Cathy Park Hong

ON MINOR FEELINGS, AND WRITING POETRY & PROSE

By Scott Edward Anderson

Beowulf Sheehan

Cathy Park Hong is one of the most original and inventive poets writing today. Her New York Times best-selling book of essays, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, blends memoir, cultural criticism, and an acute sense of observation on race, identity, and the Asian American experience. 

Hong is also the author of the award-winning poetry collections, Dance Dance Revolution and Engine Empire. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Windham-Campbell Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, among other accolades. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

I talked with Cathy Park Hong about her writing, the response to her first book of prose, and her upcoming appearance at the Authors Guild Foundation’s WIT Festival. 

You’re coming to the Berkshires for the Author’s Guild’s WIT Festival in September. What are you most looking forward to about that appearance? I am really looking forward to being in the Berkshires and meeting the local community. I’m also really impressed with the writers they’ve put together so far, like Tony Kushner, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Jamaica Kincaid, and I’m especially looking forward to being in conversation with Sayed Kashua, whose writing I have not been familiar with previously. I’m really interested in hearing from him. It’s a “Festival of Thoughts” and I’m going to be there not just as a speaker, but also as a participant, as someone in the audience, who wants to listen.

When you wrote Minor Feelings, did your background in poetry influence how you wrote or arranged the essays? I organized the essays based on a kind of associative way of thinking rather than a linear approach. I was just following my obsessions. The way I thought through my essays is very much as a poet, based upon sound and imagery as much as about following through on an idea. And I think being a poet gave me more liberties to leap from an idea to a memory to a historical anecdote. That’s what I do as a poet as well.

So, more associative thinking rather than a linear progression. Did you have that structure in mind when you were writing the book, or did it evolve as you were writing? I make my life difficult because I only figure out what I’m writing as I’m writing. I wasn’t sure what the overarching concept was that was going to tie all these essays together. I had a vague idea that the book was going to be about art, politics, and race. That was it. I started with the friendship essay (“An Education”) and from there I wanted to write about Theresa Hak Kyun Cha (“Portrait of an Artist”), and from there I just followed my obsessions. Often, the genesis of an essay would be the spillover from another. For instance, when I was writing the Richard Pryor essay (“Stand Up”), I had this whole passage on white innocence, and I thought, “This doesn’t belong in this essay,” so it became a whole new essay (“The End of White Innocence”). The essays accreted in that manner rather than me mapping it all out.

Your poetry seems so completely original, with its mix of languages and playing with sound and genres. Can you talk about your process of writing poetry? Writing both Dance Dance Revolution and Engine Empire were completely different than the way I write poetry now. It was much more painstaking and research-based. Back then, I wrote poetry more like a fiction writer. It’s important to me to have a setting and the voice of a character or a chorus of characters and then, after that, the book kind of writes itself. But it takes me a long time to find that setting and voice, and then it takes experimenting and playing with different voices and sounds. I’ve always been influenced by speculative fiction, and I was really enchanted by this idea of an invented world, or a world set in the future as an indirect way of looking at the present. So, I’ve allowed myself more play and invention with poetry, less with prose. I tend toward the more autobiographical in prose.

You’ve talked about experiencing a kind of “double self-loathing” from being both an Asian American and a poet. Can you talk a bit about that experience of being an Asian American writer? I think we’re in a very different time now than when I was emerging as a poet. There were far fewer Asian American writers—or, they were there, they just weren’t getting attention. There was like a quota for the number of Asian American writers, and you had to write a certain kind of narrative for it to be palatable to a non-Asian, i.e., white audience. But I think the gates have blown open. There’s a lot more diversity to the kinds of writing that gets out there and there’s more opportunity now for writers. Being at Berkeley, I also teach a lot of Asian American students and I don’t think they have the same kind of hangups as I did when I was coming of age. I think they’re just more empowered and more self-assured. They’re bolder about questioning the status quo and they have more models, more writers they can look up to; so, it's a different time. 

You explore that a bit in Minor Feelings, the idea of the “model minority myth.” Were you conscious of trying to interrogate or dismantle that narrative in the book? The model minority myth was a narrative pinned on me, and I felt that I had no control over my own story. I confronted it by being truthful to my own variegated experiences first, but I also wanted to show my disobedient side. As a writer and as a poet, I was always someone who questioned, who interrogated. But my agenda wasn’t to simply counteract against a model minority myth. I was more interested in trying to understand who I was; my understanding of being Asian American in the most complicated, contradictory way possible.

What has the response to Minor Feelings meant to you? It was important to me that the book found its readers, but I was surprised by the scale of the response. I was not prepared for it, and I don’t think I have still quite absorbed it. I still see myself as this kind of obscure poet, with a chip on the shoulder, underrecognized, and underestimated. So, it doesn’t sit comfortably, the idea that I’m this successful writer now. I’ve been deeply moved and astounded by the conversations I’ve had with people who have come up to me and told me how much the book changed their lives. It’s incredible.