The first essay hooked me, and I found the rest to be a wild ride where some resonated and others not so much. That's how essay collections go. I appreciate a lot of Anne Anlin Cheng's insight and introspection; however, I'm not quite sure about the part where she stopped being a model minority. I would have liked to have had that more explicitly addressed.

Essays about the author's experiences in school, society and work as an Asian American female.Family
expectations, how society expects her to behave along with the constant microaggressions are neverending.
Reflections on being a child, a wife, mother and teacher.
Interesting read.
#OrdinaryDisasters #Pantheon #NetGalley

Anne Anlin Cheng may want to stop being a model minority, but that doesn’t mean her writing can be a mess. Unfortunately, I found ORDINARY DISASTERS to be the written equivalent of a mad flail into the universe: simultaneously overburdened and overwhelmed by a range of thoughts and emotions about several dozen disparate topics, it dumps everything out in a long scream but never quite successfully makes a point about anything.

Look–as an Asian American woman, I will always support other Asian American women’s journey of reckoning with their intersectional identity of race and sex. However, if you’re going to put that into a collection of essays and subtitle it with the intention of marketing it towards other AsAm women who may want to read it to see themselves reflected in it, you ought to make sure to do several things:

1. Each essay needs to be a thematically complete entity.

Within each essay Cheng ping-pongs between topics: she will write one paragraph about her racial guilt over being in a WMAF relationship, followed by a paragraph about her experience battling cancer, followed by a paragraph of her love of fashion. Each one of these topics is fine, but not all in one essay! I finished each essay with my brow furrowed. Passages in isolation seem insightful, but put together lacked cohesiveness.

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2. Connect your examples with your themes.

The theme of racial identity flits in and out of Cheng’s essays on a whim. It’s one thing to write about her own WMAF relationship; it’s another to give us three pages about how her husband is the most excellent specimen of man in the world, without tying that back to the topic of WMAF relationships. She writes similarly unconvincingly about Asian vs (white) American family dynamics and parenting styles. She’ll write so emotionally about her mother, but then at the beginning and the end of the essay claim that the point is to analyze Asian mothers. There’s a difference between writing an essay talking about your mother’s good and bad points, and writing an essay that examines the problematic characteristics of Asian parenting *while using your mother as an example*.

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3. Match your book’s subtitle and synopsis with your themes, and vice versa.

I’m upset enough by the misleading marketing for this book to deduct yet another star. Worrying about your looks, whether or not you’re a good mom/daughter/wife, reckoning with your cancer journey… all of that is fine, but in ORDINARY DISASTERS Cheng wants to imply that she struggles with these issues *specifically because* she is an Asian immigrant. It’s not. The book markets itself to be about “what it means to be an Asian American woman living in America today”, but it’s really only about what it means to be Cheng. Which is fine… but I wish it wouldn’t be dressed up as if it’s a problem Cheng faces because of her Asian identity.

I’m comparing this to BIBLIOPHOBIA, an upcoming memoir-ish essay collection also published by an Asian American female academic.In BIBLIOPHOBIA, Chihaya’s racial identity makes up part, but not most, of her essays, which made the book’s marketing feel truer to its contents while being more honest about the role that race plays in her memoir. In ORDINARY DISASTERS, on the other hand, race is purported to be front and center, while really not being so.

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And that leads me to an even more problematic (if that’s possible) aspect of the book. ORDINARY DISASTERS is not so much Cheng processing her internalized racism as it is her revealing her own LACK of progress in processing her internalized racism. There are so many instances where she will make some purportedly insightful comment about racial identity, and then, in the very next sentence, say something that perpetuates racist beliefs. For instance, she’ll observe how much more difficult it is for people of color to be taken seriously in academia, and in the very next passage write about the time she felt hurt by something her POC colleagues said about her. She uncomfortably toes the line between realizing that white supremacy is the root of all race-based issues in the US (yes, even between different non-white races), and blaming POC (including herself) for our lack of success or inner peace.

I can’t in good conscience recommend ORDINARY DISASTERS because, aside from the glimmers of insight about being a racial/cultural minority in various spaces in the US, the collection as a whole carries an air of incompleteness or mislabeling at best and problematic internalized beliefs at worst.

A mix of memoir and theorizing like Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes. I've taught some of this author's earlier, more academic writing, so it's especially fascinating for me to see how those ideas emerge from or echo through her own experience.