“Writing offers me a dwelling when I feel the most homeless.” — Anne Anlin Cheng
Anne Anlin Cheng is putting down her necessary words to help her and her loved ones remember her life’s highlights even as she is aging quickly from a bout of cancer and other ailments, in Ordinary Disasters: Or, How I Stopped Being a Model Minority. This collection of essays ranges from the personal to the professional, with her working decades as a professor of English and American Studies.
In the Preface, she shares about her battle with cancer during the pandemic. In that time period, the widespread anti-Asian hatreds also surfaced both in her experiences and in the public mind. That period seems to have prompted an urgent need to write this personal and academic collection of writings.
“The Monk and the Soldier” refers to herself as a monk, and her White husband as the soldier, when she shaves her head to preempt their loss during cancer treatments, and her husband shaves his in solidarity. She thinks of how various cultural messaging informs their lives and their respective images from their respective bald heads. This evolves to a rumination about their interracial relationship:
Years ago, when my husband was out shopping with our newborn, a woman in the store approached him and asked eagerly, ‘I got my daughter from China. Where did you get yours?’ My husband was amused by the encounter, but I recall being pained. Did my husband, even for a second, feel that our daughter was foreign to him? Did the incident jar him out of the cocoon of our new family?
The Chinese side of this family observes “how white” the children are, and the white side of the family observes “how Chinese.” While no side comes across as malicious, their comments sting. This spousal pair are two very different personalities. She is perfectionistic, hyper-sensitive, and vulnerable; he is more happy-go-lucky and confident and outgoing. They each make space for the other, but there are tensions. They have intimacy, but they also have unbridgeable separateness.
And yet, much of the writing is a celebration of their unlikely love and marriage, this, her second marriage after a short disastrous one in her mid-30s. She writes of him: “When cancer and chemo stripped me down to the core, there was no one else on Earth on whom the bare skeleton of me could lean other than him.”
Cheng is, as she describes it, worn down by the racial eddies she works in, the various slights, the senses of unbelonging. She writes:
Recently after working on a yearlong committee with a group of colleagues, I overheard one of them say, ‘And we even had a Chinese woman on the committee with us.’ What feels so terrible about social alienation is that it can divide you from yourself.
As a youngster, she was a small firebrand and feminist. She went against social practice in Taiwan and wore a colorful getup to photo day when everyone else was in uniform. She describes how she became a less flamboyant personality in short order after moving to the U.S. as a young child:
She disappeared behind little punctuating moments: Adrianne—pink, blond, green-eyed, and one of my first American friends—pinching my skin and exclaiming, ‘You are not yellow at all!’; my father telling me not to call him ‘Poppi’ anymore because in America it sounded as if I were calling a puppy; the only other Asian American girl in my school subbing me because people assumed we would be friends.
In “Striving,” while her professional life has been so important to her, the identity politics in academia enervate her. She summarizes: “I was the institution’s poster child for diversity, my labor its alibi, my perseverance praiseworthy but tiresome to others.” She notes at one point: “Assimilation is not passing. It’s more of a shell game.” In her many years stateside, she has found that racism is pervasive from years of first-hand experiences but also professional study. She describes a kind of Catch-22: “It’s a no-win game: as a person of color, you must speak up for yourself, but the moment you speak as a person of color, you’ve already lost the game.”
“Fictions and Frictions of Interracial Love” describes how Cheng met her husband just as she was waiting for her divorce from her first husband to finalize. She and her second husband, whom she does not name, marry six months later. He was a tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, and she was a college professor. She describes the physical headiness of their romance and love:
The minute we became a team, he did what we needed—no guilt trips, no passive-aggression. The world was easy and expansive in his company. A palpable, slightly drunken aura accompanied us wherever we went, buffering our contact with the world. Our connection, unforeseen and organic, wrapped a magical cloak around the two of us. We stood tall and shining. Nothing could touch us.
In her work, she describes herself as a difficult personality. These moments are moving and funny. She was so sensitive about her racial identity and how she and her husband might appear stereotypical that she would sometimes overreact. The offensive trope is of “the White Man and his (silent) Asian Wife.” This occurs at a party, which sparks her into “saying something, anything, just not to be that.” She describes private fights, such as when he innocently misinterpreted the academic term of “racial capital,” which precipitated a blow-up. She observes: “My husband and I are on the same side of the political aisle, and, still, the acrimony of American racial reckoning stings us.”
A number of works describe a difficult growing up as a child of a beautiful mother, maternal grandmother, and other relatives…but falling short herself. In “Letter to Lin Tsu-Ai, My Grandmother,” she begins with a tone of recrimination. She was not loved as much as her brother by their maternal grandmother. She was criticized for falling short of her family’s unforgiving perfectionism but was praised for at least being “likable.” Love is severe.
In “Irascible Love,” she describes her struggles with her mother’s aging. While she maintained her slimness, she was losing her sense of hearing. Her short-term memory was starting to lapse. And her preferred language also changed. This work also begins to explore her relationship with her father, whom she took to task for his critique of Cheng’s mother but who also showed tenderness with her over the years. She writes:
My father, whom I loved dearly, was not an easy person, by turns incisive and caustic, teasing and brooding, generous and critical, affectionate and inflexible. I used to watch his moods the way a meteorologist watches the skies. And although the world would know him as a stern man, we knew in our little circle that he was capable of great bursts of surprising, infectious, childlike mischievousness, making his descents into stormy darkness all the scarier even as they made his light self, when it returned, that much more charismatic.
In “The Look,” she describes various men ogling her and notes that “sexual desire does not preclude racial disdain.” She describes various awkward passes and presumptions of her availability, including from former military stationed in Vietnam and Korea. Her enamorment of fashion clothing troubles her in terms of how others may see her “sartorial play.” Glamor is obvious artifice, but its “synthetic malleability” is a superpower for self-representation.
“Things Not to Do to My Daughter When I’m Old” is a short work, which is essentially a list of things she does not want to trouble her daughter with. The topics echo some of the elements in other essays in the collection.
“Beauty Queen” is a theoretical and applied exegesis of cultural approaches to beauty, particularly in the Taiwan context, but also in global mass media. In one memory, she is sitting with her mother to judge other women’s physical attractiveness on the television. She admits that this practice happens automatically with her…even as she is enlightened and feminist.
Cheng challenges the grand dame of letters, Joan Didion, in “Joan Didion Talks to Marie Kondo About Packing and Self-Respect.” She writes:
“That’s the beauty and the trouble with Didion: her insights can teeter between being either a symptom or its critique. It’s not her intention, but her knife-edged, relentless observations about her surroundings and herself can offer such an exquisite study of whiteness, especially its middle-class privileges and middle-class white femininity.”
This work reads as follows very much a product of the American academy in the humanities, in which researchers map areas of expertise, make cases, attack others, defend turf, and advance the field.
A number of works engage broader culture, and throw conversations around female identity and Asian American-ness. “American Girl” explores the socio-cultural roles of dolls and their representations and the commodification of femaleness. “Asian Woman Is/Not Robot” explores the racist tropes of Asians as robotic and insensate beings, stemming from coolie narratives generations ago. “Southern Chinese” shows different types of Chinese, some American-born, some “fresh off the boat,” and the nuances of the social interactions of Cheng as a child in the early 1970s when the family moved to Savannah, Georgia. She challenges the stereotype of close Asian families in this work, showing the fraying of family ties after different relational needs change.
“Unexceptional States” opens with so many parts of formerly “Asian-friendly” parts of the U.S. turning hostile against Asians in the pandemic. She reviews the fraught history of the U.S. with Chinese in a mass lynching event and exploitive labor on the railways, among others. She writes:
Systems of colonialism, internment, segregation—all of which America has availed itself of—operate not by fully expelling the racial Other but by securing-without-recognizing the Other within existing institutions. This is what makes the American racial ecology and American democracy so specific and volatile: an elaborate structure built on the diversity that it disavows.
In her professional work, she coined the term “American racial melancholia” to refer to the history of American relations with peoples of other races.
“Affirmative Action” engages a timely issue. “Then, Atlanta” shows a relatively multicultural and multiracial city that devolves in a racist attack in 2021, in which a number of people are killed at three Asian-owned spas. Where she sees threads of “racialized misogyny” through that crime, and unfounded assertions of sex work related to the spas, she also hears ignorance in official responses to those violent crimes. “Asian Pessimism” asserts that Asian Americans are seen as “too privileged to count in the stark polarity between Black and white.”
Cheng’s family takes a “Trip to Disney” after her cancer treatments but in a time with COVID-19 in full-fledged transmission. People are masked poorly in the crowded spaces of Disneyland, giving Cheng some concerns, but she hides her anxieties for the most part, and her daughter revels in the environment. The author writes of “the invisible labor of joy” that people perform for others’ psychological comfort.
“Passing Vignettes” shares snippets of remembered experiences with some life lessons and laughs. One anecdote has her colicky daughter who would cry and not sleep through the night for three years, leaving her parents frazzled. In one concerning moment, at her wit’s end, she panics and fears that there may be something wrong with their child. The reach for help ends in a funny outcome when the child sees a fire fighter in full gear and quiets immediately. In another, the author is flirting with a friend at a café when the waitperson makes a funny comment that results in the author offering a witty observation. The joys of life are in the mundane.
In “How I Keep Losing My Father,” Cheng describes a generous moment between her and her father.
“On Aging” covers some frightening but not uncommon experiences with transient global amnesia and observations of her own physical aging. She quips: “I don’t so much exercise now as practice perpetual rehab.”
In “Praying,” she describes her bargaining with a God that she does not believe in. Her illness has led her to going to “religious thinking,” which she terms a “trap” and a “primitive superstition.” (Some of her Taiwanese relatives converted to Christianity thanks to white missionaries.)
The takeaways from Anne Anlin Cheng’s Ordinary Disasters: Or, How I Stopped Being a Model Minority may be not what she intended.
The collection leaves the idea that a lived life has to be agonized over, including over minutiae. Nothing should ever be forgotten and only very little forgiven.
This personal essay collection suggests that being politically correct (self-righteously so) is somewhat relativistic and subjective.
Her essays leave the sense that every person is singular and such a product of their own life influences, inescapably so. Yet, in the current age of celebrity, even professional academics may fall into the idea of celebrity, in which their every whimsy may be worthy of attention somewhere. Or perhaps this is an expression of writerly ego.
In “Mothering a Son,” she writes: “I am writing against my disappearance.” Even in the face of mortality, whether months or years, and armed with high intelligence, the writing product (seen as almost sacred in academia) is always a melding of human personality and how they engage the messy world out there. People cannot escape their own humanity in themselves and their reluctance to empathize and connect to the humanity of others.
How should readers approach Dr. Cheng’s essays? Certainly, she is highly culturally literate. She is precise and exacting. She is demanding of readers. Her points of view can be political and purposefully discomfiting.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
