Cathy Park Hong is a poet and professor of creative writing, the author of three poetry collections: Translating Mo’um (2002), Dance Dance Revolution (2007), and Engine Empire (2012). Minor Feelings is her first work of nonfiction, though it is one which shares and expands upon the themes, if not the linguistic and stylistic experiments, of her poems. Among other matters, Hong is concerned with the invisibility and erasure of Asians in American culture, with the racist and imperialist history of the United States and of the English language, with the trauma of belonging to a racial minority, and with the development of Asian American women into artists.

One of Hong’s characteristic techniques, typical of a creative writer, is to demonstrate the points she makes even as she expounds them. She often does this by pointing out her own mistakes or omissions. For instance, when discussing the invisibility of Asian women and the erasure of the sexual trauma they suffer in “Portrait of an Artist,” she begins by confessing that for a long time she was uninterested in the rape and murder of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and did not bother to find out what happened to her. She often mentions her early lack of political engagement. In “An Education,” she depicts herself as an artist, then as a poet, with a narrow formalist view of the arts, uncomfortable with the idea of using the techniques she has learned to express and explore her identity as an Asian woman.

Another instance of the way in which Hong makes her point through dialogue with herself and her former self lies in her discussion of the extent to which Asian Americans can be regarded as a cohesive group. How is it possible to regard people from countries as different as Vietnam and Pakistan as a single community? Asia, as she points out, is half the world. White Americans often regard “Chinese” as synecdoche for Asian and are frequently wrong in their guesses about Asian Americans’ countries of origin. In “The Indebted,” she conducts a thought experiment in which the racists who yell at people of color to go back home to “[insert nation or continent]” have their wish immediately granted:

Confusion will abound. Ecuadorians will find themselves in Mexico, or I could find myself in China.

However, Hong demonstrates several times that she herself has failed to discern significant differences between races. In “United,” she complains to a Filipino friend that Asians are self-hating, but her friend responds that Koreans are self-hating, while Filipinos are not. In “Bad English,” she tells a childhood friend that she is not allowed to play with her any longer because she is Mexican, only to hear her retort: “But I’m Puerto Rican.”

In one instance at least, this technique has misfired in the estimation of several critics. Sophia Nguyen complained in her Washington Post review that Minor Feelings avoids its own principal topic by expending much of its word count in discussing the binary opposition between Black and white people in America and in examining the well-worn topic of racism against African Americans. It could, however, be argued that in doing this Hong is again demonstrating her point that Asian people are seldom placed near the center of any discussion about racism. She continually points out that white people regard Asians as almost (but not altogether) white and that Black people often have a similar perception, making them unwilling to see Asians as allies in their struggle against racism.

Whether one regards Hong’s demonstrative technique as successful or not, the way in which she continually illustrates the...