“Minor feelings occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialised reality, thereby creating a static cognitive dissonance”.

This powerful and poignant collection of essays features on a huge amount of ‘end of year’ lists and it’s not hard to see why. In moving from poetry to prose, Cathy Park Hong, writes precisely and lucidly about her experiences growing up and navigating the world as a Korean-American, doing so through the lenses of history, art, language, philosophy and politics. The book simmers with incendiary emotion: Hong’s voice is raw and unflinching and exhausted. She offers fascinating insights, projecting the need for additional voices to be heard in discourse so often reduced to the dichotomy of ‘black/white’ whilst also acknowledging her inability to speak on behalf of all Asian-Americans. She instead speaks “nearby”, locating her fusion of memoir, cultural criticism and racial consciousness in a space that allows for empathy and compassion, without presumption.

The essays tackle a wide range of topics: female friendships, depression, racial self-hatred, the representation in media, capitalism and foreign policy, art, the judicial system, war, immigration and racial myths, to name just a few. This is a book I really need to spend more time with: one day I’ll re-read it, armed with a pen and pad to make extensive notes.

One thing that stood out reading this though is yet another stark reminder of my white privilege. As a woman of Asian heritage, but one born and raised in America, Hong speaks vividly about the invisibility she has felt in her home country. As a white man living in Asia, I have never felt that way, never been forced to confront whether or not I am welcome or feel belonging, never had to adjust or mediate myself in response to other people’s myths or expectations of who I am or should be. I’m grateful that writers like Hong force me to confront my privilege, but I also know that passive empathy and readership is not remotely enough to make the world a better place for everyone.