"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"--
Part memoir, part cultural criticism, part history, this collection of original essays threaded with personal stories 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. Illustrations.
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 Chengs 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.
