My minor feelings
Cathy Park Hong, the author of Minor Feelings, is unabashed. Throughout her essays, she delves into confronting identity through the lens of her own lived experience without subtlety, exploring the complexities of what it means to be Asian and American, both wholly at the same time. While debriefing the first essay, the one consensus that my book club group came to unanimously was the feeling of discomfort, an indescribable sense of uneasiness. Afterward, I wondered- what made us so uncomfortable? Why was our reaction toward the conversations about race and identity so unsettling? As a daughter of Korean immigrant parents like Park Hong, it was easy for me to draw parallels between her internalized feelings and my own. As for my entire book club group, though I cannot speak for them, we had all chosen this book knowing its topic matter. Even if not by intention, we all still implicitly understood how personal it could reach. Mostly, I think, we were stunned by the bluntness of Park H