The author’s background is Korean. In all the essays, she is alive to the danger of using “Korean American” as synecdoche for “Asian American,” and this danger is often made explicit by other Asians from different backgrounds. When she tells a Filipino friend that Asians are self-hating, her friend corrects her, saying that “Koreans are self-hating. . . . Filipinos, not so much.”

Africa, like Asia, is a huge, diverse continent, but Hong contrasts the cohesion and purpose of African American activism with the division and diffidence of Asian Americans. The term “Asian American,” she points out, only dates back as far as 1968, when Asian activists copied the attire as well as the aspirations of the Black Panthers. Hong herself feels an affinity for Americans from other Asian countries but continually refers to words and concepts that are specifically Korean. When white people tell her that Asians are “next in line to be white,” she wants to teach them about the hardships suffered by Chinese laborers in the nineteenth century and the overt racism of the Chinese Exclusion Act. At the same time, she cannot embrace this as her own history, as her ancestors still lived in Korea at the time.

Ultimately, Hong acknowledges that she cannot speak on behalf of anyone else, whatever their heritage. She uses Trinh T. Minh-ha’s idea of speaking or writing “nearby” a subject to unify the struggles of all marginalized people: Black, Asian, transgender, queer, and others. Such intersectionality means that it does not matter, from the perspective of the activist, that Asian Americans are a diverse group, since their political interests are the same and, despite what they are constantly told, are not aligned with white hegemony.

For a book by an Asian American writer, with Asian American identity as its primary subject, Minor Feelings spends a lot of time commenting on the binary opposition between Black and white people in the culture of the United States. In doing this, Hong demonstrates one of her own major contentions: Asian people are all too often invisible in American society. This invisibility takes several different forms. They may be dismissed as almost white (“next in line to be white,” as the man who is, ironically, discussing his racial awareness seminar in “United” puts it). Or their suffering may be obscured by that of African Americans. The largest mass lynching in American history took place in Los Angeles in 1871, when eighteen Chinese men and boys were tortured and murdered. The street where this took place, the author points out, was called Calles de los Negros.

Hong emphasizes that Asian women, in particular, often disappear without trace and without explanation. Even a relatively celebrated person, such as the artist and poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, was raped and murdered in New York’s SoHo district without any media coverage. The author had to resort to court documents to obtain confirmation that she was raped before being murdered. The prosecutor in the case remarked on the lack of publicity given to a homicide in an area that was usually safe but said he did not know why there was so little media interest. One of Cha’s friends, however, was certain that she knew the answer, saying: “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.”

The author is a poet who writes in English and who also reflects frequently on what the English language means to her and to other minorities in America. The broken English and enforced silence of the...