Olivia: Most of us think racism is about loud, obvious hate. A slur shouted from a car, a clear act of discrimination. But what if the most corrosive form of racism is quiet? Jackson: Quiet how? Like, something you can’t quite put your finger on? Olivia: Exactly. A constant, low-grade fever of suspicion, shame, and irritation that you're told is all in your head. A feeling that your reality is constantly being questioned. That's the territory we're exploring today. Jackson: That sounds unsettlingly familiar. It’s that feeling of, "Am I crazy, or did that just happen?" Olivia: You are not crazy. And we're diving into a book that gives this feeling a name: Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong. Jackson: Right, and Hong isn't just a writer; she's a highly respected poet and a professor at UC Berkeley. She even won the National Book Critics Circle Award for this book. You can feel that poetic precision and academic rigor in every sentence. Olivia: Exactly. She’s not just telling stories; she’s dissecting them with the sharpest of scalpels. And she starts with a feeling many of us might recognize, even if we couldn't name it, rooted in her own personal history.

Olivia: Hong defines "minor feelings" as the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and born from the friction between American optimism and your own lived reality. They're called 'minor' not because they're insignificant, but because the dominant culture constantly minimizes them. Jackson: Okay, so it’s not that the feeling itself is small, it’s that society treats it as small. Like, "Oh, you're being too sensitive," or "You're reading too much into it." Olivia: Precisely. And to make this idea real, she tells this incredibly vulnerable story from her own life. In her thirties, she becomes consumed by anxiety and depression, convinced that a facial tic from her childhood has returned. It hasn't, but the feeling is so real it takes over her life. Jackson: That sounds terrifying. An imaginary illness. Olivia: It is. She calls it "stinking thinking." She’s desperate, so she decides she needs a Korean American therapist. She thinks, this is it, a shortcut to understanding. Someone who will just get it without her having to explain her entire cultural existence. Jackson: I can see the appeal. You wouldn't have to do the emotional labor of explaining the backstory of your whole life. Olivia: Right. So she finds a therapist, has a consultation, and pours her heart out. And then... the therapist rejects her. Says they're not a good fit. Jackson: Wow. That’s a brutal rejection when you're at your most vulnerable. It’s like the one person you thought would understand is the one who turns you away. Olivia: It sends her into a spiral. She leaves these rambling, desperate voicemails. She even calls and hangs up, just to see if the therapist will answer. It’s this raw portrait of neediness and shame. And for Hong, this experience is the epitome of a minor feeling. Her immense pain is dismissed with administrative language about not being a "good fit." Her reality is invalidated. Jackson: So these 'minor feelings' are when your reality—your pain—is just flat-out denied by the world? Olivia: Yes. And it’s why she includes that powerful quote about the exhaustion of explaining race to a clueless white person. She writes, "It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain... Except it’s even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don’t exist." Jackson: That is a heavy, brilliant line. It’s not a debate; it’s an existential argument you’re forced to have. We saw a very public version of this a few years ago with the David Dao incident on that United Airlines flight. Olivia: A perfect, and horrifying, example. Dr. David Dao, a Vietnamese American man, is told to give up his seat. He refuses. He’s a doctor, he has patients to see. His reality is clear. But the airline’s reality is that they need the seat. And their reality wins. Jackson: It wins in the most brutal way possible. They drag him, a 69-year-old man, down the aisle. Bloodied, disoriented. His humanity, his reality, was completely disposable in that moment. Olivia: And Hong’s point is that this wasn't just a case of bad customer service. It was the physical manifestation of a thousand tiny dismissals. It’s what happens when a person is seen as an object, an obstacle, rather than a human being whose reality matters. That’s the danger of ignoring minor feelings; they accumulate until they explode into something major and violent. Jackson: This idea of whose reality gets to be the default one feels central. It seems to lead directly into another huge concept in the book, something Hong calls 'the end of white innocence.' What does she mean by that?

Olivia: "White innocence" is this idea that white people are blissfully unaware of their privilege or the mechanisms of racism. It’s the "I don't see color" defense. Hong argues this isn't a benign ignorance; it's a powerful tool of deflection. It allows the person in power to act like they're the victim when confronted. Jackson: The classic "How could you accuse me of that?" maneuver. It flips the script and puts the accuser on the defensive. Olivia: Exactly. And she tells this story that is just a masterclass in how white innocence is weaponized. It’s about her friend, the poet Prageeta Sharma, who in 2007 was hired as the director of the creative writing program at the University of Montana. Jackson: Okay, so a position of authority. Olivia: You'd think. But she's a woman of color in a predominantly white institution. A visiting professor and some grad students decide to play a "prank." They steal a private article of her clothing from her desk drawer and take pictures of themselves wearing it on their heads. Jackson: Hold on. That's not a prank. That's a violation. It's targeted, creepy, and deeply disrespectful. Olivia: Of course. Sharma files a sexual harassment complaint. Her colleagues offer a half-hearted apology, but when she doesn't immediately accept it, they become enraged. They tell everyone she's overreacting, that she has no sense of humor. They use their "innocence"—'it was just a prank!'—to paint her as the aggressor. Jackson: This is infuriating. They violated her, and then gaslit her into being the problem. Olivia: It gets worse. They convince the department chair to strip her of her directorship and cut her salary. Jackson: What? For reporting harassment? That's retaliation. Olivia: And it perfectly illustrates the point. Their "innocence" protected them and punished her. And this connects directly to the model minority myth. Sharma did everything 'right.' She's an accomplished poet, a program director, a success story. But the moment she stepped out of line and refused to quietly accept their disrespect, her status was revoked. Jackson: That’s the trap of the model minority myth, isn't it? It’s a conditional acceptance. You're welcome at the table as long as you're quiet, hardworking, and don't challenge the people who own the table. Olivia: It’s a cage. And it’s used to pit minority groups against each other. The book is unflinching about this, and it's one of the things that has made it both widely praised and, for some, controversial. Jackson: I was going to ask about that. The book was a Pulitzer finalist and has been hugely influential. But I've heard some readers found her personal stories, like the one where she gets angry at a Vietnamese pedicurist in a nail salon, to be problematic. Does she risk doing the same thing—judging another minority group from a position of privilege? Olivia: It's a valid question, and one she wrestles with on the page. In that scene, she's a graduate student at the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop, and she's furious with this young Vietnamese boy for what she perceives as a bad, resentful pedicure. She refuses to pay. Later, she's consumed with shame, realizing she knew nothing about his life. She was projecting her own self-hatred and insecurities onto him. Jackson: So she's not presenting herself as a hero in that story. Olivia: Not at all. She's presenting herself as deeply flawed. For Hong, the reckoning isn't just with white America; it's with her own internalized racism, her own complicity. She’s exposing the ugly, messy, contradictory feelings that the model minority myth is supposed to hide. It's uncomfortable, but she argues it's necessary. Jackson: That unflinching honesty is really her proposed solution, then. It's not about being perfect; it's about reckoning. Which leads to her final point: how do you reclaim your story? For Hong, a poet, it starts with language.

Olivia: Yes, she has this whole fascinating chapter called "Bad English." She talks about growing up hearing her mother's broken English, a source of shame for her as a child. But as an artist, she reclaims it. She sees "bad English" and mistranslations not as errors, but as a form of poetic resistance—a way to "savage" the dominant language and create something new from its fragments. Jackson: It’s like taking the master's tools and not just building your own house, but taking the tools apart and turning them into a completely different kind of art. Olivia: A perfect analogy. And this idea of art as a site of resistance and reclamation is central to the most moving chapter in the book, "Portrait of an Artist." It's about the life and death of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Jackson: I'm not familiar with her. Olivia: And that's part of the point. Cha was a groundbreaking Korean American conceptual artist and writer. In 1982, just a week after her seminal book Dictee was published, she was raped and murdered in New York City by a security guard. She was 31. Jackson: My god. That's horrific. Olivia: What's almost as horrific is what happened next: nothing. The crime received virtually no media coverage. As one of her friends tells Hong in the book, "She was just another Asian woman. If she were a young white artist from the Upper West Side, it would have been all over the news." Jackson: That's heartbreaking. It's the ultimate erasure. Her life and her death were treated as 'minor.' Olivia: Exactly. And her art, especially Dictee, was all about fighting that erasure. It’s a difficult, fragmented book that deals with historical trauma, colonialism, and the struggle to speak in a language that is not your own. It’s a work of art that is actively resisting being easily consumed or dismissed. Jackson: So Cha's art was her way of fighting against the very invisibility that ultimately shrouded her death. It makes her story even more tragic and powerful. Olivia: It does. And for Hong, the act of writing about Cha is itself an act of reclamation—of refusing to let her story, and the story of her death, be silenced. It’s a way of paying a debt. But the book doesn't end on this note of solitary artistic struggle. It ends with a call for something more. Jackson: Solidarity? Olivia: Yes. The final chapter, "The Indebted," brings up the life of Yuri Kochiyama. She was a Japanese American woman who was interned in a camp during World War II. That experience radicalized her. She moved to Harlem and became a fierce activist for Black liberation and other causes. There's a famous photograph from the day Malcolm X was assassinated—she's the woman cradling his head as he lay dying. Jackson: Wow. I've seen that photo but never knew her story. From an internment camp to the side of Malcolm X. Olivia: And for Hong, that is the answer. The way out of the isolation of minor feelings is not just through individual achievement or art, but through recognizing shared struggles. She uses a phrase from activists: "I am here because you were there." It connects the personal pain of an immigrant in America to the global history of colonialism and war that brought them here in the first place. Jackson: It reframes the whole narrative. It’s not about "making it" in America. It’s about understanding why you had to come to America to begin with. Olivia: Precisely. It’s about understanding that your story is fundamentally intertwined with the stories of other marginalized people. That's the final reckoning.

Jackson: So after all this, what's the big takeaway? The book is so full of pain and anger. Is the point just to feel bad, to sit in these minor feelings? Olivia: No, I think it's the opposite. Hong argues that acknowledging these 'minor feelings' isn't an endpoint; it's the starting point for a true conversation. The goal isn't to perform your trauma, to say, "I hurt, therefore I am." It's to use that feeling to build a bridge of understanding. Jackson: A bridge to whom? Olivia: To others who have been marginalized. It’s about moving from "I" to "we." That's what the Yuri Kochiyama story is about. It's what the quote "I am here because you were there" is about. It links the specific pain of an Asian American experience to the much larger, shared history of anyone who has been on the receiving end of Western power. It’s a call to dismantle the very systems that create these feelings in the first place. Jackson: It makes you question what small feelings you've been dismissing in your own life, and what larger story they might be telling. It’s not just about race, but about any time your reality has been denied or minimized. Olivia: Exactly. And we’d love to hear what resonated with you. What 'minor feelings' does this book bring up for you? Find us on our socials and share your thoughts. It’s a conversation that’s difficult, but deeply necessary. Jackson: This is Aibrary, signing off.