I picked up poet Cathy Park Hong's collection of essays, Minor Feelings to see if I can find any overlap between her life and experience as an Asian American immigrant and mine. We did have the same hyphenated American racial identity, although I personally had never considered myself Asian. Asian for me means the people from East Asia - China, Koreas, Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and the like. But however I see it, I also understand the common the thread that binds us all - we all have roots in the continent of Asia, whether East Asia or West Asia and we are all outsiders, immigrants hot off the U.S immigration grill in most cases.
Park Hong, a Korean American born and brought up in California, touches this aspect of immigration history in one of her first essays. She reminds us that the immigration policies of the U.S government ever since the first immigration law was enacted in 1790 - The Naturalization Act, was intent on preventing non-white immigration. The 1790 law allows any free white person of “good character,” who has been living in the United States for two years or longer to apply for citizenship. Without citizenship, nonwhite residents are denied basic constitutional protections, including the right to vote, own property, or testify in court. This exclusion is especially concerning because 1 in 5 persons counted by the 1790 census was of African descent.
In 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act passes, which bars Chinese immigrants from entering the U.S. This is the first time a specific group of immigrants are targeted by a U.S immigration law. In 1917 U.S. government decides to be impartial and expands the ban to all of Asia - restricting the entry of Filipinos even, a former colony. Then there is the much-maligned and rightly so, Japanese Americans internment camps during the Second World War. In 1965 under the threat of heightening Cold War, as a part of the PR exercise to revamp its image US opens doors to the degraded Asian people - but only the best and select professionals who already have advanced degrees and were highly trained- engineers and doctors were admitted in. Hong's book made me look this all up as her essays filled the gaps.
She also reflects on the sorry space taken up Asians in daily life. She ruminates thus about her own poetry reading, " I confront the infinite chasm between audience conception of the Poet and the underwhelming evidence of me as that poet. I just don't look that part. Asians lack presence. Asians take up apologetic space. We don't even have enough presence to be considered real minorities."
She says when she hears the phrase, 'Asians are next in line to be white', she replaces 'be white' with 'disappear', and that Asians reputed to be accomplished and law-abiding will disappear into this country's amnesiac fog.
While most of her essays resonated with me there were a couple that flew over my head. There was one where she expounds on the merits of Richard Pryor's standup and her appreciation of it. I never really understood Richard Pryor, even with closed captions on. Appreciating Pryor, might be like learning to appreciate dark beer. I need to drink a lot of light, craft and fruity beers to get there. Although many African American comedians I like, like Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock and Wayans Brothers consider Pryor the father of African American comedy. Maybe it was because Pryor created that niche for African Americans in the standup scene, where none had existed before. He was the pioneer, the reason why others could walk the trail he cleared. While Richard Pryor made Cathy Park Hong question the kind of audience she should be/is writing for, no stand-up comedian (except perhaps George Carlin) has ever led me down the tunnels of retrospection or life-reviews.
The other essay I breezed and skipped through was the one about her college days, female friendship and art. There was nothing wrong with the essay, it was just not a subject I cared much about. It delved too much on relationships, emotions and people and too less on hard cold facts, logic and info snippets that I tend to enjoy. My bad.
Minor Feelings is a hybrid of memoir and criticism. There were places where I could appreciate the poet in her, writing the essay, but there were also places where her prose dangerously veered into the stiff, incomprehensible parlance favored by academia. I could find similarities in her experiences and her diagnosis of situations that you are exposed solely by the merit of belonging to a racial minority.
In one of her essays, Park Hong mentions an anecdote about an award-winning poet of color say during a Q&A, "If you want to write about race, you have to do it politely, because then, people will listen." Minor Feelings is Cathy Park Hong trying to come clean of her politeness cover, talking about race in prose, it was good to hear an Asian voice on the subject - loud and clear.
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