Jisoo Choi's Interrogating White Nostalgia: Reflections on Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong comprises part of The 1701 Project, a venture led by The Yale Historical Review.

1. FALL 2020
INTERROGATING WHITE NOSTALGIA
Reflections on Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong
by Jisoo Choi, DC '22
Edited by Lydia Burleson, JE '21
1YALE HISTORICAL REVIEW

2. ATHY PARK HONG'S recent book of
essays, Minor Feelings: An Asian American
Reckoning, has been on nearly every reading
list this summer, cropping up on colorful
Instagram posts and reviews of 2020 releases. I was
lucky enough to acquire a library copy just before the
quarantine began and libraries froze circulation, and
I’ve had lots of time since then to read and reread the
book as I watched in real time the urgency of Hong’s
words reflected in the resurgence of activism for racial
justice across the country. Outrage at the killings of
Black Americans at the hands of police—George Floyd,
Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others
whose names we know and do not know—has encou-
raged Asian Americans to reflect on anti-Blackness and
white-adjacent privilege within our communities.
Hong spoke about Asian American identity and
read from an essay in Minor Feelings during The Yale
Review’s 200th Anniversary Festival, just weeks before
the book’s release. After attending her talk, I walked
around campus feeling like there was a hole in my
chest, cold February air blowing right through me. I
felt a strange mix of hollowness and relief at hearing
the thoughts of my own wrestling with racial identity
finally put into words— into prose that was vulnerable
and angry and articulate—by someone who didn’t
know me, but seemed still to understand me because
she, too, was Korean. It was not unlike the indescri-
bable—even illogical—connection Hong herself writes
about feeling toward a Korean therapist she once des-
perately sought out, a connection predicated solely on
a shared heritage and diasporic identity.
That’s not at all to say that Minor Feelings was an easy
read or that it didn’t challenge me to question my own
assumptions and habits as an Asian American raised by
predominantly white and tacitly racist educational ins-
titutions. Some moments in the book, like Hong’s look
at the popular media narrative about the Vietnamese
American writer Ocean Vuong, pointed out cultural
patterns I had normalized despite initial dissonance
or discomfort. She observed that in media coverage of
Vuong’s debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,
interviewers tended to sidestep his queer identity to fo-
cus on his archetypal refugee success story, fitting his
lived experience to a prepackaged American narrative.
Hong writes, “Vuong is asked to rehearse his shattering
experiences of refugee impoverishment and the sal-
vation he found in poetry […] so that his poetry and
biography have become welded into a single American
myth of individual triumph,” and challenges us to reas-
sess the stories we consume and internalize about suc-
cess and the immigrant experience, because even the
most admired Asian American people in this country
are still tokenized and caricatured.
Hong’s other criticisms of culture were more probing
and unsettling, as she trained a consciously anti-racist
eye on cherished, near-invincible works of American
art. In a chapter titled “The End of White Innocence,”
Hong argues that the white American characterization
of childhood as innocent and pristine is motivated by
the desire to return to a past Americana that does not
question or challenge white supremacy. But even then,
she elaborates, this would be a past more imagined than
truly historical: “a manufactured, blinkered, pastiched
nostalgia that the theorist Lauren Berlant defines as a
‘small-town one that holds close and high a life that ne-
ver existed, one the provides a screen memory to cover
earlier predations of inequality.’” Here, Hong comments
specifically on Wes Anderson’s 2012 film Moonrise
Kingdom, a beloved story about young love and child-
hood bravado set in 1965 and delivered in the director’s
characteristic auteur style. And, she admits, the quaint
film on its own is “relatively harmless.” But this film’s
pastel frames and all-white cast (“the scrubbed white of
Life magazine ads,” Hong writes, with the notable exclu-
sion of the ethnic Other) are a far cry from the histori-
cal reality of 1965. Due to the passage of the Hart-Celler
Act during the year, which abolished the immigration
restrictions set by the National Origins Act, 1965 was a
watershed year in American immigration history. Hong
cites that from 1965 onward, 90% of immigrants to the
U.S. have arrived from places outside of Europe. 1965
marked the last year that white Americans comprised
85% of the American population. “It’s as if the Never-
land of New Penzance is the last imperiled island before
the incoming storm of minorities floods in,” she writes,
and the film’s imagery is not reminiscent of Eden and
antediluvian innocence by accident. Benjamin Britten’s
opera Noye’s Fludde occupies a central role in the film,
and the climactic storm has catastrophic consequences
for the inlet on which the young couple constructed
their paradise. Moonrise Kingdom’s nostalgia for an ir-
retrievable past is thus further elevated to Biblical pro-
portions, aligning the transitions of 1965 with the ca-
tastrophic indication of lost innocence.
According to Anderson in an interview with The
C
2 INTERROGATING WHITE NOSTALGIA

3. Hollywood Reporter at the 2012 Cannes Film Festi-
val, the choice of 1965 as the setting was largely spon-
taneous, but the cultural shifts that the year ushered in
influenced the decision. “I do think that the scouts and
its Norman Rockwell–type of Americana is sort of part
of it,” he said. “It seems like 1965 is really the end of one
kind of America.” And thus Hong concludes:
Moonrise Kingdom is just one of countless contem-
porary films, works of literature, pieces of music,
and lifestyle choices where wishing for innocent
times means fetishizing an era when the nation
was violently hostile to anyone different. Hol-
lywood, an industry that shapes not only our na-
tional but global memories, has been the most
reactionary cultural perpetrator of white nostalgia,
stuck in a time loop and refusing to acknowledge
that America’s racial demographic has radically
changed since 1965. Movies are cast as if the
country were still “protected” by a white suprema-
cist law that guarantees that the only Americans
seen are carefully curated European descendants.
One of the characteristics of Moonrise Kingdom
that endears the film to a nostalgic American au-
dience is the fact that the children drive the action,
imbuing the film with a tone of wonder and whimsy.
The coming-of-age genre, with its emphasis on a hal-
cyon childhood, is so pervasive in modern film and
literature that it is hard for us to imagine a time when
childhood was not looked fondly upon with a rose-
tinted gaze. But Hong writes that “the alignment of
childhood with innocence is an Anglo-American in-
vention that wasn’t popularized until the nineteenth
century,” before which children were merely conside-
red small adults. She mentions William Wordsworth’s
poetry as formative to the modern image of child-
hood, citing a literary precursor to J.D. Salinger’s
The Catcher in the Rye, which she discusses—and
disparages—earlier in the chapter. Indeed, I asked
my mother, who went to school and lived for most of
her life in Korea, what nostalgic coming-of-age texts
she remembers reading in her youth, and the Korean
translation of The Catcher in the Rye was her stron-
gest memory of such a genre, over any widely read
works of literature by Korean authors.
“The End of White Innocence” investigates Ame-
rican narratives intended to retroactively create a
homogenous, uncontroversial “screen memory” of
white innocence, then contrasts it with its oppo-
site, the shame and awareness that often wrenches
Black American children prematurely from naïveté
and waits to be discovered behind the thin veil of
ignorance for all who benefit from white privilege.
White nostalgia, then—that which is personified in
the character of Holden Caulfield and the whimsical
romance of Moonrise Kingdom—is the intergenera-
tional vehicle of the white innocence fantasy. White
nostalgia, because this country leaves no room for
innocence in the lives of children of immigrants
or Black children. White nostalgia, because it ins-
pires the creation of retrospective worlds in which
people of color are invisible and thus excluded from
claiming this nostalgia. American nostalgia, which
the anthropologist C. Nadia Seremetakis considers
distinct from the original Greek concept (couched in
the valor and heroism of epic poetry), was only ever a
commodity for the privileged. Conceived initially by
that mythical innocence, the nostalgia is inherited by
the next generation through the romanticized narra-
tives that immortalize the desire to return to the pure
and guiltness childhood of whiteness. And the oeuvre
of works inspired—even in part—by this white nos-
talgia continues to expand, now internationally.
This spread of white nostalgia and the narratives it
has inspired (from coming-of-age novels to the xe-
nophobic rhetoric of the Trump administration) into
different countries, some with very different racial
histories than that of the U.S., is ongoing. And it is of
particular interest to Asian Americans, as its discus-
sion in Minor Feelings may indicate. The current world
of art and media is nearly borderless, and there surely
now are Korean authors writing coming-of-age novels
that romanticize childhood and youth and non-white
filmmakers inspired to recreate the emotional impact
of Moonrise Kingdom. And because of this distillation
of a fundamentally racist and exclusionary mythology
into an aesthetic or literary category, it is all the more
important to be aware of the shadow of racial and ra-
cist constructions on the narratives we engage with.
I’ve always considered the Studio Ghibli film, Whis-
per of the Heart, a popular Asian parallel to Moonrise
Kingdom in tone and theme. Whisper of the Heart is
also a love story between two young teenagers whose
interests and personalities complement each other’s,
and the film involves nostalgia more directly through
3YALE HISTORICAL REVIEW

4. a grandfather figure who tells stories about his youth.
But this film has an even more direct link to American
nostalgia: when we meet Shizuku, the female protago-
nist, she is writing her own Japanese lyrics to the song,
“Country Roads” by John Denver. Invoking one of the
most iconic melodies in American country music, a
genre rich with white nostalgic tunes, the nostalgia of
Whisper of the Heart traces its subconscious influence
back to the longing for a lost white innocence. I don’t
know what that means for the continued sharing and
production of white nostalgia–reminiscent art—in
films like Whisper of the Heart, do the ideas at the core
of white nostalgia morph into something relevant to
Japanese history, or do the pieces of American racial
history remain intact, vestigial but visible?
In concluding “The End of White Innocence,” Cathy
Park Hong reminds her Asian American readers that,
as much as we have been aligning ourselves and our
experiences in contrast to those of white nostalgia, we
occupy a shifting middle ground in American race
relations. She writes:
I have to address whiteness because Asian Americans
have yet to truly reckon with where we stand in the
capitalist white supremacist hierarchy of this country.
We are so far from reckoning with it that some Asians
think that race has no bearing on their lives, that it
doesn’t ‘come up,’ which is as misguided as white
people saying the same thing about themselves, not
only because of discrimination we have faced but be-
cause of the entitlements we’ve been granted due to
our racial identity.
This—among many other tasks of reading, listening,
learning and unlearning, and organizing—is the an-
ti-racist work Asian Americans must take on. We have
fought for—and are seeing—increased representation
of Asian artists in film, journalism, medicine, law, tech,
and many other fields whose habits are inundated with
malignant white nostalgia. And in all of these places,
we must hold ourselves and each other accountable
for the stories we tell and the voices we uplift. It is so
easy for us to become enamored by the rosy palette of
white nostalgia and adopt those narratives and their
outgrowths as our own even as they erase the complex
and revolutionary histories of marginalized Americans
and do not look critically at the underbelly of that nos-
talgia. Our interaction with culture and ideas must be
active and critical, interrogating white nostalgia in the
places we least expect it.
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