Minor Feelings: a Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition

“The therapist opened her door. The first thing I noticed was the size of her face. The therapist had an enormous face. I wondered if this was a problem for her, since Korean women are so self-conscious about the size of their faces that they will go under the knife to shave their jawlines down (a common Korean compliment: ‘Your face is so small it’s the size of a fist’).”

Hong’s reaction to her Korean American therapist is one steeped in the racial prejudice of white people that Korean women have internalized. Hong knows that the large-faced therapist would be judged as unattractive by the Korean beauty standards that prefer Westernized characteristics. Just as Hong expects that the Korean therapist will understand her by virtue of their shared ethnicity, she expects that she can understand the therapist and her insecurities for the same reason. When the therapist eventually rejects Hong’s protracted suit to be her patient, Hong feels doubly rejected because it seems to be coming from someone who she thinks ought to be validating the experiences she has to hide from the rest of the world.

“To recite my poems to an audience is to be slapped awake by my limitations. I confront the infinite chasm between the audience’s conception of Poet and the underwhelming evidence of me as that poet. I just don’t look the part. Asians lack presence. Asians take up apologetic space. We don’t even have enough presence to be considered real minorities.”

Hong claims that her Asianness puts her in a liminal space where she is neither a white, educated audience’s lofty ideal of a poet, nor even a vivid embodiment of a person of color. She moves from a negative judgment of herself for not looking the part to a commentary about people of her race in general. The generalization that “Asians lack presence” is an internalization of the racist white view of Asian people. Still, this place of discomfort is a crucial starting point for the book’s examination of Asians’ lived experience in America.