What is the author's tone in the essay collection, Minor Feelings?

The author's tone throughout each of the essays in the collection is both humbled and brazen, distinct and personal. Hong refuses to submit to conventional expectations of how her story and voice should sound. As a writer of color, Hong actively resists definition as a quiet, submissive, and compliant academic and thinker. Rather, Minor Feelings is Hong's work to subvert and reinvent this prescribed artistic and personal identity. In each of the essays, Hong recounts stories from her past and engages with ancillary texts, creating sometimes dissociative connections between the personal and the universal, the micro and the macro facets of the Asian American experience. These formal, stylistic, and linguistic decisions lend and expansiveness to Hong's voice. While Hong boldly refuses to feel gratitude for her nation, to assume any dictated style or mode of expression, she also actively questions her interiority, her culture, her understanding of both, throughout the collection. These passages of questioning or searching, illustrate Hong's deep desire to learn, to know, to understand the untranslatable and incomprehensible facets, not only of her own experience, but of her nation's past and present political climates. Because Hong's tone is authentic and raw, so unabashed, her reader feels a kinship with her, a desire to listen to her accounts, but to explore the world with her and through her lens.