"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"--

Anne 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 The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. 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.

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
9 Joan Didion Talks to Marie Kondo About Packing and Self-Respect 98
10 “American Girl” 110
11 Asian Woman Is/Not Robot 122
 
Part IV. Asian America
12 Southern Chinese 133
13 Unexceptional States 149
14 Affirmative Action 159
15 Then, Atlanta 170
16 Asian Pessimism 177
 
Part V. Good-byes
17 Trip to Disney 195
18 Passing Vignettes 204
19 How I Keep Losing My Father 227
20 On Aging 239
21 Mothering a Son 254
22 Praying 267

Acknowledgments 277
Notes 279
Illustration Credits 283