Anne Anlin Cheng is a professor in the Department of English. Her latest book “Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority” was published in September 2024 by Pantheon.
How did you get the idea for this project?
I was going through a series of crises – personal, medical, social, professional – and realized that I needed to find a different way of thinking about and living my life. This is my first book of personal writing after having written three books of scholarship. These essays represent a way back to myself, or, more accurately, back to a self I have yet to fully own.
How did the project develop or change throughout the research and writing process?
This book of essays tracks and dramatizes how the personal is impacted by, but is also far exceeding, the social and the cultural. I write about a wide range of topics: American Girl dolls, Joan Didion’s packing tips, faculty politics, immigration, illness, aging, interracial relationships, and more. I don’t think I could have written this book without my decades of research and scholarship. At the same time, the research and scholarship alone were not enough to help me survive the disasters avalanching around me. I needed a new mode of writing. And, indeed, writing this book changed my life; it changed how I want to live my life.
What questions for future investigation has the project sparked?
Parts of this book are about my mother and her aging. Even as I was writing and finishing “Ordinary Disasters,” her condition has been rapidly changing, Her declining cognitive abilities render her a stranger to herself and to me. I would like to work on writings that can capture the unexpected convergences between dementia and immigration, both forms of self-forgetting and alienation.
Why should people read this book?
One thing I learned from reading great literature: when you are willing to be honest and dig into the innermost idiosyncrasies of your life and psyche, that is actually when you meet other people. The book is very much about the processes of alienation and self-alienation – both in the world but also within one’s own intimate loves – that I think many people also experience. The book speaks directly to Asians in America, but it also speaks to anyone who finds themselves estranged from the people they love the most, who felt the schism between who they are seen as and who they are, and who discovers that what have made them successful their whole life may have exacted profound, invisible costs.
Ordinary Disasters was listed as one of Hyperallergic’s 30 Best Art Books of 2024 and the Washington Independent Review of Books’ 51 Favorite Books of 2024; read more about faculty on ‘best of’ lists on the University homepage.
Learn more about other publications by Princeton University faculty in the humanities by exploring our Faculty Bookshelf.
