Minor Feelings

United

My depression began with an imaginary tic.

For an hour, I stared at the mirror, waiting for my eyelid to flutter or the corner of my mouth to tingle.

Do you see my tic? I asked my husband.

No.

Do you see my tic now? I asked my husband.

No.

Do you see my tic now? I asked my husband.

No!

In my early twenties, I used to have an actual tic in my right eyelid that spread so that my right facial muscles contracted my eye into an occasional Popeye squint. I found out I had a rare neuromuscular condition called hemifacial spasm, triggered by two cranial nerves behind my ear that became twisted. In 2004, when I was twenty-six years old, a doctor in Pittsburgh corrected my spasms by inserting a tiny sponge to separate the two entwined nerves.

Now, seven years later, I was convinced my spasms had returned ­that somehow the sponge had slipped and my nerves had knotted themselves up again. My face was no longer my face but a mask of trembling nerves threatening to mutiny. There was a glitch in the machine. Any second, a nerve could misfire and spasm like a snaking hose hissing water. I thought about my face so much I could feel my nerves, and my nerves felt ticklish. The face is the most naked part of ourselves, but we don t realize it until the face is somehow injured, and then all we think of is its naked condition.

My self-­conscious habits returned. I found elaborate ruses to hide my face in public, cradling my cheek against my hand as if I were in constant dismay, or looking away to quietly ponder a question about the weather when all I could think of was my ticklish nerves that could, any second, seize my face into a tic.

There was no tic.

It was my mind threatening mutiny. I was turning paranoid, obsessive. I wanted someone to unscrew my head and screw on a less neurotic head.

Stinking thinking, my husband called my thinking.

To try to fall asleep, I ingested whiskey, then whiskey with Ambien, then whiskey with

Cathy Park Hong is the author of three poetry collections including Dance Dance Revolution, chosen by Adrienne Rich for the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Engine Empire. Hong is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review, McSweeney s, Boston Review, and other journals. She is the poetry editor of The New Republic and full professor at the Rutgers University Newark MFA program in poetry. In 2021, she was named one of Time s 100 most influential people in the world.

[A] formidable new essay collection . . . I read Minor Feelings in a fugue of enveloping recognition and distancing flinch. . . . [Cathy Park] Hong is writing in agonized pursuit of a liberation that doesn t look white a new sound, a new affect, a new consciousness and the result feels like what she was waiting for. Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror

Minor Feelings is a major reckoning, pulling no punches as the author uses her life s flashpoints to give voice to a wider Asian American experience, one with cascading consequences. NPR

Hong dissects her experiences as an Asian American to create an intricate meditation on racial awareness in the U.S. Through a combination of cultural criticism and personal stories, Hong, a poet, lays bare the shame and confusion she felt in her youth as the daughter of Korean immigrants, and the way those feelings morphed as she grew older. From analyzing Richard Pryor s stand-up to interrogating her relationship with the English language, Hong underscores essential themes of identity and otherness. Time

Cathy Park Hong s new memoir confronts the tough questions of Asian American identity. Drawing its title from Hong s theory regarding the impact of racial stereotypes and lies on ethnic minorities, this memoir-in-essays is a must-read at a time of rising racist violence and distrust. Bustle

An incendiary nonfiction book about a pressing social issue of the day . . . With its mix of the personal and political, Minor Feelings is the kind of trenchant social critique that s bound to get people talking. BuzzFeed

Hong busts out of the closed loop of Asian American discourse and takes off at a run. It s not that she doesn t address the model minority myth, the brutality of casual racism, or the mortifications of a first-gen childhood; she writes passionately about how Asians are dismissed, the lowly carpenter ants of the service industry. It s just that she also makes every