Ordinary Disasters

Praise

“From one of our most incisive scholars in race studies, Anne Anlin Cheng has written a memoir that is both astonishingly vulnerable and cutting. . . . 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

“[Cheng] gazes into the deep well of the American soul. . . . [An] exhilarating work.”
—Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer and A Man of Two Faces

“We all know artists who seem to have found the winning formula in their work and subsequently forgot what it meant to keep up the effort. Not Cheng. This essay collection returns to the form’s roots in Montaigne—the French essayer: to try.”
—Lisa Yin Zhang, Hyperallergic, “The 30 Best Art Books of 2024”

“There is something fearless in the way Anne Anlin Cheng turns a brilliant analytic intelligence on the tender, intimate, ordinary stuff of living—the relation of husband and wife, mother and child, the relation of our daily selves to our mortality—that is very beautiful and a little scary. It’s a book that opens up and opens up, goes deeper when you think it has willed and reflected its way to its depths.”
—Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the U.S.

“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.”
—Emily Bernard, author of Black Is the Body

“Ordinary Disasters is one of those rare books that makes you think, feel, think again, and feel again. Anne Anlin Cheng writes about history and culture with sharp insight, and she writes about personal life with its many private joys and pains with delicacy and intimacy. The book is an elegant and courageous record of not only one individual’s story but also a generation’s experience and memory.”
—Yiyun Li, author of The Book of Goose

“Anne Anlin Cheng, one of the nation’s most eloquent scholars of race and gender, has given us a luminous gift in Ordinary Disasters—a coordinated flight of inner stories that wheel and dive through history, pain, love, consciousness, art, childhood, parenthood, the Asian experience in America, the conundrums of time and mortality.  A powerful, courageous book, extremely artful, maybe her best.”
—Richard Preston, author of Wild Trees and The Hot Zone

“How lucky we are, how blessed, to behold the voice, heart, and mind of the ingenious Anne Anlin Cheng. . . . The complexity of being an Asian American woman . . . takes center stage in this book, as one of the world’s foremost thinkers helps us grapple with the contradictions of navigating this beautiful, unbeautiful life.”
—Sally Wen Mao, author of Ninetails

“Written in elegant, powerful, and often poetic prose, Ordinary Disasters is an arresting amalgam of radical honesty and deep erudition that pulls no punches about the uncomfortable questions that emerge in our everyday entanglements with gender, racial, and cultural difference. . . . A tour de force.”
—Tina Campt, author of A Black Gaze

“Cheng joins a notable coterie of POC writers creating a hybrid genre deftly combining (often scathing) social commentary and intimate memoir. . . . Cheng exhibits an intricate understanding of historical context, identity politics, and cultural theory. . . . Piercing. . . . Resonant.”
—Booklist

“A lovely collection. Tenderly written essays form a beautifully intimate memoir.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Sharply intelligent, compulsively readable, and surprisingly funny. . . . exploring what it means to be Asian and American today, Cheng interweaves academic concepts with personal anecdotes, popular culture analysis, and reflections on current events.” —Asian Review of Books

“Cogent, engaging prose. . . . Her essays clearly and penetratingly warn of the enormous toll these myths of race and success in America take, not just on the author as an individual, but on society as a whole.” —Washington Independent Review of Books