Minor Feelings: a Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition

Depressed Hong is living in Brooklyn with her husband and seeking a therapist. She hopes to find “a Korean American therapist because I wouldn’t have to explain myself as much. She’d just look at me and just know where I was coming from” (5). While Hong has a cathartic first session with a Korean American therapist, in which she explains her depression and family history, the therapist repeatedly rejects her entreaties for further sessions. Stinging with rejection, Hong writes a diatribe in a review, complaining that all Koreans are too repressed to be trusted as mental health professionals. The review is mysteriously deleted. When Hong eventually settles on a Jewish therapist, she wonders whether the Korean American practitioner rejected her because Hong’s personal history was replete with “issues that she herself had not fully processed” (28).

Hong, the daughter of Korean American immigrants, has long felt ill at ease with her ethnic identity. She feels that Asian Americans occupy an uneasy liminal space. They are “distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down” (9). Asian Americans have often been called the model minority owing to their economic advancement and have even been labelled as the most likely to disappear into the white race through intermarriage and hard work.