Ordinary Disasters

A bold, moving, intimate look at race, gender, identity, illness, and immigration that examines, through lenses both personal 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 audacious 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, 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 for interracial and intergenerational intimacies in a world where there can be no seamless identity. ” – 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