Cathy Park Hong on Minor Feelings

AT THE YALE REVIEW’S 200th anniversary festival in February 2020, TYR Editor Meghan O’Rourke spoke with the writer and poet Cathy Park Hong about writing about race, segregation in the arts, and her book Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. During this conversation, Hong read an excerpt from the book in which she defines these “minor feelings” as those emotions that people of color experience when confronted by a literary and popular culture “filtered through the white imagination.” In the above video excerpt, Hong also discusses the myth of white innocence and the difficulties of writing from one’s own life.