Ordinary Disasters

August 1, 2024
Musings on race, gender, parenting, and mortality. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, race and gender scholar Cheng was already battling cancer. She was also parenting two children, navigating an interracial marriage, grieving the death of her father, and managing her aging mother. During this time, the author writes, "it felt as if I was at war with everyone, including my partner and my own body." The purpose of the essays she collects here, Cheng states, is to find "a way back to myself, or more accurately, to arrive at a self that I have yet fully owned." On this journey of self-discovery, she writes about her memories of her grandparents in Taiwan, her experience of anti-Asian hate during the pandemic, her changing relationship with her teenage son, her husband's incomplete understanding of her racial experiences, and her childhood in Savannah, Georgia. While many of her essays hone to traditional narrative structures, others lean toward the inventive, most notably "Things Not To Do to My Daughter When I'm Old," a poignant, tongue-in-cheek list of the author's mother's foibles that she hopes will not become her own. The strongest essays are the most personal, in which Cheng speaks frankly, vulnerably, and insightfully about how her multiple identities affect the most important aspects of her life. In these pieces, she flows effortlessly between her relationships and insecurities and scholarly, historical, and pop culture references. While a few of the essays temporarily break this mesmerizing spell by slipping entirely out of the personal and into the academic, overall this is a lovely collection. Tenderly written essays form a beautifully intimate memoir.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

August 1, 2024
"I was going through cancer when the world got sick: a raging pandemic and unabashed racism sweeping our country," Princeton professor Cheng begins. Cheng joins a notable coterie of POC writers creating a hybrid genre deftly combining (often scathing) social commentary and intimate memoir--think Cathy Park Hong's Pulitzer-finalist, National Book Critics Circle-winning Minor Feelings (2020), which Cheng acknowledges here. A longtime scholar of race and gender, Cheng exhibits an intricate understanding of historical context, identity politics, and cultural theory. Especially piercing is her confrontation of anti-Asian hate: "We live in a time of such heightened racial hierarchy that, even as Asian Americans are being bashed and stabbed, they can still be minimized and dismissed as too privileged to count in the stark polarity between Black and white." Her most empathic writing explores her family's immigration, being Southern Asians, her interracial marriage, motherhood and mortality (cue tissues), and being, all-too-often, the only woman of color in the room. Cheng's most resonant pieces are the least formal, particularly "Passing Vignettes," a delectable hodge-podge of seemingly random thoughts and precious memories.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

August 12, 2024
This resonant blend of memoir and cultural criticism from Princeton English professor Cheng (Ornamentalism) sees the author dissecting stereotypes of Asian-American women while reflecting on her own relationships to them. In forceful essays organized into five sections, loosely themed around individual stereotypes (including “Mothers and Daughters” and “Beauty for the Unbeautiful”), Cheng gives close readings of films including Barbie and Crazy Rich Asians, breaks down an Alexander McQueen photo shoot by the photographer Nick Knight, and shares uncomfortable interactions with strangers about her interracial marriage to illustrate how Western society often—both intentionally and subconsciously—fetishizes Asian women, turning them into exotic objects rather than complicated individuals. Such fetishization, Cheng argues, causes the “ordinary disasters” of the book’s title, which she pushes against by shedding light on “the scripts we follow, and the scripts that follow us.” In rigorous but accessible prose, Cheng achieves a dazzling balance of curiosity and righteousness, cataloging the forces of racism and sexism that have attempted to strip her of her humanity while illustrating its durability. Readers will be wowed.