Minor Feelings: a Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition

This chapter tells the story of Hong’s friendship with two other Asian girls, Taiwanese Erin and Korean Helen, at Oberlin college. The girls wanted to have an avant-garde art collective to rival the one normally set up by white men. Hong notes that white men are most often the ones who transgress the establishment’s definition of art. However, “transgressive bad-boy art is, in fact, the most risk-averse, an endless loop of warmed-over stunts for an audience of one: the banker collector” (114). While Hong feels that artistic friendships between women of color are rare in the annals of art history, she believes that her own friendships with Erin and Helen was one such friendship. When Erin and Helen came into Hong’s life, art-making became a mission as opposed to a private fantasy. The women shared and traded ideas, applying them to their artistic and literary projects.

Hong considered herself fortunate compared to the majority of her Korean American peers, as her parents allowed her to decide on the course of her education for herself. Incidentally, her father also had dreams of being a poet. While Hong initially thought she would be a visual artist, she soon realized that while she had technical ability, she lacked Erin and Helen’s aesthetic flair.