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.
Anne Anlin Cheng is Louis W. Fairchild ’24 Professor of English at Princeton University. She is the author of The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief; the award-winning Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface; Ornamentalism which served as the conceptual basis for the exhibition “Monstrous Beauty” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and a book of essays Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority.
