Hello, Wesley. Hello, Jenna. So a few weeks ago we decided to do something on the show that we have never done before, but always wanted to do, which is read a book.

And this year we chose Minor Feelings in Asian American reckoning by the poet and author and cultural critic, Kathy Parkhong.

So now that we're done reading the book, we're going to talk about it a little bit, and then we're going to talk to Kathy.

But Wesley, do you remember why we picked this book in the first place?

Well, I think what we wanted to do was try to think about what's been happening in this country for the last 15 months since the pandemic started.

And there seemed to be this uptick partially driven by the president's association of the coronavirus with China.

But also this longstanding tension between Asians and America.

And this idea that they're not American.

And the ways in which those problems manifest themselves through violence and hate speech.

One of the reasons to talk about this book is what Kathy Parkhong is doing in it is truly reckoning with Asian American identity.

And she isn't the first person to attempt to do it. But there was something urgent in her writing.

There's a real simmering rage here that it just was.

I don't want to say it's pleasurable to experience, but there's there is something.

I don't have a lot of pleasure in it because it matched my own.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's worth noting this book was finished way before any of this started happening.

And yet it's a book that is so right timed for right now.

And in the wake of watching the anti-Asian sentiment spike in this country.

And thinking about how to show up in solidarity.

And thinking about how to reckon with the difficult feelings around the individual attacks that are happening in this country being perpetuated by black people.

And what to do with that and how to still make this fight intersectional despite the discomfort.

A big part of my desire was to fill in my own knowledge gaps and refresh.

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