DOUBLE DOORS OPEN

KNOWN FOR HER INVENTIVE AND GENRE-DEFYING POETRY, CATHY PARK HONG BREAKS NEW GROUND WITH HER FIRST ESSAY COLLECTION, MINOR FEELINGS: AN ASIAN AMERICAN RECKONING, PUBLISHED IN FEBRUARY BY ONE WORLD, IN WHICH SHE FEARLESSLY PROBES THE INTERSECTIONS OF RACE, ART, AND LITERATURE.

AS I wait for the writer Cathy Park Hong to meet me at Poets House, the public poetry library in New York City, I decide to track down her books in the stacks. I climb a winding staircase to the bright reading room, which looks out past a playground and a row of honey locust trees to the Hudson River. A man reads a newspaper on a periwinkle couch while a dozen people tap on their laptops and a volunteer straightens books on a cart. I find the permanent collection at the end of the room, and a few rows in I spot Hong’s three poetry titles on a top shelf, wedged between Homer’s Odyssey and Garrett Hongo’s Coral Road (Knopf, 2011).

When Hong arrives and I tell her where I found her books, she laughs. “That’s my home,” she says, “between Homer and Hongo.” Hongo blurbed Hong’s first poetry collection, Translating Mo’um (Hanging Loose Press, 2002)—published when Hong was twenty-five—praising its “canny and sophisticated verbal music.” And Hong published her own take on a classically inspired epic poem with her second book, Dance Dance Revolution (Norton, 2007), selected by Adrienne Rich as winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize.

Regardless of her placement on the shelf, Hong is an original writer, distinctive for her formal restlessness, slangy and polyglot style, irreverent tone, sci-fi tendencies, and resistance to tidy narratives. As a poet she conjures worlds and personas and depicts how war and colonialism warp and circumscribe individual choice. Dance Dance Revolution follows the character of the Guide, a former South Korean revolutionary living in a futuristic desert resort town, and was written in an invented pidgin that drew on Korean, Spanish, and Latin, among other languages. Engine Empire (Norton, 2012), Hong’s third poetry book, confronts the idea of progress through a triptych of poems: a collection of ballads and other formal experiments set in a nineteenth-century American Old West, a sequence of mostly prose poems about a Chinese boomtown, and a series of more lyric poems about a future of hyper-surveillance. “The language is volatile, undergoing metamorphosis and extreme pressure,” wrote John Yau about the book in Hyperallergic. “The fact is—Hong doesn’t repeat herself and she sounds like no one else.”

But today we’re not here to talk about Hong’s poetry; we’re here to talk about her first essay collection, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, her most personal book and perhaps her greatest formal departure yet, published by One World in February. In seven essays, Hong examines what it feels like to be Asian American through personal anecdote, cultural criticism, historical analysis, and reportage. With great acuity and observational bite, Hong dissects feelings of shame, indebtedness, doubt, anger, and invisibility and contextualizes these states of mind within the history and cultural representation of Asian Americans. She explodes myths about Asian American identity—the model minority and the diligent, grateful child of immigrants, for instance—and lays bare the history that has shaped Asian Americans’ relationships to whiteness, as well as to other racial groups.

Hong says she struggled to write about “Asian Americans,” a label that refers to a set of people with enormously disparate histories, economic realities, and cultures. “Is there even such a concept as an Asian American consciousness?” she writes. Hong does not let her own voice stand in for the group, however; she constantly loops in the ideas and stories of many other Asian American thinkers and artists, including theorist and critic Sianne Ngai, activist Yuri Kochiyama, filmmaker and performer Wu Tsang, and writers Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Prageeta Sharma, and Myung Mi Kim. And Hong says she was determined to risk writing about the topic. “Tackling the subject of Asian America filled me with discomfort and nervousness but also a need,” she says. “I felt I had to confront it because—even though it’s 2020—we still don’t have control over our own stories. I had to say something.”

Minor Feelings has already rattled many readers, who are praising it for naming so much of what has been unnamed about life in the United States as an Asian American. Victory Matsui, Hong’s editor at the Random House imprint One World, describes their experience first reading the collection. “I was nervous. I was afraid Cathy would make us—Asian Americans— look bad or expose us too much. I was afraid of her anger,” says Matsui, who has since left One World and is living and training at a Zen monastery. “I was reading the book with my eyes wide and my heart pounding, asking myself after every paragraph, ‘Wait, are you allowed to say that? Are you allowed to talk about this?’ Reading the book woke me up to my comfort with Asian American invisibility and to all of the rage, heartbreak, melancholy, and shame that I had suppressed over my lifetime. Cathy’s ruthless honesty and fearlessness breathed courage into me.” Other writers have been similarly galvanized and thrilled by the work. On Twitter the poet Eugenia Leigh

wrote, “I am so perfectly triggered, so gorgeously riled up by this book.” Novelist Charles Yu tweeted, “It made me cringe, feel, hurt, and see things I’ve long known in a totally new way.”

Matsui notes that Hong writes with “an incredible emotional depth and vulnerability,” and for Hong, part of that vulnerability stems from writing directly about her own experiences. She writes about being born and raised in Los Angeles as the child of Korean immigrants and describes some of the anger and humiliation her family members experienced and occasionally inflicted upon one another. She writes about attending Oberlin College in the nineties and forming her artistic sensibility and principles inside of a volatile friendship with two other Asian American women artists. She writes about attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, spending time in South Korea on a Fulbright grant, weathering depression in her thirties in New York City, and much more. While she never lingers in the autobiographical mode, her descriptions of her life and what it can feel like to be Asian American—both in one’s mind and body—lend Minor Feelings an emotional heft and visceral power.

Hong now teaches in the MFA program at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, and is the poetry editor of the New Republic. This afternoon she came to Poets House from Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband, the video artist and photographer Mores McWreath, and their five-year-old daughter. Hong and I sit down to talk on two squashy couches in the private reading room of Poets House. The apple-green walls of the room are hung with framed black-and-white portraits of poets—Lucille Clifton, Adrienne Rich, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Amiri Baraka, among others—who seem to look on as Hong begins to describe the thinking and process behind Minor Feelings.

How long have you been working on

Minor Feelings?

I started writing the essays in 2015—so about three years to write and draft. And then I edited it quite a bit. But the thinking behind it started really in 2011, and it took other forms.

What were the other forms?

I tried to turn it into poetry at first, but I was having a lot of problems because, while I’ve always written about race, I wanted to really directly confront the Asian American consciousness in relation to other races, whiteness, and this country—and I wanted to make an argument. It’s hard to make an argument with poetry. Poetry for me is more about immersing the reader in a world and indulging in my love of language and weird words, whereas with Minor Feelings I wanted to map out my ideas, and the lyric form would not let me do that. I was confronting race in a satirical way, and that voice would not lend itself to poetry. I was also having trouble because I am not an autobiographical poet—I always use the lyric form to throw my voice, to write in persona. And suddenly, having made the decision to write in my own voice seemed really daunting. It was like trying to find another persona but this time in the autobiographical voice. The poem just didn’t feel like myself. So I ended up writing sentences.

Do you think differently when you write in sentences for prose?

Yes. I guess I’m more myself. I don’t know why, but when I’m writing poetry, I just want to wear a costume. Writing sentences is much more intimate for me; it allows me to dive into my interior consciousness in a more personal way. Another reason I started writing prose was because I became a mom. Suddenly I had so much less time, and the idea of spending an hour hammering out one line, maybe one stanza, seemed horribly wasteful. With the fragmented time I had, it was easier to bang out paragraphs rather than compose finely wrought stanzas.

That’s just my approach to poetry— of course there are poets like Lucille Clifton or William Carlos Williams or Frank O’Hara who can zip out a poem in the little bits of time they have. I can’t do that. My process has always been very painstaking.

You said you tried thinking about your autobiographical “I” as a persona. Did you also feel that about the “we” in the book, which usually refers to Asian Americans?

When I interviewed Nathaniel Mackey for the Paris Review at the 92nd Street Y, I asked him about the first-person plural, and he said he treats the “we” like a room that contracts and expands. I also follow that flexible definition of the “we” in Minor Feelings. The “we” can be a very problematic pronoun. When you wield the “we,” people often say, “Well, who is this ‘we’? That ‘we’ doesn’t include me.” So I was nervous about using it since I was talking about a collective—I was writing about Asian Americans, which is a group that is very hard to define. So going on what Nate Mackey said, I hope it’s a “we” with double doors open. People can come in and identify or they can leave—I hope it’s not in any way prescriptive.

In the book you describe the essays, which constantly shift registers, as modular essays. How did you arrive at that form?

In one sense it was a huge departure from writing poetry; in the essays I wanted to follow an argument or question to its end and, to paraphrase James Baldwin, bear out more questions on the way to that end. But in another sense, the way I write poetry influenced how I wrote the essays. I’ve always felt comfortable writing prose poetry, and I had a lot of these different patches of prose paragraphs—scenes, personal anecdotes, analyses of books, vents about things. I thought, “These all fit into an argument that I’m making. How do I fit them together?” So I began mixing and matching these paragraphs the way you would put together stanzas for a poem, and that’s how I arrived at a modular form. It’s not really that unique—a lot of people write in that form. And my essays aren’t fragmentary; I wouldn’t call them, for instance, lyric essays. I’m trying to make a coherent argument. But the poetry behind it has to do with this accretion of different systems of knowledge.

Is that how you distinguish the lyric essay—it doesn’t typically advance an argument?

I wouldn’t say that. I don’t know the definition of a lyric essay—I just know it when I see it. They read more ambiently. They lean more on sensory experience than on an idea that is being unpacked. And lyric essays seem to lean more on silences in the way that a poem does, whereas for me, with the essays in Minor Feelings, I had this compulsion to dissect everything.

In your poetry it’s not clear if you are writing about people in your life, but it is clear you are in Minor Feelings.

How did you approach that whole new set of questions regarding what you could or could not write about other people?

That was the hardest part. I was not prepared for the moral concerns when you write memoiristically about other people and you don’t have the shield of fiction. It was quite difficult, especially when I was writing about people who are close to me, like my friends and parents and family, which I’ve never really done before. It was hard to go to that vulnerable place but also to ethically wonder, “Do I have a right to write about them?” I didn’t want to write this book where my personal, familial intergenerational pain was front and center; I didn’t want people to come away from this book just feeling empathy for me—that wasn’t doing enough. I also wanted to implicate the reader and say, “This is what I went through, but this is not just my problem; this is everyone’s problem—this is systemic, this is structural, this is

America. What are we going to do about it?” When I was writing about my family and the difficulties they faced, I didn’t want it to be this singular, exceptional trauma, the way that a lot of the publishing industry makes nonwhite narratives out to be, like “Look at this painful story!” and “Buy this painful story!” And yet at the same time there was trauma growing up—I didn’t reveal as much as I could have, and it might be something I return to. But when I was writing these personal stories, I didn’t want to just write a story; I wanted to grapple with it and for people to understand the narrative apparatus in which I was telling these stories of trauma, so it wasn’t something the reader could easily consume and say, “Oh, that sucked.”

In the book’s acknowledgments, you thank your editor Victory Matsui, writing that they pushed you toward a vulnerability you couldn’t reach on your own. What was that vulnerability?

Victory was a brilliant and amazing editor. They were instrumental—they really helped me shape the book in a way I could not have on my own. The original draft of the book was more academic and impersonal, and instead of telling stories, I was like, “This is the argument, and you have to believe it.” And every time I made a generalization or academic cant started creeping into my sentences, Victory would stop me and say, “No, this also has to be an emotional journey. The reader shouldn’t just think their way through the book; they should feel their way through the book so they’re convinced not just cerebrally, but emotionally.” They were very tough—they made me take out an essay and rewrite huge portions of another—and I might have resented it at the time, but I’m so glad I did it. They asked me hard questions. I was very blessed and lucky to have an editor like Victory; a lot of people of color have trouble with the publishing industry because they can’t find an editor who really understands what they’re doing with their books. Either

the editor does too much or just makes mechanical edits without asking the hard questions that need to be asked. So editors like Victory are rare. I hope there are other people of color in the publishing world who have a more empathetic, deeper understanding of these stories by minorities.

What were the hard questions Victory asked?

One example: “Stand Up” was a hard essay to write because I was dealing with interracial conflict between Asian Americans and African Americans. It’s almost easier to write about Asianwhite conflict or feeling oppressed or erased by a white culture. When it comes to the interracial conflict between Asian Americans and African Americans and/or Latinx, it’s really hard—you can easily say the wrong thing or skate over the problem. I don’t know if I was entirely successful because there’s a lot more to be said. It’s hard to be honest—it’s much easier to virtue signal and say things like,

“Asians need to stop being anti-Black.” There are a lot of essays and articles in which Asian writers scold other Asians, which is not going to convince anyone. You have to first talk about where you come from and simultaneously show how your circumstances are different and not that different from those of African Americans and how Asian Americans are granted advantages African Americans are not. It’s a tricky moral calculus. So when Victory looked over the essay, they said, “You’re not going deep enough. You have to show your uncertainty and discomfort. You have to put more of yourself in that scenario.”

You’ve shared what was difficult in writing the book in terms of the content, but what did you find difficult in terms of finding the time and space to write?

It was hard. I’m a mom; I have a daughter who is five years old, and I wrote most of the book when she was a toddler. I had to wedge writing time in when she went to swim class or early in the morning before she woke up. But I was also very lucky: I got a WindhamCampbell Prize that allowed me time off from teaching, which was incredibly important and helped me finish the book. I also had summers when I could go on residencies. And I have a really supportive partner. When people ask, “What’s the secret to your success?”— it’s so important you have a supportive partner. My husband is a feminist in the true sense of the word because he’ll take on more childcare or household duties so I can have the uninterrupted time to write. So I’m very lucky in that way. But of course it was also hard— I wasn’t sleeping. Even when I wasn’t writing I was just so anxious about finishing the book. I would get up in the middle of the night. I’m a slow writer; I wish I were the kind of writer who can write a thousand words a day, or like Knausgaard who can write twenty pages a day. But I would spend a whole day agonizing over one paragraph, and then get up at 3 AM. In the past when

I woke up at three in the morning, I would try to go back to sleep—but I learned that, no, when an idea sprang into my mind at three in the morning, I had to get up and write it until five in the morning—and then the day would start.

In the book you describe a lot of internal and emotional states by making similes to animals. You say shame is a “sharp, prickling awareness that I am exposed like the inflamed ass of a baboon,” the mind “would curdle like a slug in salt” when it can’t stop noticing whiteness, and the mind that’s trying to attach to a memory that doesn’t exist is like the “feelers of a mollusk groping the empty ocean floor.” Do you have a sense why you use animal imagery when trying to describe feelings, especially those connected with race?

I did notice that. Toward the end I thought, “I’m using a lot of mollusk imagery; what’s up with that?” I wanted to give color and shape and legibility to the feelings that I haven’t seen in American literature or cinema— feelings that are racialized. When you write about the interior consciousness, it can be quite abstract and cerebral, so I was using my poetic tools. I was using similes so there was a real tactility to the interior consciousness that I was describing, and it just happened to be a lot of animals and mollusks. I probably used animals because a lot of the feelings I felt were kind of debased, and that’s often equated with an animalistic feeling. And I write a lot about emotions like anxiety, shame, and suspicion—a lot of that comes from a fight-or-flight instinct, which is instinctual and animalistic. So the animal imagery came easily for me. I didn’t rationalize it at the time—I just wanted to embody the thought process so the reader can feel it in their body as well.

One of the words that kept coming up for me in thinking about your books was betrayal. In Dance Dance

Revolution, the character of the Guide and the Guide’s grandfather and father provide information to those in power—for example, Japanese soldiers, American soldiers—which is a kind of betrayal. In the first section of ballads about the brothers in Engine

Empire’s first section, which is set in a California boomtown, the characters betray one another in different ways. In Minor Feelings the idea of betrayal crops up when you write about your family and friends. Can you talk about this thread of thinking across your work?

There is concern and worry about betrayal in all of my books. Maybe with Minor Feelings it has to do with writing about other people. The Asians that I know, or the Koreans that I know, are very private people. There’s this fear of being exposed or exposing the source of your unhappiness, as well as a culture of shame. There was consensus among my parents and the community that I grew up in of, “Look forward, don’t look back, move on. Why dwell? Don’t dwell.” So I felt that dwelling—exposing some of the unsavory parts of my family—was a kind of betrayal. To truly write about what my family was like I was turning them in, implicating them, especially when I have this thinking drilled into me: “We came here and provided you this education and then you use that education and turn it against us?” That’s a kind of betrayal.

But in Engine Empire and Dance Dance Revolution, I was more thinking about the compromised positions a lot of colonized peoples are in and how they will often betray their loved ones in order to get ahead. I was curious about these less heroic stories of people who were complicit in some way. That complicity is also in Minor Feelings, how Asians are complicit in capitalism or colonial thinking. Even the state of being Asian in this country—if you look at it more from the perspective of other people of color, Asians are treated as suspicious because we’re white-adjacent. And even though I haven’t done anything—I don’t think I’ve done anything—sometimes I

feel like a traitor, because of how we’re always used as this wedge. We’re not entirely victims nor are we entirely aggressors; we’re somewhere in between.

I think many Asian American writers probably tussle with this fear of betraying one’s family by writing about them. Do you have any advice for them?

Don’t write to impress. Write what makes you feel uncomfortable even if it means betraying your family. I say that in jest, but I also sort of mean it. It was hard for me to do this, but when you first start writing you have to write— if you are writing about your personal life—as if no one else is going to see it but you and maybe other people who would understand where you’re coming from and feel the same kind of pain or rage or happiness. It’s important to get it all down on paper.

What do you imagine to be an ideal artistic community or collective?

I don’t have an ideal—just groups of people coming together sharing ideas, ideally IRL. I criticize the internet in the book and what technology has done to communities and to literature. In certain ways it has opened up doors and disrupted the gatekeeping of elite institutions, so I’m grateful for that. But I think real conversations aren’t being had in favor of the conversations you have on Twitter or Facebook, which are very limited to being whether you’re for or against something. If I were to think of the ideal, I would say it’s something akin to Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s idea in The Undercommons of marooned communities—communities made up of not just artists, but also writers, adjuncts, anyone who’s in any kind of economically precarious situation. Instead of trying to be enfranchised, you try to be deliberately disenfranchised and fuck with the system as much as you can. I’m kind of butchering what they say, but that’s my ideal: to create an undercommons of people that is outside of the digital capitalist grid. That’s easier said than done—but you’re asking about the ideal.

What are you reading or working on now?

I’ve been reading Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting, Benjamin Moser’s biography of Susan Sontag, Danez Smith’s Homie, and Virginia Woolf’s books—there are so many books on my bedside table. I’ve been trying to write a few poems. I started a series called “Satan Sonnets,” and was like, “OK, I found it, finally I’m writing.” But that ground to a halt. It might turn into something else, but I hope they’ll remain poems. And I’ve also been interviewing people. I had time off in the fall, so I went back to L.A. and found people I knew in childhood, and I’ve been interviewing and talking with them. I don’t have any idea what I’m going to do with it yet, but I just want to listen and see what happens.