What does it mean to be a model minority? And how does one stop being one? In her poignant new book of personal essays, Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority, Anne Anlin Cheng takes an unflinching look at race, gender, aging, immigration, and growing up Asian in the American South, examining, through lenses both intimate and political, what it means to be an Asian American woman living in America today.
Join us for a special conversation between Cheng and noted writers Cathy Park Hong and Jia Tolentino. Together, they will discuss love, grief, memory, interracial and intergenerational relationships, identity, and the intricacies of the Asian American experience.
This program will be followed by a brief book signing of Cheng’s Ordinary Disasters (2024), Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020), and Tolentino’s Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (2019).
Anne Anlin Cheng is a professor of English at Princeton University and was a 2023–24 MoMA Scholar in Residence. She is the author of The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (2000), Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (2000), Ornamentalism (2018), and Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority (2024).
Cathy Park Hong is a professor of English at University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2021) and the poetry collections Engine Empire (2012), Dance Dance Revolution (2007), and Translating Mo’um (2002).
Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of the essay collection Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (2019).
The MoMA Scholars in Residence program is supported by the Ford Foundation.