I loved how acerbic the author was in describing her experiences and so-called ‘minor feelings’ about her racial identity. As a white reader, it can be easy to say, ‘oh, that’s no big deal’ or ‘you can’t get worked up about that’ and Hong does an excellent job of explaining how useless that approach is. A bit like telling a depressed person to cheer up. One thing was very clear from the book, Hong didn’t gain anything from ignoring these feelings and could only understand herself and her life by accepting their existence and validity. The book has the feeling of someone getting a lot off their chest.
Hong introduces the concept of ‘speaking nearby’ a subject in the book and it's a fitting description of this patchwork of reflections with no real narrative. Hong touches on her family history, her childhood, her reading, her writing or failure to write, speaking broken English and the art and biographies of her heroines in the process of speaking nearby the subject of race. Some of these passages were really brilliant and moving. For example, I loved her writing about the gruesome death of one of her favourite artists (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha) and whether the silence surrounding it was respectful or disrespectful. She handles the moral and philosophical niceties with delicacy and speaks with the authority of someone who has researched and considered the subject extensively and carefully. At the other end of the spectrum, adolescent tales about her psychotic friend stealing her poems at college don’t feel very nearby at all. Plus it feels kind of shitty to drag her mentally unstable former friend in public via her book; a fact she even acknowledges. Maybe it’s supposed to be warts and all but I still thought it was the worst part of the book.
I enjoyed Hong’s prose. It is pithy and easy to read while still being inventive and maintaining a distinctive voice. Of course, being the pedant that I am, there were some upsetting moments. I have no idea what a ‘pooched stomach’ is, a tummy that looks like a dog? The dictionary didn’t know either. I also couldn’t understand why the word ‘molecule’ is used about a sweet her father is eating - how could anyone eat anything in such invisible, microscopic quantities and why use such a technical term? She also used two of my least favourite phrases: 1) ‘thought experiment’ - it’s not an experiment because there’s no control and it means exactly the same as ‘think about’ but is pretentious and inaccurate 2) ‘late capitalism’ - should be ‘recent capitalism’ unless the date for the death of capitalism has been set and only Hong’s been told about it - sigh!
Hong is great at highlighting the white bias in media that I ordinarily wouldn’t be at all aware of. Why is everyone in a film like the remake of ‘Bladerunner’ white, including the enslaved children? However, when she started shredding ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ I did wonder if it was possible to be nostalgic about certain aspects of the more racist past without it being an overt endorsement of racism itself? A film about white kids at camp in New England during the 60s doesn’t seem racist to me just because it doesn’t have any people of colour in it. But maybe that’s just because I’m white and I like Wes Anderson. I was more interested when Hong notes that there are hardly any people of colour in any Wes Anderson films except for subservient subcontinental Indians. Her characterisation of him as a collector and the idea that collections are defined by what they leave out also fascinated me. But the specific criticism of ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ struck me as unfair.
Much as I love Hong’s anger and brutal critique of anyone and everything, sometimes I wondered if she’s at risk of fetishing her indignation. Sometimes I would read passages littered with the accusatory ‘you’ while thinking, ‘who is ‘you’ in this context?’. Probably, it’s the white man and I’m willfully misunderstanding it. But sometimes it feels like Hong likes nothing better than to get indignant with rage at a certain individual, situation, novel or film. Then again, sometimes her anger itself was revelatory. Like when her white friend starts crying after Hong gets racially abused on the subway. My natural reaction is to explain it away like it was a bad experience for everyone or perhaps her white friend is a sensitive and emotional person, who may have experienced traumas of their own that are being triggered by the violent shouting match. Either of those things could be true. But Hong’s anger makes her description lucid and conveys the visceral nature of her feelings. This was really helpful to me and taught me a lot. All told, there’s more good in Hong’s anger than bad. Her idea of refusing to be indebted really struck a chord with me. For all the talk of being grateful for life, it could also be said that life is rudely thrust upon a person and the idea of choosing to be born makes little sense to me as I am now. Childhood certainly mainly seems to be following orders for most of us. Who knows? In any case, Hong’s anger was a roaring furnace that powered the book and lit it up but sometimes it felt a bit out of control and threatened to consume everything else.
This was a well written book and taught me a lot about a subject I’m naturally ill-informed about. Parts of it were really wonderful but other bits felt boring and narcissistic.
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