Reading

A Review of Anne Anline Cheng’s Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority (Pantheon)

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

I’ve been chuffed to see more memoirs and creative nonfictional works published by individuals who I know more prominently through their scholarship. Such is also the case with Anne Anline Cheng’s Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority. For anyone in literary and cultural studies, you already know Cheng as a luminary for her three monographs that focus respectively on racial melancholia, Josephine Baker, and the racial objectification of Asian/ American women. Cheng now veers into the creative nonfictional terrain with Ordinary Disasters (Pantheon, 2024), which I review here: “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.”

I have really enjoyed the essay form lately. It’s a strange one that I didn’t see that much of until Chee’s How To Write an Autobiographical Novel and then Castillo’s How to Read Now. Cheng’s work follows in this strong tradition, with various pieces that focus on the topics listed in the description. I do think that the most compelling are the ones related to Cheng’s cancer diagnosis and subsequent journey. The extraordinary perspective that Cheng shares in these narrative sequences not only give us pause to consider how devastating the disease is just on a physiological level and on an individual, but also how it also affects a larger social ecosystem of the family. A standout piece on Cheng and her son clarifies how she comes to realize just how much her child has imbibed the challenges of knowing that his mother may not live for a long time, and that she must acknowledge that this atmosphere is one that will have a serious impact on his maturation process. Another key thread is Cheng’s time growing up in the South. I have done some research here, so I knew about the relatively sustained population of American born Chinese in Georgia, for instance, but to read about it from a creative nonfictional perspective brings to mind the complications of a transnational migration that occurs in a more contemporary period. Indeed, Cheng’s family comes to the area after a number of Chinese Americans settle there far prior to the Immigration Act of 1924. Though of the same ethnic background, Cheng realizes that she is not quite like these other Chinese American families, which also comes to be accentuated by the general fact that there are not many Asian Americans in the area at all. One key thing is that Cheng already knows she loves literature from her youth. Finally, there are a couple of pieces that are more elegiac in nature, with a standout in which Cheng discusses her relationship with her father. There is a brief moment at the end of that essay in which Cheng realizes her time with her father is coming to a close. She doesn’t realize that a certain moment will be the last time she will her father, but he seems to know, and he lets her hold onto his arm longer than he normally would. What cuts deep about this particular interaction is how astutely Cheng understands what has occurred. Because her parents are not physically demonstrative in terms of affection, these extra seconds come to bear incredible meaning, an awareness that there is a deep love between them, and that they must communicate it before it is too late. I will say that Cheng is generally diplomatic about her experiences as an academic, but there are some obvious kernels in this essay collection which underscore how pioneering her work and her presence is at a place like Princeton and that the gauntlets she has run exist in so many areas of her life. A true survivor in all senses and an outstanding contribution to (Asian) American letters.

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A Review of Samantha Sotto Yambao’s Water Moon (Del Rey, 2025)

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

Samantha Sotto Yambao’s Water Moon (Del Rey, 2025) may be one of the first books of fiction that I’m reviewing that was published in 2025. Yes, I’m behind, but so is everyone else who studies and reads Asian American literature because it would literally be a full-time job now to just be on top of the what is coming out LOL. So, for those in the know, Yambao previously published under Samantha Sotto. Long ago, we reviewed her debut, Before Ever After. I’m not sure why there is a change in the publication name, but that’s more of a detail to us. Between Before Ever After and Water Moon, there was an e-only publication called Love and Gravity. This publication was one of the first moments that I had where I was firmly dismayed by the changing landscape of reading because there were things that were only being published in digital form. I still to this day do not understand why there can’t be a print on demand option for anything that is primarily marketed as digital! We analogue kings and queens still demand our material culture. Water Moon came at a time of really bad insomnia, and I was really happy to have this novel, which really is like some of what the blurbs said, connecting this novel to Spirited Away. Okay, let’s get to that marketing description: “On a backstreet in Tokyo lies a pawnshop, but not everyone can find it. Most will see a cozy ramen restaurant. And only the chosen ones—those who are lost—will find a place to pawn their life choices and deepest regrets. Hana Ishikawa wakes on her first morning as the pawnshop’s new owner to find it ransacked, the shop’s most precious acquisition stolen, and her father missing. And then into the shop stumbles a charming stranger, quite unlike its other customers, for he offers help instead of seeking it. Together, they must journey through a mystical world to find Hana’s father and the stolen choice—by way of rain puddles, rides on paper cranes, the bridge between midnight and morning, and a night market in the clouds. But as they get closer to the truth, Hana must reveal a secret of her own—and risk making a choice that she will never be able to take back.”

This book has a LOT of weird details and weird worldbuilding issues that I didn’t fully understand. For instance, you can travel on rumors or travel through puddles. You can fold paper and thus fold time. You can buy almost anything in this dark shadow world for a price. Choices take the form of birds, which are also souls, and then there are malevolent creatures who want to take these souls because they do not have souls of their own. There are unsouled children who then develop into these malevolent creatures, who seem to be made only of inorganic parts. The description is not entirely accurate I guess, and so I will provide my spoiler warning: have you looked away? If you have not, you will find out that Hana absolutely knows that her father staged the ransacking so that the malevolent overlords of this shadow world do not think Hana is involved and may actually give up on looking for her father. Hana realizes that her father thinks that his wife, Hana’s mother, may still be alive, even though everyone thought she was executed when she failed to deliver a “choice” to those malevolent overlords. Thus, what ensues is really a detective quest. Hana is eventually accompanied by a physicist who happens upon the shop on the same day of the ransacking. The physicist is clearly into Hana romantically, so he’ll pretty much do anything to spend time with her, despite the fact that he’s in a shadow world where physics seem to have no meaning. I’m always the most skeptical about this element of the plot in fantasies only because it seems to stretch credulity—at least to me—that a person will simply go into a dangerous under world without really knowing the stakes of what might befall him. And they are in danger ALL.THE.TIME. But, the true romantics in these readers will love this dynamic duo because they persist in the face of demons, monsters, and everything in-between that might be trying to push them off the path of their quest. Eventually, Hana discovers that her mother is indeed alive, but there is no happy reunion, only knowledge that the world in which she has been born into is structured through various conceits that eliminate the possibility for much free will and agency. The ending was wrapped up a little bit too neatly, and because the worldbuilding rules are so strange, I actually wanted to find out what happened to Hana when she is forced apart from her dashing romantic paramour. And spoiler warning again: they are eventually be reunited but not after a long time apart. On the level of my insomnia, I will say that the novel did its purpose. It helped relax me in a time of great stress and anxiety, and so we sometimes see the salve that fiction can offer, at least in the form of closure.

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A Review of Katie Kitamura’s Audition (Riverhead, 2025)

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

I’ve always been a huge fan of Katie Kitamura. I fell hook line and sinker for Kitamura’s work ever since her unexpected first novel, but it was the unrelenting prose of Gone to the Forest, Kitamura’s second work that truly threw me. From then, I’ve followed her literary publication journey, reading with much interest the intriguing divorce story at the center of A Separation and the strange, disorienting world of The Intimacies. Audition (Riverhead, 2025) retains Kitamura’s enviable prose, though I’m not sure I understood what even happened in this novel. I may need someone’s interpretation. Let’s let the marketing description tantalize us even a little bit further, and I am definitely giving you that spoiler warning NOW: “One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilizing Möbius strip of a novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love. Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.”

The reviews I’ve seen online haven’t really helped me figure out how I feel about this novel. Most have been raving, but I still find myself pretty perplexed. The first half of the novel involves the unnamed narrator circling around Xavier, a young man. It is clear that the generational difference between the unnamed narrator and Xavier is an issue: how do people see the two of them out in public? The unnamed narrator suspects that some might think Xavier an escort and possibly a young lover, and the narrator herself certainly finds Xavier attractive. For his part (and role, and the importance of roles will come up again and again), Xavier believes the unnamed narrator to be his mother based upon an interview that the narrator gave awhile back where she claims to have given up her child. This information was an equivocation that the interviewer never clarified: the narrator-actress had in fact had an abortion but the interviewer chose to cloak the meaning. Their meetup at the restaurant is interrupted when the unnamed narrator thinks she’s seen her husband Tomas there, though he’s supposed to be somewhere else. The fact that Tomas sees her, but then leaves the restaurant leaves her perturbed, and she goes after him. What ensues is a long monologue where we discover their marital strain that has befallen them, with the narrator having had a string of affairs. The second part of the novel shifts dramatically. The play that the narrator had been struggling with in part one has now become a major success, though now the play has a different name. The roles around the narrator have seemingly changed. Xavier is now in fact the narrator-actress’s son, and Tomas is Xavier’s father. Xavier eventually moves back in with Tomas and the narrator, though it is evident that there is some kind of subtext to the strain between parents and child. This section of the novel was the most difficult for me to understand. Xavier’s girlfriend Hana eventually moves in, and one day that narrator-actress comes upon them in some sort of strange interaction. The narrator-actress demands that Hana leave, which of course creates more strain with Xavier. The conclusion reveals that Xavier had been spending his time hammering away at a play with the narrator-actress inspiring the title role. The meta-dramatic conceit of novel may be playing with the various ways in which we perform socially expected identities, but I’ve never been a huge fan of the novel-of-ideas, and I found myself unwilling to let go of narrative coherence. Indeed, I wanted to make sense of how part 1 related to part 2: was one the reality over the other? Was there a way to put them together to make sense of them as a single narrative? The latter question seems impossible (unless section 1 is a version of the play that Xavier has written), but if we go with the sliding doors type model, I would have preferred a stronger way to unite the two sections, perhaps with the first one, ending in a way that revealed again some sort of meta-dramatic conceit. Whatever the case, the novel will get you to converse with someone, especially because you will want to find out the reaction of someone else who has read the novel. And, of course, whatever you feel about the plot, Kitamura’s prose will always be sparking. There is a moment in this novel where Kitamura’s narrator is essentially telling readers something that Xavier might want to know (something along the lines of: “Of course I didn’t tell Xavier any of these things), but the narrator only directs it to her audience in a kind of interior monologue. It is an exquisite moment and technique that enhances the intimacy that Kitamura can create through her fiction.

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A Review of Alexandra A. Chan’s In the Garden Behind the Moon: A Memoir of Loss, Myth, and Magic

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

Alexandra A. Chan’s In the Garden Behind the Moon: A Memoir of Loss, Myth, and Magic (Flashpoint, 2024) continues my trend of reading some creative nonfictional publications. The book actually comes out of a hybrid publishing company that also has a self-publishing arm called Girl Friday Productions (the full link for this book can be found below). This text is an absolutely gorgeously produced work, much in the same vein as Satsuki Ina’s The Poet and the Silk Girl. There are full color illustrations, high quality glossy pages, and full color photographs. Let’s let the marketing description do some work for us: “A left-brained archaeologist and successful tiger daughter, Chan finds her logical approach to life utterly fails her in the face of this profound grief. Unable to find a way forward, she must either burn to ash or forge herself anew. Slowly, painfully, wondrously, Chan discovers that her father and ancestors have left threads of renewal in the artifacts and stories of their lives. Through a long-lost interview conducted by Roosevelt’s Federal Writers’ Project, a basket of war letters written from the Burmese jungle, a box of photographs, her world travels, and a deepening relationship to her own art, the archaeologist and lifelong rationalist makes her greatest discovery to date: the healing power of enchantment. In an epic story that travels from prerevolution China to the South under Jim Crow, from the Pacific theater of WWII to the black sands of Reynisfjara, Iceland, and beyond, Chan takes us on a universal journey to meaning in the wake of devastating loss, sharing the insights and tools that allowed her to rebuild her life and resurrect her spirit. Part memoir, part lyrical invitation to new ways of seeing and better ways of being in dark times, the book includes beautiful full-color original Chinese brush paintings by the author and fascinating vintage photographs of an unforgettable cast of characters. In the Garden Behind the Moon is a captivating family portrait and an urgent call to awaken to the magic and wonder of daily life.”

I’ll start out by saying that this work doesn’t fit into a single genre, though it probably hews closest to the memoir. Chan chooses to structure the work through the Chinese zodiac calendar. While it would seem like the memoir would be linear, it actually is not. The placeholder years really exist as the beginning point of each chapter, which often moves forward and backward in time. Chan has done some painstaking work, not only in ensuring that a larger archival footprint of her family is shared with readers but also in the background research that she conducts to fill out her family’s lengthy genealogy. This creative nonfictional work is anchored primarily by Chan’s attentiveness to grief. Indeed, the emotional core emerges through Chan’s close relationship with her father, which she conveys through the larger historical tapestry that is unveiled by detailing his life. He grows up in Georgia at a time where there are very few Chinese Americans; he serves in World War II; he marries and gets divorced and marries again (having dealt with the problematics of legislation that impeded interracial unions). Adding to the author’s loss is the fact that her mother will also die of a rare cancer a number of years before the death of her father. But Chan’s modus operandi is to find a way through the grief. Thus the subtitle also reminds us of the centrality of both myth and magic as ways that we confront devastating loss. The “magic” of this particular text surfaces especially in the signs that Chan sees that tells us that her relationship with her parents endures whether or not they are physically with her. She’ll visit faraway places and see traces of her parents in the majestic vistas before her, and she’ll know that the memories she carries means that she will never lose her parents. As the memoir moves forward—and I provide you with a spoiler warning here—Chan’s research into her family history yields a shocking discovery. Her father discovers that their ancestral background ties them to African Americans. Chan comes to find out that an ancestor who was purportedly from South America had actually come to pass as half-Chinese and that she and her family members are part Black. The depth to which Chan continues to mind her biological background is perhaps not surprising, given that she is an archaeologist, but Chan also has an astutely analytical mind as a scholar. Indeed, she comes to consider her father’s mixed race background as one of the reasons why he was so compelled to achieve and to move forward so diligently in life, knowing that the shadows of racial difference could overwhelm him. Chan’s memoir soars precisely because of this impressive balance between self-reflection and excavation, which provides readers with an enduring tribute to a uniquely American family.

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