
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or


This week, we have host Stephanie Tam in conversation with Anne Anlin Cheng about her book, Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority, which debuted in September 2024 and was published by Pantheon.
In this episode, Anne discusses her journey from academic scholarship to a personal, deeply vulnerable "new kind of writing." After decades of teaching as one of the foremost scholars of race, literature, and aesthetics at Princeton University, a series of personal and political crises led Anne to grapple with what it means to live firsthand as an Asian American woman in our world. Stephanie and Anne talk about the challenges of "finding your voice" in the first person, the double bind of the model minority myth, and the problem with how Americans think about who deserves social justice — "as though attention to nonwhite groups, their histories and conditions, is only as pressing as the injuries that they have suffered." Anne also shares her personal experiences of grieving her father, a tragic series of student suicides, and the complexities of interracial marriage. Finally, Stephanie and Anne explore what it takes to find and sustain an "ordinary faith" in the midst of all these "ordinary disasters."
By NüVoices5
2525 ratings
This week, we have host Stephanie Tam in conversation with Anne Anlin Cheng about her book, Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority, which debuted in September 2024 and was published by Pantheon.
In this episode, Anne discusses her journey from academic scholarship to a personal, deeply vulnerable "new kind of writing." After decades of teaching as one of the foremost scholars of race, literature, and aesthetics at Princeton University, a series of personal and political crises led Anne to grapple with what it means to live firsthand as an Asian American woman in our world. Stephanie and Anne talk about the challenges of "finding your voice" in the first person, the double bind of the model minority myth, and the problem with how Americans think about who deserves social justice — "as though attention to nonwhite groups, their histories and conditions, is only as pressing as the injuries that they have suffered." Anne also shares her personal experiences of grieving her father, a tragic series of student suicides, and the complexities of interracial marriage. Finally, Stephanie and Anne explore what it takes to find and sustain an "ordinary faith" in the midst of all these "ordinary disasters."

91,067 Listeners

7,722 Listeners

9,485 Listeners

56 Listeners

612 Listeners

112,584 Listeners

288 Listeners

21,853 Listeners

932 Listeners

994 Listeners

190 Listeners

5,470 Listeners

67 Listeners

1,116 Listeners

8 Listeners