Lulu Yao Gioiello I first came across your work when I read your essay Yellow Skin, White Gold on Asia Art Archive. It really resonated with me, so I sought out your book Ornamentalism. I come back to that book often as, being an Asian woman myself, I think a lot about the image of her in Western society, in media and on social media. How did you get into writing about the “yellow woman?” And how did you decide on the title of your new book Ordinary Disasters?

Anne Anlin Cheng I have always been really interested in race and gender and in particular, racialized gender. The question of Asiatic femininity was on my mind professionally and personally. I realized that, at least academically, there was very little written about this figure in a historically or theoretically rigorous way. Everybody understands that she’s been subject to a lot of racism and misogyny, everyone seems to think that’s a given, but nobody had said anything more deeply about this figure other than to point out the symptom. The moralistic gesture over the years, of saying in outrage, “That’s fetishizing the Asian woman” hasn’t gotten us very far. Because we all know the stereotype has been around for centuries, and as you say, even today in popular culture and social media. I really wanted there to be some kind of feminist theory about the Asian woman. I don’t think my book is the end-all to the question, but I wanted it to be at least an invitation for other people to really think rigorously and seriously about this figure. 

Ordinary Disasters is a very different kind of book. It is the first time I’m publishing personal essays, it’s the first book that isn’t out of a university press, and I wrote it for mostly personal reasons. I was going through a lot of health issues at a time when the world outside was also getting really sick. It was the pandemic, there was a lot of anti-Asian violence. And in the face of all that disaster, I realized that even though I had been writing about race and gender for three decades, there were still certain truths that I hadn’t been able to say, either out loud or to myself. All this scholarship, all this research I have done has been really important – I don’t think I could have written this book without it. But at the same time, it was not adequate enough for me. I thought about how race and gender actually gets lived out in my everyday life, in my most intimate relationships. That’s why I decided to write this book. It speaks to a more general audience, but it’s really trying to track how these complicated categories I’ve been writing about for so many years get realized in the minute grains of everyday life. So it’s very different from my previous works. It was really scary to write but also really cathartic. (laugh)

Lulu I can imagine how scary that must be! I pulled an interesting question you posed in an interview for Harvard Graduate School of Design. You say, 

I’m curious how you would answer that question, but also, this new book is essentially you writing about the Asian woman behind the scholarship on Asian women. To me, your personal stories are very much part of the scholarship, in the way that the academic texts give a lot of context historically and offer ways to think about things, but this book is showing the inherently very personal experience of being an Asian woman. And that experience is emotional; it’s in relation to family, to partnership, to colleagues…

Anne When I did speaking events for my academic books, women of color and Asian American women in the audience would often say things like, “I think this work is really important. So how do you think it should change the way I live my life?” or something along those lines. And when I used to get that question, I would feel a bit startled and misunderstood, because I was writing cultural analysis and cultural criticism. I wasn’t writing a how-to book, and I wasn’t trying to tell people how to live. Still, that question has stayed with me. It’s a very real question in a different way. This book of personal essays is about trying to answer that question — not to tell people how to live, god forbid. I would be the last person to tell people how to live — but it is offering an example of how my own life has been impacted by these large categories of identity and culture, and how they are in no way adequate to account for who I am. But at the same time, they continue to impact and shape who I am. It’s a complicated push and pull between me, the private person, and these public categories. They’re so intertwined in complicated ways that I feel only through personal narrative, only by dramatizing how relationships have all these larger elements moving inside them, even if they’re not enough to explain those relationships, can you actually see how complex these categories are.

I want people to understand what a lived experience of race, gender and immigration are. These are words that people bring up all the time, but they become a catch-all phrase for something. To actually see how it impacts a person dealing with their marriage, their parenting, their professional lives; when you see all the minute details of how these interactions get played out, I think It’s a much more complex, real picture, or understanding of these categories.

Lulu Yeah. I feel like the term “Asian American” often gets flattened down to either celebrating our culture in easy-to-digest ways, or is only about the obviously terrible things that we experience or have experienced. I really liked how, in your book, you brought up things about your life that contradict each other but coexist. You brought things up that could be thought of as stereotypes for people who are outside looking in. For instance, you opened the “Mother and Daughters” chapter by talking about how your grandma preferred boys. 

Anne Yes. She was totally verbal about it.

Lulu And as much as it pains me to say it, that is a real thing.

Anne  She was completely explicit.

Lulu My Ama does that too. Even if it can give us Asians a “bad look” I’m glad you didn’t hide that. You chose to talk about your family from all different angles. You spoke about your dad having two sides to him, the caring and the cold shoulder. I think it’s really important for Asian Americans to be able to see how there are multiple ways into understanding and living your own culture. 

Anne This is something that identity politics doesn’t get at — to understand Asian Americans as subjects, as people, right? People are complicated, and so our relationships to the most beloved people in our lives are also complicated. With my grandma, I wanted to be really honest about that. She really never loved me, it sounds funny to say. She cared about me but she really didn’t like me. I was too mouthy, I was a girl… Her care for me was conflicted. At the same time, there was a huge attachment between us that I hope the essay can capture. We had a very antagonistic relationship but it was nonetheless a very close one. She represents for me a part of my past which is tied to Taiwan — a past that I have lost in many ways since immigrating. 

Lulu You know, reading your book, I found many similarities between us, but also a lot of differences. My mom’s Taiwanese and also has Sjögren’s syndrome, something you mentioned you were diagnosed with in the last few years. You have mixed children, I am a mixed child. You and your husband’s individual parenting styles actually reminded me both of my dad, who had his own “tiger mom” era and then went the more “you’re on your own” route later on in life. And when you were speaking about your Ama, I thought of the time I first went back to Taipei at nineteen and met my own Ama. At first I was taken aback with culture shock from the way this family I had just met was making fun of me. They’d poke fun at how skinny or fat I was, how my feet were too big, my chest was too flat…

Anne There’s no one more brutally honest than the Taiwanese family haha.

Lulu Right?! But then towards the end of the trip, I started to realize that they only said those things because I was family to them. It was actually a term of endearment. That realization made me feel, one, a lot better about the situation, but also made me think of the nuances of being Asian. For example, many Caucasian therapists think of this dynamic in Asian families as verbally abusive, which in many ways it certainly is, but they might have missed the side of that relationship where the intention was to express intimacy and care. In any case, it was really interesting to see the similarities and differences between your and my own story, how there was so much overlap despite some obvious generational, socioeconomic and immigrational differences.

Anne What you’re saying about this paradox is really important because I think about how the term Asian American on the one hand is arbitrary, because it encompasses people from so many different backgrounds. But on the other hand, since Asians in America are essentially treated the same — the general public doesn’t care if you’re Chinese or Filipino — this false category still operates. 

I was thinking the other day about the model minority stereotype, and how as an educator I always feel like it’s my job to debunk this myth to the wider American public. It disguises the fact that Asian Americans as a demographic have the highest income disparity, that it’s used as a wedge and a shaming device against Black Americans and the so-called “Welfare Queen.” But when it comes to the Asian American community, it is just as important to acknowledge that just because something is a stereotype doesn’t mean it doesn’t have power. It doesn’t mean we are free from it, we are attached to this stereotype. For years as a young woman, I did not think I was a model minority. I thought I was too smart or above it, I criticized it intellectually and historically. But after I essentially got sick from working too hard from doing institutional labor, I realized — my God, I am the model minority. In spite of all my intellectualizing, I bought into this — So I think it’s important as a community to think about the ways in which we remain attached to this stereotype. It’s not that we’re foolish, because it’s understandable. If your choice in life is to be seen as either the yellow peril or the model minority, you’re going to pick the model minority… It’s a survivalist strategy.

Lulu In your book, you mentioned going to a meeting of Asian Americans and feeling like everyone was speaking a different language and contradicting each other. My hope is that there will be more opportunities for stories and personal accounts like yours, Cathy Park Hong’s, and others who can show a bigger picture of an individual’s life alongside all the theory and politics. I feel like that can help us see the things we have in common and see that the things that make us different don’t mean we can’t relate to each other or find common ground.

Anne Right. In the essay, I wrote about how excited I was to see all these different faces at the staff meeting in the university. But then as the meeting went on, we realized how different we were — nationally, American-born or Asia-born, there were differences in when we immigrated, whether we were 10 or 30, whether someone was from Taiwan, mainland China, or Hong Kong… All these differences started to emerge. I felt like I was in the tower of Babel. At first this really depressed me because it made me realize in a very visceral way that Asian Americans haven’t come together politically with the kind of force that some other communities can, because we have all these internal differences. But at the same time I thought about how inspirational our community can be – because we have so much difference, and we have more power together than when we are apart. But on your mention of Cathy Park Hong, I was a big fan of her poetry, and when she came out with Minor Feelings, I remember thinking, my god, this is game-changing. Reading works like hers really gave me a model not just to write but also to have courage to talk about this stuff. I’m hoping my book will do the same for other people. It’s hard for Asian Americans in general to write about personal stories. When I told my mother a couple of years ago that I was writing about our family and about myself, the first thing she said was, “Don’t tell people you have cancer.” Her instinct was to hide any kind of negativity from the world. That’s part of why writing this book was so therapeutic. It was hard for me to write but it felt like it was good for my soul. To admit I had cancer or have had really unpleasant racial encounters that made me angry. My instinct has been to put on a good face, it’s part of the whole model minority thing, to put on a good face. With every one of these essays that I finished writing, I feel like I’ve taken a stone from my heart and put it on the table. It’s lightening. The silence we endure as Asian Americans does not serve us individually or as a community. 

Lulu Do you think this is also something that can resonate with the Asian reader who is not an immigrant, or is perhaps an immigrant in another part of the world? You mentioned the quote from David Xu Borgonjon, “You’re only Asian when you’re not in Asia.” But I’ve been speaking with a lot of Asian artists and publishers, who in general have to be very globally minded since they have to navigate an international industry, and they seem to be grappling with their own cultural identities as well, or are at least interested in the work of Asian Americans. I do feel like there is a certain bridge being built between the Asian diaspora and Asians in Asia. Have you experienced this at all when speaking about your work? Do you think there’s a way for us to cross-culturally communicate better?

Anne  That’s such a good question. When you mentioned Asians living or moving elsewhere, my first thought was the film Crazy Rich Asians which I’m sure you saw. What startled me about that movie was that I thought it was going to be a movie about Singaporeans in Singapore. Asians in Asia. But the movie turned out to be so Asian American. It was so aware of Asian abjection around the world. The film opens to the family showing up in a fancy hotel in London only to be turned away. As retaliation, the mother buys the whole hotel. It brings up this idea that even Asians living in Asia experience denigration the moment they step outside. The movie is about wealth as compensation for that. Wealth, good family, good taste, good education, these definitions of success turn out to be highly Western ideals. I was kind of disappointed that this movie about Asians in Asia ended up accidentally being about Western envy.

Lulu Do you see anything out there now, Asian media or representation wise, that gives you hope?

Anne  There’s been a huge boom in Asian American writing from different perspectives. I’m seeing a lot of amazing contemporary young novelists and essayists out there. Books like Hyeseung Song’s Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl opposing the model minority myth. Media representation wise, I’m just going to say it: I’m truly cynical about anything to do with multiculturalism because what’s good for the media is what is profitable — so oftentimes Asian American representation pops up precisely as a gesture instead of real inclusion. As an underrepresented group, representation is of course desired, but politically, it’s very complicated. Sometimes a positive stereotype is put forth as an antidote to the negative stereotype, but a stereotype is still a stereotype. But back to the literary scene, it’s very encouraging to see more Asian writers publishing and more Asian Americans and people of color pursuing writing in school and as a career. When I was a college student many years ago, I was known as the only Chinese girl in the English major.  A lot has changed since then.