Year of the Tiger: An Activist's Life - Softcover

Wong, Alice

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593315391 ISBN 13: 9780593315392

Verlag: Vintage, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • ONE OF USA TODAY'S MUST-READ BOOKS • This groundbreaking memoir offers a glimpse into an activist's journey to finding and cultivating community and the continued fight for disability justice, from the founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project

“Alice Wong provides deep truths in this fun and deceptively easy read about her survival in this hectic and ableist society.” —Selma Blair, bestselling author of Mean Baby

In Chinese culture, the tiger is deeply revered for its confidence, passion, ambition, and ferocity. That same fighting spirit resides in Alice Wong.
 
Drawing on a collection of original essays, previously published work, conversations, graphics, photos, commissioned art by disabled and Asian American artists, and more, Alice uses her unique talent to share an impressionistic scrapbook of her life as an Asian American disabled activist, community organizer, media maker, and dreamer. From her love of food and pop culture to her unwavering commitment to dismantling systemic ableism, Alice shares her thoughts on creativity, access, power, care, the pandemic, mortality, and the future. As a self-described disabled oracle, Alice traces her origins, tells her story, and creates a space for disabled people to be in conversation with one another and the world. Filled with incisive wit, joy, and rage, Wong’s Year of the Tiger will galvanize readers with big cat energy.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alice Wong is a disabled activist, media maker, and research consultant based in San Francisco, California. She is the founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project—an online community dedicated to creating, sharing, and amplifying disability media and culture—and the editor of the anthology Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century and Disability Visibility: 17 First-Person Stories for Today (Adapted for Young Adults). Alice is also the host and coproducer of the Disability Visibility podcast and copartner in a number of collaborations such as #CripTheVote and Access Is Love. From 2013 to 2015, Alice served as a member of the National Council on Disability, an appointment by President Barack Obama. She is currently working on her next anthology, Disability Intimacy, forthcoming from Vintage Books.

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Introduction

The book you are reading is from the future, as am I. I have traveled a long way to be with you and have much to share. Spending several decades on Earth has been quite a thing for this disabled Asian American woman in a hostile and unforgiving climate. Clawing, hissing, and fighting through a pandemic, against inequities in vaccine access and eugenic policies and attitudes that consider certain groups disposable, have given me the need to pause and reflect on all that I’ve been through. I have fought these battles for the bare minimum of existing in the same space with you all.

I realized in 2020 that the time to tell my story was now or never. That’s what being a high-risk ventilator user who was deprioritized by the State of California for lifesaving vaccines will do to you. Sheltering in place with your seventy-plus-year-old parents, who are also high risk, for over a year amid anti-Asian violence and hate will do that to you, too. Instead of having a mediocre white man’s midlife crisis and buying a combustible self-driving Tesla or investing in cryptocurrency for “true freedom,” I decided to write a memoir at this age—the age I was never supposed to reach, during a time I was never supposed to occupy. I will never have children, but my work, stories, and relationships are my legacy, and this book you are reading is the latest contribution to the Canon of Alice. 

Did I dream of becoming an activist? No, but it’s probably what I’m most known for. Ableism conscripted me into activism. Other people have the luxury to opt in and out of activism like earning extra credit for a project, but not me. What I have learned about creating change and staying true to myself from childhood up to now is yours for the taking. Getting your needs met, being part of a community, stirring up shit, and sharing information: these are examples of my activism, and there are many ways to be an activist whether you use the word to describe yourself or not. How and where I do it is as important as why and whom I do it with. Being agitated and dissatisfied is an activist mood. Activism is undervalued, unsustainable, and unrelenting. Hypercapitalism, white supremacy, and ableism create the structural conditions that undermine activism and other attempts at changing the status quo. Finding the joy, pleasure, and generative possibilities of organizing is part of my long-term unlearning of what activism is supposed to look like. Unlearning and building anew is activism as well.

Living under multiple existential threats, I’ve seen how marginalized communities care for one another and find solidarity across movements, because at the end of the day no one will remember and save us except us. I say this as a longtime resident of San Francisco who cannot remember the last time there was a torrential thunderstorm but who’s had to deal with rolling power outages and days of smoke-filled air from wildfires several years in a row. And in the face of what feels like impending doom, mutual-aid collectives emerge and organizations such as Mask Oakland distribute free N95 masks in anticipation of and response to environmental and public health crises. We can and will do better if we follow the principles of disability justice as outlined by Patty Berne, the cofounder and artistic and executive director of Sins Invalid who believes interdependence is a strength as we meet one another’s needs, all bodies are whole and perfect as they are, our freedom is tied to the freedom of others, and people whose lives are most enmeshed in systems are the experts who should lead.

Year of the Tiger is divided into seven sections: “Origins,” “Activism,” “Access,” “Culture,” “Storytelling,” “Pandemic,” and “Future.” It is a collection of original essays, previously published works, conversations, graphics, photos, commissioned art by disabled or Asian American artists, and more. I hope you will find this book fun and something you will color in, mark up, highlight, scribble on, fold into dog-eared pages, and give to others. I liken it to a mash-up of scrapbook, museum exhibit, magazine, creative writing assignment, and diary, just without the glitter gel pens or stickers. I contain multitudes, and this is a small, playful sample of who I am.

There are many kinds of writing in Year of the Tiger, but essays are my jam. Whether I publish an op-ed for Teen Vogue or a blog post on my website, I am taking the time and doing the labor to express what I care deeply about. The economy of an essay forces a writer to be a ruthless, streamlined shark with their ideas. Restraint and precision are part of an essay’s elegance along with its structure. An essay doesn’t have to be in response to or a critique of something else; it can reveal, subvert, wonder, provoke, analyze, celebrate, and poke fun.

Aside from social media, essay writing is my activist tool of choice, my peak creative and intellectual practice, where I layer, condense, finesse, and coax a thought into a Thing. A story from a personal, overlooked perspective can reach more people than a rally and change more minds than a policy paper. For some publications, I have to summon all that I am into eight hundred words or less, which is some damn fine magic. In Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom’s newsletter essaying, she wrote, “Beneath all the prose and the argument, an essay is a public. The best essays build a public through process and form, driven from creative impulse to address a social problem. . . . The best scholarship and the most invigorated publics have this in common: They channel massive amounts of creativity. Into relationships. Into methods. Into networks. Into discourse.” It is my intention for every chapter to be in conversation with the others and to ripple out through a mycelial network that builds, shares, and connects My Things to New Wondrous Things, tendrils of making, reaching high and low, in the shade and under the sun.

In writing the proposal for this memoir, I collected some of my past works and was stunned by the volume and the variety. Reviewing cringe-inducing pieces from my high school and college days, I realized every single piece has led me to where I am supposed to be right now. It is a privilege to trace these seeds that grew into sequoias and to highlight the communities that supported me. I planned to have maximum fun in the writing, editing, and assembling process because book stress can always use a chill friend. I tried to let go of my anxieties about memoirs and purposefully did not read an extensive number of them or research comparable ones because I knew it would just mess with my head. This probably goes against most professional advice, but I want to be transparent with you about my process and approach.

Curating myself in words, images, and objects, I was unsure if I had anything new I urgently wanted to write, and why yes, yes I did! But I also took this opportunity to throw some shade and to lean into my pettiness. I do this not purely for vindictive reasons but as examples of real experiences (with Joan Collins–level receipts) from my everyday life. My redacted texts, rage, and callouts are my truths as much as my activism and storytelling. And for anyone who does not enjoy profanity, consider yourself warned.

Memoir, as a book category, is beset with a number of unique expectations by both the author and the reader. You will not find any pithy themes from this memoir, but that’s what blurbs are for! I resist and challenge the idea that a memoir needs to be neatly digestible with sentimental generalizations about the meaning of life. Since this is my first time writing about myself at length,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Vintage
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593315391
• ISBN 13: 9780593315392
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 400
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Anja's; service@anja-karge.de; ; Von-Gumppenberg-Str. 94; Pöttmes; 86554; Deutschland