Ordinary Disasters - by Anne Anlin Cheng (Hardcover)

About the Book

"An important book--a bold, moving, intimate look both personal and political at race, gender, identity and migration and about what it means to be an Asian American woman living in America today. By the author of The Melancholy of Race and Ornamentalism. Anne Cheng's Ordinary Disasters brilliantly explores the often inarticulate consequences of race, gender, immigration, and empire. It is the story of Chinese mothers and daughters, of race and nationality, of ambition and gender, and the intricate ways in which we struggle in a world where there can be no seamless identity. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, part history, Anne Cheng's bold, original essays focus on art, politics, and popular culture from film and beauty to art and fashion. Through personal stories woven with a keen eye and an open heart, Cheng summons up the atmosphere of grief, love, anger, and humor in negotiating the realities of being a teacher/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 pressures of internal and external ordinary stresses. This moving, brave and illuminating book confronts and mourns how loss and catastrophe have become the unexceptional state of our current moment, in particular for an Asian American woman"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"From one of our most incisive scholars in race studies, Anne Anlin Cheng has written a memoir that is both astonishingly vulnerable and cutting. . . . I am grateful for Ordinary Disasters which I am confident will become a classic."
--Cathy Park Hong, New York Times bestselling author of Minor Feelings

"[Cheng] gazes into the deep well of the American soul. . . . [An] exhilarating work."
--Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer and A Man of Two Faces

"We all know artists who seem to have found the winning formula in their work and subsequently forgot what it meant to keep up the effort. Not Cheng. This essay collection returns to the form's roots in Montaigne--the French essayer to try."
--Lisa Yin Zhang, Hyperallergic, "The 30 Best Art Books of 2024"

"There is something fearless in the way Anne Anlin Cheng turns a brilliant analytic intelligence on the tender, intimate, ordinary stuff of living--the relation of husband and wife, mother and child, the relation of our daily selves to our mortality--that is very beautiful and a little scary. It's a book that opens up and opens up, goes deeper when you think it has willed and reflected its way to its depths."
--Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the U.S.

"Ordinary Disasters is an essay collection that will dazzle, delight, and intrigue its readers. In prose that is as vulnerable as it is exquisite, Anne Anlin Cheng manages to get at the heart of the human experience."
--Emily Bernard, author of Black Is the Body

"Ordinary Disasters is one of those rare books that makes you think, feel, think again, and feel again. Anne Anlin Cheng writes about history and culture with sharp insight, and she writes about personal life with its many private joys and pains with delicacy and intimacy. The book is an elegant and courageous record of not only one individual's story but also a generation's experience and memory."
--Yiyun Li, author of The Book of Goose

"Anne Anlin Cheng, one of the nation's most eloquent scholars of race and gender, has given us a luminous gift in Ordinary Disasters--a coordinated flight of inner stories that wheel and dive through history, pain, love, consciousness, art, childhood, parenthood, the Asian experience in America, the conundrums of time and mortality. A powerful, courageous book, extremely artful, maybe her best."
--Richard Preston, author of Wild Trees and The Hot Zone

"How lucky we are, how blessed, to behold the voice, heart, and mind of the ingenious Anne Anlin Cheng. . . . The complexity of being an Asian American woman . . . takes center stage in this book, as one of the world's foremost thinkers helps us grapple with the contradictions of navigating this beautiful, unbeautiful life."
--Sally Wen Mao, author of Ninetails

"Written in elegant, powerful, and often poetic prose, Ordinary Disasters is an arresting amalgam of radical honesty and deep erudition that pulls no punches about the uncomfortable questions that emerge in our everyday entanglements with gender, racial, and cultural difference. . . . A tour de force."
--Tina Campt, author of A Black Gaze

"Cheng joins a notable coterie of POC writers creating a hybrid genre deftly combining (often scathing) social commentary and intimate memoir. . . . Cheng exhibits an intricate understanding of historical context, identity politics, and cultural theory. . . . Piercing. . . . Resonant."
--Booklist

"A lovely collection. Tenderly written essays form a beautifully intimate memoir."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Sharply intelligent, compulsively readable, and surprisingly funny. . . . exploring what it means to be Asian and American today, Cheng interweaves academic concepts with personal anecdotes, popular culture analysis, and reflections on current events." --Asian Review of Books

"Cogent, engaging prose. . . . Her essays clearly and penetratingly warn of the enormous toll these myths of race and success in America take, not just on the author as an individual, but on society as a whole." --Washington Independent Review of Books

About the Author

Anne Anlin Cheng was born in Taiwan, grew up in the American South, and is the author of three books on American racial politics and aesthetics. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Cheng is the 2023-2024 Ford Scholar in Residence at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She is a professor of English and a former director of American Studies at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.