{"product_id":"ordinary-disasters-isbn-9780593316825","title":"Ordinary Disasters","description":"\u003cb\u003eONE 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.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePart 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eOrdinary Disasters\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003ci\u003eContents\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003ePreface ix\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Part I. Intimacy \u003cbr\u003e 1 The Monk and the Soldier 3 \u003cbr\u003e 2 Striving 15 \u003cbr\u003e 3 Fictions and Frictions of Interracial Love 27\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Part II. Mothers and Daughters \u003cbr\u003e 4 Letter to Lin Tsu-Ai, My Grandmother 49 \u003cbr\u003e 5 Irascible Love 57 \u003cbr\u003e 6 The Look 68 \u003cbr\u003e 7 Things Not to Do to My Daughter When I’m Old 80\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Part III. Beauty for the Unbeautiful \u003cbr\u003e 8 Beauty Queen 85 \u003cbr\u003e 9 Joan Didion Talks to Marie Kondo About Packing and Self-Respect 98 \u003cbr\u003e 10 “American Girl” 110 \u003cbr\u003e 11 Asian Woman Is\/Not Robot 122\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Part IV. Asian America \u003cbr\u003e 12 Southern Chinese 133 \u003cbr\u003e 13 Unexceptional States 149 \u003cbr\u003e 14 Affirmative Action 159 \u003cbr\u003e 15 Then, Atlanta 170 \u003cbr\u003e 16 Asian Pessimism 177\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Part V. Good-byes \u003cbr\u003e 17 Trip to Disney 195 \u003cbr\u003e 18 Passing Vignettes 204 \u003cbr\u003e 19 How I Keep Losing My Father 227 \u003cbr\u003e 20 On Aging 239 \u003cbr\u003e 21 Mothering a Son 254 \u003cbr\u003e 22 Praying 267\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eAcknowledgments \u003c\/i\u003e277\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eNotes \u003c\/i\u003e279\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eIllustration Credits \u003c\/i\u003e283\"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 \u003ci\u003eOrdinary Disasters \u003c\/i\u003ewhich I am confident will become a classic.\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Cathy Park Hong, \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eMinor Feelings\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"[Cheng] gazes into the deep well of the American soul. . . . [An] exhilarating work.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of \u003ci\u003eThe Sympathizer\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eA Man of Two Faces\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"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 \u003ci\u003eessayer\u003c\/i\u003e: to try.\"\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e—Lisa Yin Zhang, \u003ci\u003eHyperallergic\u003c\/i\u003e, \"The 30 Best Art Books of 2024\"\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"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.\"\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e—Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the U.S.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“\u003ci\u003eOrdinary Disasters\u003c\/i\u003e 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.”\u003cb\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Emily Bernard, author of \u003ci\u003eBlack Is the Body\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“\u003ci\u003eOrdinary Disasters\u003c\/i\u003e 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.”\u003cb\u003e \u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003eYiyun Li, author of \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Book of Goose\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“Anne Anlin Cheng, one of the nation’s most eloquent scholars of race and gender, has given us a luminous gift in \u003ci\u003eOrdinary Disasters\u003c\/i\u003e—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.”\u003cb\u003e \u003cbr\u003e—Richard Preston, author of \u003ci\u003eWild Trees\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Hot Zone\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“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.”\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Sally Wen Mao, author of \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eNinetails\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"Written in elegant, powerful, and often poetic prose, \u003ci\u003eOrdinary Disasters \u003c\/i\u003eis 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.\" \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Tina Campt, author of \u003ci\u003eA Black Gaze\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"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.\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"A lovely collection. Tenderly written essays form a beautifully intimate memoir.\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Kirkus Reviews\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eAsian Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eWashington Independent Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003eAnne 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 \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic,\u003c\/i\u003e the\u003ci\u003e Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e. 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.When I shaved my head in anticipation of chemotherapy, two things happened. First, just like that, I stopped looking like a woman. Second, I turned into a monk. My husband, peering in the mirror, said, “Hey, you look like a cute monk!” I am pretty sure the “cute” part came out of love, but the “monk” part, echoing my thoughts, struck me as a notable coincidence. In the spirit of camaraderie, he, too, shaved his head. But he did not look less male, nor did he look like a monk. Being tall and white, he looked, well, military. So there we were: the monk and the soldier.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGiven how complex gender and race are as embodied experiences, it is remarkable how simplistic and crude their visual expressions are. Could hair, a minor loss in the violence of cancer, make such a great difference? I knew, at least intellectually, that “woman” has always been reducible to her body parts, but to see such an insight so viscerally and mundanely demonstrated in the bathroom mirror stunned me. And what was with the monk? Would my husband have thought I looked like a monk had he not grown up watching kung fu movies? Would I, had I not immigrated to the United States? Have I come to see my own Chineseness through Western tropes?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the 1990s, when I lived in Northern California, the \u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Bay Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e ran an article about the great number of relationships between Asian women and white men. The article quoted an undergraduate from the University of California, Berkeley, who, asked why she preferred dating white men over Asians, said, “Well, it kind of feels incestuous to me . . . like dating my brother.” A friend who read the article poked fun at this admission, saying, “Good thing people in Asia don’t think so!” But there’s something behind what that young woman said—a thin line of grief or maybe of querulousness, an expression of familial allergy—that has stayed with me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eScholars have long pointed to the hypersexualization of Asian women and the demasculinization of Asian men in American popular media as a leading cause for the high rate of Asian American women marrying outside their race. But it is also common wisdom among Asian American women of my generation and younger that, if you discover your white boyfriend has been exclusively dating Asian women, you should run for the hills. Just because there is a white-male fetishization of Asian femininity does not mean that the inverse (that is, Asian-female fetishization or idealization of white masculinity) is true. In fact, for many Asian women involved in interracial relationships, myself included, white masculinity is a fraught challenge. Racialized gender, especially as it plays out in intimate relationships, is not and cannot be simply a question of identity politics or a problem of representation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe young woman’s confession in that interview seems to me to speak more to a deeper and more silent dilemma of intimacy for the diasporic subject, a wound in the experience of kinship itself. Kinship, after all, is all about determining who is a stranger and who is not. It is generally agreed, certainly in Western cultures, that the social norm of marrying outside one’s community, clan, or tribe produces biological, economic, and cultural advantages. (Anthropologists call this \u003ci\u003eexogamy\u003c\/i\u003e.) The injunction to marry outside one’s bloodline to ensure genetic diversity and create social alliances, however, takes on different and confusing meanings when your clan or community has been truncated or displaced, at once insular and under assault.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor many immigrant communities, marriage within one’s ethnic group (\u003ci\u003eendogamy\u003c\/i\u003e) ensures cultural and familial continuity in the face of fragmenting, geographic dispersal. Here, then, is the double bind for the racialized minority: marrying out means selling out, while marrying in can feel like giving in to conservative familial demands on the one hand and xenophobic prohibition on the other. Only within the peculiarities of American racial dynamics can traditional, racist white anxiety about miscegenation find a ready ally with traditional Asian family values. Both sides apply patriarchal and racial restrictions within which the Asian American woman must navigate.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLove can be challenging. Add being Asian and a woman in America, and you get a vexing picture. As Cathy Park Hong sums it up in\u003ci\u003e Minor Feelings\u003c\/i\u003e, “In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status . . . distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down.” Used as pawns in the game of racial divisiveness, Asian Americans are often despised for their reputed adjacency to whiteness and economic privileges. In a 2012 study, the psychologist Susan Fiske showed that most Americans rate Asians and Asian Americans as highly “competent” or “intelligent,” but almost all found the latter to be “cold” or “not warm”—that is, unloved and unlovable. The result is not surprising, especially since the very terms of the survey (“competence” and “likability”) already scripted the yardstick against which Asianness gets judged.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Asian American woman would seem to fare better than her male counterpart on the likability scale. She at least can claim access to the idea of erotic or exotic appeal. But this privilege also spells her downfall. At once the lotus blossom and the dragon lady, the celestial being and the pestilential prostitute (according to nineteenth-century immigration laws), Asian beauty in America is, historically and now, an ugly business. To this day, the Asian American woman occupies a weird place in the American racial imaginary: she has absorbed centuries of the most blatant racist and sexist projections, yet she hardly registers in the public consciousness as a minority, much less a figure who has suffered discrimination.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe writer David Xu Borgonjon once wryly observed, “You can only be Asian outside of Asia.” For the Asian American woman, I would add, she can be neither wholly Asian nor wholly American. Seen as both a prize and a liability, she is caught between sets of double elimination that make the question of love—and the stranger-versus-family distinction—confounding, even perilous.","brand":"Pantheon","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300409561317,"sku":"NP9780593316825","price":27.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780593316825.jpg?v=1767734254","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/ordinary-disasters-isbn-9780593316825","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}