Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority [Hardcover]

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.Contents
Preface ix

Part I. Intimacy
1 The Monk and the Soldier 3
2 Striving 15
3 Fictions and Frictions of Interracial Love 27
 
Part II. Mothers and Daughters
4 Letter to Lin Tsu-Ai, My Grandmother 49
5 Irascible Love 57
6 The Look 68
7 Things Not to Do to My Daughter When I’m Old 80
 
Part III. Beauty for the Unbeautiful
8 Beauty Queen 85