The Elephant We Don't See: A Diversity Dialogue "Minor Feelings" by Cathy Park Hong

Co-presented with the Prince George's County Office of Human Rights

The Elephant We Don’t See Diversity Dialogue celebrates Women’s History Month with “Minor Feelings” by Cathy Park Hong, an examination of one of the varied experiences of women in the United States.

In this program, staff from the Prince George’s County Office of Human Rights and the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System will discuss the book, what they learned, and the journey the Diversity Dialogue offers all of us: to read about a variety of human experiences and, through so doing, to gain greater understanding about ourselves and others.

Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.

Binding these essays together is Hong’s theory of “minor feelings.” As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these “minor feelings” occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you’re told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they’re dissonant—and in their tension, Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her. 

With sly humor and a poet’s searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, "Minor Feelings" forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche—and of a writer’s search to both uncover and speak the truth.