Anne Anlin Cheng grew up in Taiwan and moved to Savannah, Georgia with her parents and brother as a school-aged girl. Having learned English as her second language, she majored in English literature in college (“to my parents’ horror”), earned a PhD, published books on race and gender, and worked her way up the ladder of the professoriate at Princeton University. Then one day, she lost herself.
It turns out losing yourself can happen in an instant. One minute I was getting into the car early in the morning to drive to campus, dressed up and mentally braced for a presentation to the university board of trustees, and the next I was waking up in a hospital room.
In fact, as we learn in the essay titled “On Aging”. Cheng had been awake, but was experiencing “transient global amnesia”. In the hospital, she kept asking the same questions and even telling the same joke. The episode passed, but Cheng wasn’t through with hospitals. She was later diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
Across twenty-two essays, Cheng’s sharply intelligent, compulsively readable, and surprisingly funny book gives us a glimpse of the “ordinary disasters” that shaped the author’s life and relationships. Take, for instance, a glance into the mirror, as described in the book’s first essay, which sets the tone for all that follows:
When I shaved my head in anticipation of chemotherapy, two things happened. First, just like that, I stopped looking like a woman. Second, I turned into a monk. My husband, peering in the mirror, said, ‘Hey, you look like a cute monk!’… In the spirit of camaraderie, he, too, shaved his head. But he did not look less male, nor did he look like a monk. Being tall and white, he looked, well, military. So there we were: the monk and the soldier.
In a profoundly intimate and vulnerable moment, Cheng looked into the mirror and was met with an image laden with racialized and gendered stereotypes. Why should Cheng look like a monk while her husband looks like a soldier? Why should a cyclist scream “Fucking Chinese tourist” at her as she walks on a lake path near her home? Why should her colleagues question her authority as a scholar of race? Because, writes Cheng in “Striving”, “I would never be able to exceed the flat outline of how I appear to the world: just another Chinese woman.”
In 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. In stylish and jargon-free writing, essays comment on American Girl dolls, Joan Didion’s packing tips, Atlanta sushi restaurants, cancer, films like Ghost in the Shell and Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, faculty politics, affirmative action, Disney World (“the Las Vegas for Americans with small children”), and her grandparents, parents, spouse, daughter, and son.
One essay takes the form of a list of “Things Not to Do to My Daughter When I am Old”. Another is a series of “Passing Vignettes”, partly inspired by The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. In the latter essay, Cheng writes evocatively of her childhood in Tainan where she lived with her physician grandfather in a building that also housed the city’s first Western-style clinic. Across the street, Cheng’s “Great Uncle #8” ran a traditional herbal medicine store called the Golden Statue. Customers didn’t know that the Western doctor and the purveyor of herbal medicines were biological brothers. Great Uncle #8 had been “given away” as a child, to join another branch of the family tree. In this very particular Taiwanese family, the author formed her earliest sensibilities, which would later disappear into the flat outline of “just another Chinese woman.”
“I am writing against my disappearance,” Cheng states in “Mothering a Son”. Here, she is speaking of mortality, which may be the most ordinary disaster of all. The book’s final six essays are grouped together in a section titled “Good-byes”. Against the pain of past losses, the fear of future disasters, and the everyday indignities of being in the world, Cheng turns to writing, not for the sake of achievement, but as a form of prayer. The reader is lucky for it.