PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksDry and delightfully off-key, Hong’s sense of humor is anchored in self-mockery, if not self-flagellation ... Hong uses humor self-reflexively as a rhetorical device to communicate, and cope with, thorny topics like internalized racism, shame, guilt, and bitterness ... In Minor Feelings, shame’s dissociative effects encourages scrutiny and self-reckoning, allowing Hong to skillfully navigate gaps and affinities between her own Asian-American experience and the Asian-American position more generally. When Hong doesn’t see her experience of race reflected in existing literary frameworks, she uses her racialized experience to make her own.
