On Thursday November 14th from 7-8pm, AAAinA hosted author Anne Anlin Cheng and Curator Iris Moon for a reading and conversation around themes shared in Cheng’s new book, Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority. For the conversation, Cheng and Moon discussed themes within and external to the book, including larger questions of what it means to be an Asian American woman living and working in the U.S. today. 

Participant Bios

Anne Anlin Cheng was born in Taiwan, grew up in the American South, and is the author of three books on American racial politics and aesthetics: The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief; Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface; and Ornamentalism.  Her writing has also appeared in The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Hyperallergic, The Huffington Post, The Nation, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.  In 2023-2024, she is Scholar-in-Residence at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  She teaches at Princeton University.  Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority is her first book of personal essays.

Iris Moon is the Associate Curator in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she is currently organizing the 2025 exhibition, Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie. She is the author of Melancholy Wedgwood (2024), Luxury after the Terror (2022) and co-editor with Richard Taws of Time, Media, and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France (2021). In addition to curatorial work, she teaches at Cooper Union.

AAAinA’s general programming and operations are funded in part by the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council, Ruth Foundation, the Vilcek Foundation, and other foundations and individuals.