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Before beginning Minor Feelings, A Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition, an essay collection by the poet Cathy Park Hong, I sat with the book in my lap for a few extra moments Flames flick over the British cover The title and author’s name are printed in ALL CAPITALS It feels like the cover designer is trying to say this book is a fire bomb My 23andMe profile would inform you that half my genetics are from Asia I’ve been told I will love this book, and I want that to be true   The essays can be read alone or in order Hong gives her take on stand-up, female friendship, the poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, poetry, and art-making Tying all this together is Hong’s desire to outline the Asian American condition Hong argues that ‘Asian Americans have yet to truly reckon with where we stand in the capitalist white supremacist hierarchy’: that Asian Americans occupy a slippery spot that makes them both the oppressors and the oppressed When a white man tells her that ‘Asians are next in line to be white’, she considers that she could have replied, ‘We were here since 1587! So what’s the hold up? Where’s our white Groupon?’ Hong looks at the LA race riots between the Black and Korean American communities Koreans had the economic advantage: Asians were better able to get bank loans to open up small businesses in the poor neighbourhoods where they lived with other marginalised communities But Hong also stresses the need to ‘balance multiple truths’ — many of these Korean merchants were themselves only just above destitution They were not the architects of white supremacy And she gives instances of Black Korean co-operation The ways the Asian community can learn from and support the Black community is a recurring theme, be it in Hong’s own admiration for the black stand-up comedian Richard Pryor, or in the way she retells the story of Yuri Kochiyama and her support of Malcolm X But the exact location of Asians, between whiteness and blackness, resists measurement