Ordinary Disasters: Acts of Beauty for the Unbeautiful: Essays

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.

Anne Anlin Cheng was born in Taiwan, grew up in the American South, and is author of three books on American racial politics and aesthetics. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times, The Washington Post. Cheng is the 2023-2024 Ford Scholar-in-Residence at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She is professor of English and director of American Studies at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, NJ.