Minor Feelings: a Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition

Hong considers that only white children in America are privileged with a childhood that is free from care and self-consciousness. Like other people of color, Hong felt like she grew up “outside the model of the enshrined white child” and that she looked “sideways” at white childhood with envious eyes (68). Hong, whose childhood was full of duty and devoid of tender, playful moments with her parents, feels an “uncanny weightlessness” where nostalgic memories should be (67). As the mother of a four-year-old girl, she tries to recreate these missing scenes with her daughter, while realizing that her own parents also tried to give her what they missed from their childhoods—namely, the fundamentals of food, shelter, and education.

Hong finds that white literary and popular culture is obsessed with childhood and solipsistically indulgent about its ending. As part of the New Sincerity movement of the mid-aughts, writers and filmmakers traveled back in time to hallowed visions of childhood when white people’s majority standing in America was unthreatened. For example, Wes Anderson’s film, Moonrise Kingdom, is set in 1965 on New Penzance, a fictitious island. The film, which shows two 12-year-olds falling in love, is entirely devoid of people of color. The film’s