Minor Feelings in the Wake of the Atlanta Attack: How a Mom of Asian Descent Spent the First 100 hours in the Aftermath

Abstract

This autoethnographic writing documents how a family of Chinese descent spent their first 100 hours after the Atlanta Shooting on March 16, 2021, in which a White gunman killed eight people, including six Asian women. It bears witness to the rise of the anti-Asian racism in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic and offers a snapshot of the private life of a family of Asian descent in the dawn of the Stop Asian Hate Movement. Drawing on Korean American poet Cathy Park Hong’s term minor feelings, this essay explores how emotions, rooted in racialized lived experience and triggered by the mass shooting, evolved, shifted, and fueled the sentiments that gave rise to the Stop Asian Hate Movement. Compared with the more visible violence against Asians and Asian Americans displayed on social media, it interrogates the less visible traumatic experience that haunts Asian and Asian American communities.