Ordinary Disasters

How I Stopped Being a Model Minority

By: Anne Anlin Cheng

Narrated by: Anne Anlin Cheng

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.

©2024 Anne Anlin Cheng (P)2024 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"From one of our most incisive scholars in race studies, Anne Anlin Cheng has written a memoir that is both astonishingly vulnerable and cutting. For the first time, she turns her brilliant acumen towards herself, using her experiences as daughter, wife, mother, divorcee, cancer patient, student, and professor to explore the painful and subtle vicissitudes of the Asian American experience. With exacting poetic rigor, Cheng unseams the psychosis that internalized the model minority myth. Her scholarly attention—that is distilled into such pleasurable clarity—to Asian female sexuality is especially a crucial contribution to the conversation on race in America. I am grateful for Ordinary Disasters which I am confident will become a classic."
—Cathy Park Hong, New York Times bestselling author of Minor Feelings

"Anne Anlin Cheng has written a book on the brink. She stares into her own abyss, fearlessly. But she also gazes into the deep well of the American soul from where racism and sexism comes, sometimes manifest in unspeakable violence, oftentimes through microaggressions that have worn down her body and spirit. But if her body has been broken, its rubble serves to hone the sharpness of her mind, its keen edge evident throughout this exhilarating work."
—Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer and A Man of Two Faces

“Ordinary Disasters 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. Readers will find themselves identifying with both the tender, personal moments that the author lovingly reveals, as well as the larger cultural issues that have shaped her distinctly complex experiences on earth. This is a book about love, family, community, work, motherhood, womanhood, daughterhood, and marriage. You will enter this book and find a companion in its fascinating stories. You will close its covers with a greater understanding of what it means to be a person in this day and age—actually, any age.”
—Emily Bernard, author of Black Is the Body