Cathy Park Hong's Minor Feelings

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    Last year in AP Lang we read a part of Cathy Park Hong's book Minor Feelings, specifically, The Indebted, and Hong's writing style and word choice stuck with me as impactful and gave me a new perspective on different ideas.

    When thinking of beautiful words and poetry, the first thing that came to my mind was Minor Feelings and The Indebted. Although I haven't read all of Minor Feelings, there were two lines from the book that stuck out to me as beautiful.

    “Innocence is both a privilege and a cognitive handicap, a sheltered unknowingness that, once protracted into adulthood, hardens into entitlement.” Hong's choice of words such as "unknowingness" and "hardens" brings a sense of (interestingly enough) innocence turning into the knowledge of self, which is exactly what Hong is trying to convey. Another notable word to point out is Hong referring to innocence as a "cognitive handicap", unlike others who would refer to innocence as a barrier or another more toned down term, Hong's use of words shows the severity of innocence as Hong believes it to be.

    Another line from Minor Feelings | The Indebted that I find beautiful come from Hong's perspective on the feeling of indebtedness, “I’d rather be indebted than be the kind of white man who thinks the world owes him, because to live an ethical life is to be held accountable to history.” Hong brings her point across in a very efficient manner while also developing her ideas on accountability and indebtedness. Again Hong's word choice, words like "ethical" and "accountable", prove Hong's ideas while also showing the severity of the situation.

    Although Minor Feelings isn't a poem, it's multiple essays of Hong's personal incidents and ideas put together in a rather poetic way. Not all poems have to rhyme to be a poem, and Hong's essays in Minor Feelings bring depth and beauty to her beliefs similar to how poems bring out depth in their own ways.

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