Structure

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning is a collection of the following seven essays: "United," "Stand Up," "The End of White Innocence," "Bad English," "An Education," "Portrait of an Artist," and "The Indebted." Each of the essays employs a modular form. This structure mimics a collage structure and functions through accumulation and associative thought. In all seven of her essays the author combines anecdotes from her childhood, family life, and artistic career, with references to other writers' work and stories and historical data and accounts. This form enacts Hong's exploration, discussion, and exhibition of the Asian American experience. Refusing to identify as the spokesperson for all Asian American identities, Hong writes in "Bad English" that she uses the modular structural mode because she is "only capable of 'speaking nearby' the Asian American condition, which is so involuted that [she] can't stretch myself across it" (103). If Hong wrote...