Ordinary Disasters

Ordinary Disasters

By Anne Anlin Cheng
Unabridged
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Anne Anlin Cheng has written a book on the brink. She stares into her own abyss, fearlessly. But she also gazes into the deep well of the American soul from where racism and sexism comes, sometimes manifest in unspeakable violence, oftentimes through microaggressions that have worn down her body and spirit. But if her body has been broken, its rubble serves to hone the sharpness of her mind, its keen edge evident throughout this exhilarating work.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer and A Man of Two Faces
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.