Professor Anne Cheng ’85 Reflects on the Asian American Experience

The book: What does it mean to be an Asian American woman living in America? That question is at the heart of Anne Cheng ’85’s latest book. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, and part history, Cheng reflects on her experience to unpack the realities of race, gender, aging, and immigration in this country. Ordinary Disasters (Penguin Random House) offers readers a collection of essays full of brilliant thoughts and mixed with deeply personal reflections that speak to the human experience. 

The author: Anne Cheng ’85 earned her bachelor’s from Princeton in English and creative writing, her master’s in English and Creative writing from Stanford University, and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California Berkeley. She is a professor of English at Princeton and affiliated with the Program in American Studies, the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Committee on Film Studies. As a scholar on race, she focuses on the uneasy intersection between politics and aesthetics. 

Excerpt:

Years ago, when I was a newly tenured faculty, in a departmental discussion on the pros and cons of affirmative action, a much more senior colleague stood up and pointed (literally) to me as a good example of affirmative action. At the time, I was horrified by the sudden attention of 40 plus pairs of eyes on me. My first thought was Asian Americans were not underrepresented minorities in the UC system or on the West Coast. My second thought was my work is so much more than that! But deep inside I felt affronted by what had seemed to me then the suggestion that somehow I got my position through less than hard work or for less than intellectual reasons.

In a society that values self-determination, nothing is more vexing — or more misunderstood — than affirmative action. Most individuals of color do not want to be told that they owe their jobs or their recognition to affirmative action, while disgruntled whites begrudge the opportunities that they imagined have been denied to them due to it. 

Although there are plenty of negative feelings swirling around the issue, there are plenty of confusions, too. Who counts as underrepresented? In what fields and under what contexts? Who actually is most likely to benefit from the elimination of affirmative action?

The drama of affirmative action being played out in the public eye often looks like a hunger game among communities of color. The 2023 Supreme Court cases over college admission, for instance, frame the issue as a rivalry between Asian and African Americans. . . [W]hen it comes to Asian Americans, most experts agree that the end of affirmative action will not change discrimination against Asian Americans. There is no such a thing as “pure merit,” and even if there were, Asian Americans would not necessarily benefit from such standards. In college admission, the elusive calculus of “merit” falls into two different forms of assessment: so-called hard versus soft ranking. The former encompasses quantifiable grades and test scores; the latter refers to ineffable qualities such as creativity, maturity, social skills. Since Asian Americans are stereotypically seen as uncreative, immature, and socially inept, they tend to score low in the “soft” category.  However, should Asian American candidates exhibit stellar “hard” numbers, they are often dismissed as one-dimensional grinds. Asian American candidates are thus the only racial group that can be seen as too good and not good enough at the same time. …

 … [W]hat happened with the recent Supreme Court cases is not a natural outcome of Asian American and African American competition. Asian Americans – here, the Students for Fair Admissions – are being used as stand-ins for white, anti-Black interests, just as the “model minority” had historically been deployed as a proxy for conservative whites to shame other racialized minorities and to critique the welfare system. Asian Americans, of course, do suffer discrimination, except the source of that discrimination is being misdirected. Anti-Asian discrimination is less likely to come from affirmative action policy than from the host of stereotypes that haunt Asian American candidates, especially the image of Asian Americans as drone-like overachievers.

But the biggest misunderstanding and the most egregious boondoggle in the recent Supreme Court decision is how the predominantly conservative Court cited, as its rationale, the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) as precedent for the doctrine of “Constitutional colorblindness.” To paraphrase the high Court’s logic, since the Constitution is “colorblind,” it is therefore unconstitutional to take race into consideration. This reasoning would have us believe that a decades-long solution aimed to foster racial diversity in the face of systemic and historic racial inequality is itself racist because it recognizes race. What convoluted and perverse logic!

What’s sad is that the history of Brown is itself beset by this kind of pernicious logic. We tend to think of Brown as this watershed moment when American apartheid gave way, but Brown and its legacy is much messier than that…. In 1963, almost a decade year after Brown, in my hometown of Savannah, Georgia, a lawsuit (Stell v. Savannah-Chatham County Board of Education) was filed by a group of African American parents against the Chatham County for conducting what was called at the time "biracial" education; that is, the county had integrated Black and white children in the schools but not in the classrooms, thus a de facto segregation was still in place. In that case, a group of white, pro-segregation parents joined the defense and, in a surprising move, cited the same Clark study used by Marshall to argue for segregation, contending that since Black students suffered from the lack of self-esteem, a “separate education” will grant Black children the opportunity to develop a stronger, "healthier" Black identity “among their own.”  Thus the very evidence that Marshall drew on to prove racial injury caused by segregation was being used to support the isolation and continued segregation of Black students.  A discourse of identity affirmation, supposedly for independent Black identity, turned into a weapon for white supremacy.…

Let us be clear: colorblindness only works in a nonracist world, and we know we do not live in such a world. 

In a racially-driven world, colorblindness, too, is inherently unequal.

Over the years I have pondered over my own unspoken allergy to the idea of affirmative action. Nor have I ever liked being called “the first!” or being designated as “the role model.” It’s never comfortable to be reduced to one’s symbolic value. But now I think it is no small thing to be shown possibilities one has not imagined before or to be given a chance where none had existed before. Looking back to that faculty meeting so many years ago, I see that my unease in that room spoke more to my own insecurities than anything else. (No one is more prone to the imposter syndrome than an academic.) It also said something about my own convoluted path.  How did a Taiwanese girl who came to America refusing to learn the alphabets until the last desperate moment become an English professor?

In college, to my parents’ horror, I majored in English literature, specializing in British modernism. (Years later, at some reunion, a classmate whom I didn’t remember recognized me by saying, “Oh, you were that Chinese girl who majored in English!”)  While I genuinely loved — and still love —  the writers I studied, I was not unaware of how my intellectual choices were bucking against expectations. No, I wasn’t going to be a mathematician or engineer or doctor. No, I wasn’t an East Asian Studies major. I wasn’t going to “study myself” which seemed self-involved and intellectually suspicious. 

But why did I think that? White students don’t feel solipsistic or intellectually illegitimate when they study Shakespeare or James Joyce or when they major in American Studies. I was in fact shaped by the clichés that I thought I was eschewing….

Affirmative action is fraught not only because of the persistent question about merit but also because of the flattening out of an individual to a racial category. This is endemic to most of our current institutional efforts to “correct” racism: a flat-footed quantitative numbers game or an ineffectual moralism aimed at addressing a complex, systematic, widespread, and discriminatory system that heaves both quantifiable and hard–to-quantify consequences. But having limited tools does not mean we stop using them, refining them...

Yes, affirmative action is vexing for persons of color. So, too, is identity: at once vital and limiting. I flinch when white readers expect writers of Asian descent to write about “being Asian.” Equally, I wince when I hear writers of Asian descent insist that they are American, rather than Asian American, writers. I understand a writer of color would not want to be pigeon-holed, or be reduced to an ethnographic/cultural guide, or be seen as performing or trading in on their ethnicity. At the same time, why do we assume that to be an “Asian American writer” is restrictive instead of being generative and creative? As the scholar Min Hyoung Song elegantly puts it, “…is your individuality so important that you refuse to be tainted by the possibility that you are part of something larger, collectivities that bind and narrow…as much as they enable and support and make impossible things seem suddenly, breathtakingly possible after all?”

         …

When I look at my students, each striving to prove their worth and virtuosity, I think of Malcolm Gladwell’s insight in Outlier that success does not come solely or even primarily from IQs or innate talents but rather from the ability to recognize a given opportunity and to make the most of it. The key here is the given: not the kind of given that is unquestioned and already in place, like privilege, but given as in something that someone or some mechanism extended and made available that would otherwise not have been. Success, which to me means building a life that is meaningful and sustaining, a difficult enough task, requires a great deal of hard, ongoing, personal labor, but it also takes luck and community.

Excerpted from Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority © 2024 by Anne Anlin Cheng. Reproduced by permission of the author. All rights reserved.

Reviews: 

“Ordinary Disasters is one of those rare books that makes you think, feel, think again, and feel again. Anne Anlin Cheng writes about history and culture with sharp insight, and she writes about personal life with its many private joys and pains with delicacy and intimacy. The book is an elegant and courageous record of not only one individual’s story but also a generation’s experience and memory.” — Yiyun Li, author of The Book of Goose

“A lovely collection. Tenderly written essays form a beautifully intimate memoir.” — Kirkus Reviews