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Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning cover

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

Cathy Park Hong, Cathy Park Hong

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, a New York Times Top Book of 2020, and was chosen as a Guardian Book of 2020. What happens when an immigrant believes the lies they're told about their own racial identity? For Cathy Park Hong, they experience the shame and difficulty of "minor feelings". The daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up in America steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality. With sly humour and a poet's searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and artmaking, and to family and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche - and of a writer's search to both uncover and speak the truth.

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Publisher
One World
Year
2020
ISBN-13
9781782837244
Genre
Biography & Memoir
Topics
Asian American identityRace and racismImmigrant experience

Awards