Ordinary Disasters
How I Stopped Being a Model Minority
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: THE WASHINGTON INDEPENDENT REVIEW OF BOOKS • HYPERALLERGIC • The most personal writing yet to come from a noted scholar of race: a bold and moving look at race, gender, aging, and immigration that examines, through lenses both intimate and political, what it means to be an Asian American woman living in America today.
Part memoir, part cultural criticism, part history, Anne Anlin Cheng’s original essays focus on art, politics, and popular culture. Through personal stories woven with a keen eye and an open heart, Cheng summons up the grief, love, anger, and humor in negotiating the realities of being a scholar, an immigrant Asian American woman, a cancer patient, a wife of a white man, and a mother of biracial children . . . all in the midst of the (extra)ordinary stresses of recent years.
Ordinary Disasters explores with lyricism and surgical precision the often difficult-to-articulate consequences of race, gender, migration, and empire. It is the story of Chinese mothers and daughters, of race and nationality, of ambition and gender, of memory and forgetting, and the intricate ways in which we struggle for interracial and intergenerational intimacies in a world where there can be no seamless identity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This resonant blend of memoir and cultural criticism from Princeton English professor Cheng (Ornamentalism) sees the author dissecting stereotypes of Asian-American women while reflecting on her own relationships to them. In forceful essays organized into five sections, loosely themed around individual stereotypes (including "Mothers and Daughters" and "Beauty for the Unbeautiful"), Cheng gives close readings of films including Barbie and Crazy Rich Asians, breaks down an Alexander McQueen photo shoot by the photographer Nick Knight, and shares uncomfortable interactions with strangers about her interracial marriage to illustrate how Western society often—both intentionally and subconsciously—fetishizes Asian women, turning them into exotic objects rather than complicated individuals. Such fetishization, Cheng argues, causes the "ordinary disasters" of the book's title, which she pushes against by shedding light on "the scripts we follow, and the scripts that follow us." In rigorous but accessible prose, Cheng achieves a dazzling balance of curiosity and righteousness, cataloging the forces of racism and sexism that have attempted to strip her of her humanity while illustrating its durability. Readers will be wowed.
