Ordinary Disasters
How I Stopped Being a Model Minority
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Narrated by:
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Anne Anlin Cheng
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By:
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Anne Anlin Cheng
About this listen
The most personal writing yet to come from a noted scholar of race: a bold and moving look at race, gender, aging, and immigration that examines, through lenses both intimate and political, what it means to be an Asian American woman living in America today.
Part memoir, part cultural criticism, part history, Anne Anlin Cheng’s original essays focus on art, politics, and popular culture. Through personal stories woven with a keen eye and an open heart, Cheng summons up the grief, love, anger, and humor in negotiating the realities of being a scholar, an immigrant Asian American woman, a cancer patient, a wife of a white man, and a mother of biracial children . . . all in the midst of the (extra)ordinary stresses of recent years.
Ordinary Disasters explores with lyricism and surgical precision the often difficult-to-articulate consequences of race, gender, migration, and empire. It is the story of Chinese mothers and daughters, of race and nationality, of ambition and gender, of memory and forgetting, and the intricate ways in which we struggle for interracial and intergenerational intimacies in a world where there can be no seamless identity.
©2024 Anne Anlin Cheng (P)2024 Random House AudioCritic reviews
"From one of our most incisive scholars in race studies, Anne Anlin Cheng has written a memoir that is both astonishingly vulnerable and cutting. For the first time, she turns her brilliant acumen towards herself, using her experiences as daughter, wife, mother, divorcee, cancer patient, student, and professor to explore the painful and subtle vicissitudes of the Asian American experience. With exacting poetic rigor, Cheng unseams the psychosis that internalized the model minority myth. Her scholarly attention—that is distilled into such pleasurable clarity—to Asian female sexuality is especially a crucial contribution to the conversation on race in America. 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
"Anne Anlin Cheng has written a book on the brink. She stares into her own abyss, fearlessly. But she also gazes into the deep well of the American soul from where racism and sexism comes, sometimes manifest in unspeakable violence, oftentimes through microaggressions that have worn down her body and spirit. But if her body has been broken, its rubble serves to hone the sharpness of her mind, its keen edge evident throughout this exhilarating work."
—Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer and A Man of Two Faces
“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. Readers will find themselves identifying with both the tender, personal moments that the author lovingly reveals, as well as the larger cultural issues that have shaped her distinctly complex experiences on earth. This is a book about love, family, community, work, motherhood, womanhood, daughterhood, and marriage. You will enter this book and find a companion in its fascinating stories. You will close its covers with a greater understanding of what it means to be a person in this day and age—actually, any age.”
—Emily Bernard, author of Black Is the Body
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- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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When Jane Epstein's brother makes this confession, a tsunami of memories floods over her. She remembers the years of sexual abuse at his hands. The pain. The shame. Suffering from trauma few talk about, Epstein searches for solace in strip clubs and hotel rooms. She finds love, loses it, and loves again. Years pass before she dares to dive into the depths of her past. Only then does she begin to heal.
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A memoir of trials, lessons and healing
- By Mama2boys on 11-20-24
By: Jane Epstein
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Gather Me
- A Memoir in Praise of the Books That Saved Me
- By: Glory Edim
- Narrated by: Glory Edim
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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For Glory Edim, that “friend of my mind” is books. Edim, who grew up in Virginia to Nigerian immigrant parents, started the popular Well-Read Black Girl book club at age thirty, eventually reaching a community of half a million readers. But her own love of books stretches far back. Edim’s father moved back to Nigeria while she was still a child, marking the beginning of a series of traumatic changes and losses for her family. What became an escape, a safe space, and a second home for her and her brother was their local library.
By: Glory Edim
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Minor Feelings
- An Asian American Reckoning
- By: Cathy Park Hong
- Narrated by: Cathy Park Hong
- Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.
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Essential
- By Realness on 03-04-20
By: Cathy Park Hong
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Above the Noise
- My Story of Chasing Calm
- By: DeMar DeRozan, Dave Zarum - contributor, Gregg Popovich - foreword
- Narrated by: Aaron Goodson, John Patrick Walsh
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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DeMar DeRozan, six-time NBA All-Star, has been called a “basketball savant” (ESPN) and “the best closer in the NBA” (GQ)—but when he went public with his depression, it sparked a conversation that reached far beyond the court. By breaking the stigma of speaking out, he added a new, seldom-heard voice to the mental health dialogue: a successful Black male athlete, openly naming his pain and advocating for others to do the same.
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Helping
- By Tricia Cuevas on 11-22-24
By: DeMar DeRozan, and others
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We Will Be Jaguars
- A Memoir of My People
- By: Mitch Anderson, Nemonte Nenquimo
- Narrated by: Christine Ann-Roche
- Length: 13 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Born into the Waorani tribe of Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest, Nemonte Nenquimo had a singular upbringing. She was taught about plant medicines, foraging, oral storytelling, and shamanism by her elders. She played barefoot in the forest until she was a teenager and left to study with an evangelical missionary group in the city. But after Nemonte’s ancestors began appearing in her dreams, pleading with her to return and embrace her own culture, she listened. Nemonte returned to the forest and traditional ways of life and became one of the most forceful voices in climate change activism.
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*Shouting from rooftops!
- By E Wagner on 11-22-24
By: Mitch Anderson, and others
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By the Fire We Carry
- The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land
- By: Rebecca Nagle
- Narrated by: Rebecca Nagle
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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A powerful work of reportage and American history that braids the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation’s earliest days, and a small-town murder in the 1990s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native rights to that land more than a century later.
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Amazing book
- By Annie H on 11-22-24
By: Rebecca Nagle
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From Under the Truck
- A Memoir
- By: Josh Brolin
- Narrated by: Josh Brolin
- Length: 5 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
Weaving a latticework of different strands, moving back and forth through time, Josh Brolin captures a life marked by curiosity, pain, devotion, kindness, humor. He recounts an unconventional childhood far from Hollywood. Raised on a ranch in Paso Robles, California, he was surrounded as a child by the wolves, cougars, and other wild animals gathered by his fearless and explosive mother, Jane Agee Brolin. Her tragic, early death haunts this book, and the force of her unforgettable personality is felt throughout.
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Brolin is...
- By Wilson R on 11-24-24
By: Josh Brolin
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Connie
- A Memoir
- By: Connie Chung
- Narrated by: Connie Chung
- Length: 11 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Connie Chung is a pioneer. In 1969 at the age of 23, this once-shy daughter of Chinese parents took her first job at a local TV station in her hometown of Washington, D.C. and soon thereafter began working at CBS news as a correspondent. Profoundly influenced by her family’s cultural traditions, yet growing up completely Americanized in the United States, Chung describes her career as an Asian woman in a white male-centered world.
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OUTSTANDING MEMOIRE!
- By Brenda C. on 09-24-24
By: Connie Chung