stole an item of her clothing from her bedroom as a 'prank,' the faculty turned on her. Jackson: They supported her, right? Olivia: The opposite. They said she was 'blowing it out of proportion' and 'refused to assimilate.' They dismissed her as a 'beginning poet' despite her multiple published books. And this is the part that is just jaw-dropping. They suggested she read Anne of Green Gables for 'women's leadership' advice. Jackson: You're kidding me. They told a published poet and program director to read Anne of Green Gables for leadership tips? That's beyond insulting. It's infantalizing. Olivia: It's a perfect example of what Hong means. As long as Sharma was a quiet success, she was fine. The moment she asserted her power and spoke up against an injustice, her qualifications were erased, and she was put back in her 'place.' Hong writes, "The privilege of assimilation is that you are left alone. But assimilation must not be mistaken for power, because once you have acquired power, you are exposed." Jackson: And your 'model minority' status can be used against you. Wow. So the myth offers no real protection. Olivia: None. And Hong uses an even more visceral, public example to prove it: the David Dao incident. Jackson: Oh, I remember that. The doctor who was dragged off the United Airlines flight. The videos were horrific. Olivia: Horrific. And Hong's analysis is chilling. She argues that Dr. Dao, a 69-year-old Vietnamese American physician, wasn't just a random victim of an overbooked flight. He was targeted because of unconscious racial bias. He was seen as a passive, unmasculine, and compliant Asian man who wouldn't make a fuss. When he did refuse, he was met with shocking violence. Jackson: He was literally dragged out, bleeding and disoriented. Olivia: And Hong notes how he kept repeating, "I have to go home," a phrase that resonated so deeply with the immigrant experience of displacement. She connects it to her own father's trauma during the Korean War, when American soldiers dragged him from his home. It's this historical echo of Asians being "dragged against their will." The model minority myth didn't protect Dr. Dao; it made him a target. His perceived passivity was an invitation for violence. Jackson: This is all so bleak. The internal damage of minor feelings, the external trap of the model minority myth... it feels like a prison with no exit. What's the 'reckoning' in the book's title? Where do we go from here?

Olivia: The reckoning, for Hong, begins with breaking the silence and reclaiming the narrative. It's about telling the stories that have been deliberately erased. And there is no more powerful example of this in the book than the story of the artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Jackson: I'm not familiar with her. Olivia: And that's part of the point. Cha was a brilliant Korean American conceptual artist and poet. Her book Dictee, published in 1982, is now considered a foundational text in Asian American literature. It's a fragmented, experimental work about history, language, and trauma. But just days after it was published, at the age of 31, Cha was brutally raped and murdered in New York City. Jackson: Oh my god. That's horrible. Olivia: It is. But what's almost as horrible is what happened next: nothing. The art world and academia, the very institutions that celebrated her work, fell silent about the circumstances of her death. For decades, biographies and critical essays would mention she died 'tragically' or 'prematurely,' but the words 'rape' and 'murder' were almost never used. Jackson: Why? Out of respect for the family? Olivia: That was the excuse, but Hong argues it's a profound ethical failure. She writes, "The length to which scholars will argue how Cha is recovering the lives of Korean women silenced by historical atrocities while remaining silent about the atrocity that took Cha’s own life has been baffling." It perpetuates the very invisibility and erasure of violence against Asian women that is a core theme of the book. Jackson: So breaking the silence is the first step. To just state the facts, no matter how ugly. Olivia: Yes. To document the truth. But it's also about recovering our radical histories. Hong points out that the term 'Asian American' itself wasn't a demographic category from the census. It was a radical political identity forged in the 1960s by activists inspired by the Black Power movement. They were anti-imperialist and anti-racist. Jackson: That's a history I think most people have no idea about. Olivia: Exactly. And Hong introduces us to one of the most incredible figures from that movement: Yuri Kochiyama. She was a Japanese American woman who was sent to an internment camp during World War II. That experience radicalized her. She moved to Harlem, became a fierce activist for civil rights, and a close ally of Malcolm X. In that famous photo of Malcolm X's assassination, she's the woman cradling his head as he lay dying. Jackson: Wow. That's an incredible image of solidarity. She completely defies the passive Asian stereotype. Olivia: Completely. Kochiyama represents, for Hong, a model of what solidarity can look like. A sense of "we" that is "porous and large." It's not about staying in your lane; it's about recognizing that all our struggles against white supremacy are connected.

Olivia: And that really brings us to the core of Hong's argument. She says that for Asian Americans, and many other minorities, their existence in America is 'conditional.' Belonging is always promised but kept just out of reach, to ensure that you behave. You're expected to be grateful for being allowed in. Jackson: The 'indebted' immigrant. Olivia: Exactly. And Hong's final, powerful move is to reject that debt. She says this book is 'ungrateful.' She writes, "I am here because you were there," directly linking her family's immigration to the US military's destructive intervention in Korea. She argues that the way out of the gilded cage isn't to assimilate harder or be more grateful. It's to reject the terms of conditional belonging, recover these radical histories of solidarity, and build new alliances. Jackson: That idea of being 'ungrateful' is so powerful. It reframes protest not as a complaint, but as a refusal to be indebted for a belonging that should be a right. It's a declaration of unconditional existence. Olivia: It's a demand to be seen fully, with all the messy, complicated, and 'minor' feelings that come with it. It’s a call to move from being a 'model minority' to being a part of a collective majority fighting for justice. Jackson: It really makes you question what 'gratitude' even means in this context. Who are we supposed to be grateful to, and for what? The candy given after your country is torn in two? Olivia: Exactly. And that's a powerful question for all of us to think about, no matter our background. Hong's work really pushes you to look at your own assumptions about history, identity, and whose stories get told. We'd love to hear what feelings this book brings up for you. Find us on our social channels and share your thoughts. Jackson: It's a book that will definitely leave you with more than just minor feelings. Thanks, Olivia. Olivia: Thank you, Jackson. This is Aibrary, signing off.