Ordinary Disasters

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. EARLY QUOTES AND EXCITEMENT FOR ORDINARY DISASTERS: “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 "There is something fearless in the way Anne 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