Read an exclusive excerpt from “Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority” by Anne Anlin Cheng, which debuted in September 2024 and was published by Pantheon. Photo: Anne Anline Cheng.
Beauty Queen
Beauty—its judgment, care, and maintenance—made up the song of my childhood, and my lack of it a note in the background. I can’t say I was the ugly duckling, because I never did turn into the swan, but I did feel like a stepchild growing up in a family of celebrated, local beauties. In the small city of Tainan, my maternal grandmother was known for two things: for being the wife of the first doctor in town trained in Western medicine, and for her classic Chinese beauty. I was sure that the reason she never went into the sun without cover and rarely smiled, certainly never in a photograph, had something to do with deeply held ideas at the back of her mind about the pale suffering beauties of classic Chinese literature.
Her younger sister, Great-Aunt #4, had what people called a “Western” beauty—some unspoken Dutch ancestry back there somewhere—that earned her a premature but prestigious marriage and made her the toast of Shanghai in the 1940s, when she crossed the Taiwan Strait at age sixteen with her husband some thirty years her senior. On their wedding night, he gave her an antique, gilded Louis XIV handheld vanity mirror and matching hairbrush. To show her disinterest (in the gift, the marriage, him), she threw them deep under the platform bed where he couldn’t reach. For the rest of their marriage, he showered her with jewels, furs, servants, and houses decorated with Japanese gardens and Western appliances, and she slowly learned to take pride in that.
My mother had her own kind of beauty, the kind other women whispered about. “That Mei-Yin!” I could hear the admiration and the envy in their voices. As a kid, I liked to tease her that it was a good thing that she was indeed beautiful, otherwise being named after beauty itself would have been terrible. (She liked that joke.) Her face had the kind of symmetry that scientists resorted to when they tried to explain beauty, with teeth that never needed straightening, intentional eyebrows that didn’t need filling in, and wide brown eyes. There were many stories, like how, growing up in Tainan, she was for several years the local high school’s choice to play the Statue of Liberty in the annual city parade.
I don’t know why a parade in Tainan would have featured the Statue of Liberty, except maybe something to do with the American liberation of Taiwan from Japanese occupation during World War II or just the general worldwide idea in those days that America represented this much-envied beacon of freedom. But I did ask my mom if they painted her green. She laughed and said of course not. She stood on top of the float in a now modest but probably then risqué green one-piece bathing suit with a metal crown, a green papier-mâché torch in one hand, and with her one free hand waved slowly to the people, in the way of beauty queens.
Beauty was a matter of everyday practice and interest for my mother and therefore for me as a child. What little memories I have of my life in Taipei are concentrated around age six when my brother, a year older than I, had started grade school. That was the year I had my mother all to myself. In the mornings, after she fed and saw my father and brother off, she would take me with her to the neighborhood beauty shop. I loved going to the salon with her: the blast of warm, dry air greeting my face the moment the doors opened, especially on a cold day. I even liked the slightly burned, chemically smell that permeated the space. My mother said it was vulgar to gossip with the other women, so she was mostly quiet, but I enjoyed leaning on her knees while she read magazines and I daydreamed out the steamy windows, cradled by the hums of dryers and chatter all around us.
Going to the hairdresser every day to have your hair washed and put up seems extravagant, but back then in Taipei most apartments didn’t come with showers, just tubs. Washing your own hair in the kitchen sink was awkward, while hair salons were abundant and inexpensive. At the salon, I loved watching the hairdresser pull and brush out my mother’s hair before twisting it and expertly pinning it up. Unlike my own wispy hair, my mother had a crazy-thick head of hair, so thick that you could barely see the scalp even as the hairdresser pulled on the hair. Afterward, we usually strolled around the shops before heading home for my mother to make lunch and prepare dinner.
Looking back, I can see that these outings must have been my mother’s “me time,” but I thought of them as ours. Those ambles were full of pleasures and pitfalls. I loved the time alone with my mom, how relaxed she seemed, and how she would talk to me about what we saw in the shop windows. I hated the meat store on the corner with the roast ducks hanging on steel hooks, their inert heads and necks grotesquely bent, because whenever my mother was mad she would threaten to string me up like those ducks. Every time we went by that storefront, I edged her closer to the road.
I remember how self-conscious I was of my mother’s long legs, often shown to their best advantage in her miniskirts. This was at the height of the 1960s, and my mother was, of course, at the top of the fashion game. But it seemed to me back then that her dresses were terribly short, which must have seemed doubly so from my vantage point, looking up. I remember how annoyed she would be when I insisted on pulling down the side of her skirt as I walked alongside her. My gestures of modesty on her behalf probably exposed her more than they helped. But at the time I was deeply embarrassed by the lingering looks she would get from men and women alike.
Then there were the dreaded boutiques that she would coax me into, the brightly lit, hip, modern shops that she liked, where they sold clothes from abroad (America, France, Japan), fully displayed on racks rather than folded inside sealed plastic bags. These shops followed the Western custom of allowing you to try on clothes right there, and often they would breach convention and hire young male salespersons. How I disliked those men, the way they stood too close to the dressing rooms, suggested items for my mom to try on, or commented on her figure. It didn’t occur to me that they were simply trying to make a sale or that I was chaperoning my mother like some jealous mother-in-law. I don’t know where my prudery as a child came from, but those boutique encounters made me angry at those men . . . and at my mother.
But one of my favorite and most vivid memories from childhood is watching the annual Miss Universe contest on television with my mom, the other activity that was shared by the two of us alone and that we both looked forward to. We weren’t idle watchers. We dissected the features of every contestant: how one year Miss France’s eyes were so light blue that you couldn’t tell if she was looking at you; how Miss Peru had a lilt to her lips that made her appear sweet-natured; how Miss Japan’s legs were slim but pigeon-toed; how Miss USA looked like sunshine but her mouth was too wide. We were not fooled by trick makeup or easy glamor. We parsed the nuances, gradations, and particular qualities of beauty exhibited by each contestant. There’s beauty and then there’s beauty. Some beauty can be instantaneous but shallow, the kind that grabs your eyes but of which you soon tire. Some beauty can be sad, some cheap, some bold, some fine, some captivating but ferocious, like that of the actress Ann- Margret with her slightly crooked, sly smile.
The highlight of the event for us was the evening gown competition. There we really went to town: pored over every detail, cut, lines, and fabric, lamented when a particularly unfortunate choice ruined a woman’s chances, were joyous when a particularly arresting creation came onstage, something that lingered on the mind, a design that moved. I was always glad when my mother agreed with my assessments because that meant that I, even as a child, had good taste, which my mother thought made up a great deal for the lack of something else.
The Miss Universe competitions must have taken place in the summer months, when Taipei was at its hottest and stickiest, because we would always be setting up fans in the living room in anticipation. During a commercial break, my mom would send me downstairs to the mini-mart on the first floor of our apartment building to get something cold for us. Snacks, magazines, pots and pans, toiletry items, and anything else you can imagine crowded that tiny space, filling every nook of the wall from floor to ceiling. There were displays, too, on the ground, stacked on rows of low shelves that bulged out onto the sidewalk. I would carefully pick my way to the icebox at the back of the store.
My mom and I preferred either the taro pops or those single-serving ice creams whose surface you scraped with those little flat wooden spoons. Once in a while she would relent and allow me to also buy a box of these minty candies shaped like ersatz cigarettes that I liked, with tips tinted yellow like tiny flames. Now I see why my mother disapproved of that particular treat (the very idea of marketing candy to children in the guise of cigarettes!), but I loved the feeling of sophistication as I held each slim rod between my fingers the way I saw grown women do on TV.
In any event, I would spring back up the stairs, and my mother and I would settle into the couch with our treats and continue our judging. Even now, every time I see a woman in the media—on television or in a magazine—my brain immediately runs an automatic assessment: a flawed or mistaken makeup move, an infelicitous sartorial choice, a prettiness that wears thin, or an unflattering hairstyle. As an adult and a feminist, I’m horrified that I do this, and in fact the information means nothing. Yet the appraisal always happens before I can check myself.
My maternal grandmother used to say I was “all Cheng,” her way of saying I didn’t look like her beautiful daughter. My mother always maintained that I could’ve been pretty had it not been for my teeth, a terrible overbite inherited from my father’s side of the family. She bemoaned this fact for most of my life, as if my teeth were the culprit to be blamed for any misfortunes that might befall me. This complaint had always made me feel bad in two ways: sad that I had let her down and a little mad that she was really saying something about my father. All through my teens and beyond, my mother repeatedly urged me to get corrective braces. I never did. I’m kind of proud of that little resistance in me. I’m not above doing what I can to improve my looks, but I don’t care enough to modify actual body parts.
Once, on a trip back to Taiwan when I was in my mid-twenties, my mother tricked me into visiting an old friend who turned out to be an orthodontist. After examining me, he told my mother, “She has a slight overbite, but it’s normal. If she were my daughter, I wouldn’t do anything about it.”
Afterward, my mother walked alongside me with a frown, puzzling, “How extraordinary! I guess we have to believe him because he’s the expert. But how could it be? I was just so sure you had a terrible overbite all these years.” A block later, she told me casually, “You know, I had forgotten how Amah”—that is, her mother and my grandmother—“used to worry that I had an overbite, too.” She with the perfect teeth? How had this never come up before? She shook her head gently and walked on without saying anything else. Now I wonder whether the reason my grandmother never smiled for the camera had less to do with her ideals about restrained beauty than with whatever imagined notions she had about her teeth. What I had taken to be her determined grace might in fact have been an anxious pose.
On that same trip, my mother and I went down south to Tainan and saw Great-Aunt #3, the one who never left Taiwan, a fact that somehow always seemed entangled with the other facts that she never married and was understood to be the unattractive sister among a cadre of beauties. She came close to give me a good, long look. She hadn’t seen me since I was a small child. She peered into my face, patted my arm, and confided, “Oh, you don’t know, but when you were little, you were so . . . so . . . so . . . so ” I thought she was going to say I was so well behaved or at least so cute. Instead, she said, “You were so . . . so . . . so ugly!” That’s what you get from a Taiwanese relative: brutal honesty.
As a teenager in the American South, I didn’t get prettier. In high school, I was just too different. Boys glanced, curious, but did not engage. I looked to my family: I had no Chinese beauty. I looked at my new world: I had no Western beauty. Over time, I gathered that there were some American ideas out there about the exotic “Oriental” woman, but the reality of me bore no resemblance to that. Now, as an adult, I think of myself as secretly a very plain woman, secretly because I think I’ve been able to hide my lack of beauty behind my sense of style. Sometimes, I look into the mirror and grin to myself, taking a wicked, gleeful pleasure at just how genuinely and actively ugly I am, marveling at how those who love me now seem not to know this truth . . . a grand deception, a magic trick.
Much as I adore my girlfriends, I don’t really like going clothes shopping with anyone but my mother because we are both quick and scarily efficient about the exercise. Friends want to try on things, debate options, seek one another’s opinions, but my mother and I pretty much know what will or will not look good on us at a glance. I favor clean, well-cut, fitted lines in quality fabrics, something that follows the body faithfully but not cloyingly, something so expertly cut and meticulously sewn that it looks quietly, painfully expensive even decades later. Such a thing is nothing less than sheer armor. In Taiwan and back in the day, my mother and grandmother had their own tailor who would come to the house, bearing reams of sample materials.
The women would spread out around the kitchen table. Mother and Amah would bend over the textiles, parse their quality and texture, smooth and stretch, discuss ideas, draw pictures of what they envisioned, and the seamstress would make the clothes, coming back multiple times for fittings. I learned that it’s best to base a design on the material; let the cloth, texture, and color lead. With any leftover material, my mother would ask the tailor to make something for me. I always wanted to have an identical dress as my mom’s, but she invariably dictated: same fabric, different design. Grown-up patterns don’t suit little girls, she’d say. Besides, it’s much more charming to have different outfits in the same fabric than to make the mistake of being too matchy-matchy.
Once, though, my mother called for the tailor just for me. I was in the third grade and chosen to play Snow White in the school play. (This was before coming to America, when the idea of a snow-white princess—and the Statue of Liberty, for that matter—still held universal promise, even for a little Chinese girl.) I couldn’t tell who was more excited, my mother or me. We told the seamstress that I needed a princess dress: not pink—too expected, too pedestrian—but perhaps something in cool blue. I still remember the design and the fabrics we finally settled on: a pale sky blue for the underdress, to be covered by a translucent, icy blue netting that overlaid the full-length gown (my first ever), and a crenate, thick, embroidered lace in a slightly lighter blue for the high-waisted bodice. The scalloped lace would be repeated below like a line of waves lapping the bottom of the skirt.
The dress floated about my ankles when I walked.
A week before the play, however, my teacher, with much embarrassment, asked me to switch roles with the girl who was supposed to play the evil stepmother and who had been unhappy with her assignment. The girl also happened to be the headmistress’s daughter. I went home heartbroken, filled with shame. How do I tell my mom? She had already spent all that time and money on the fancy dress. And now I’d gone from the chosen to the unchosen, from the beloved to the despised. Instead of my pretty gown, I was going to have to wear an old crone’s raggedy black cloak and maybe even sport an unsightly mole on my chin.
Over the years I have grieved that my mother, for all her scrupulous care of us, was not the kind of warm fuzzy mother that I wanted. She wasn’t someone who talked about hurt feelings or indulged in your disappointments; she had little patience with tearful children with red, contorted faces. And I was such a sad reflection on her, not only by not being a beauty but also by not sharing her unbreakable composure. I cried too much. I had too many ugly feelings . . . too many feelings, period. But this time, this time, my mother did the unexpected. She was not impatient, nor did she reprimand me for crying. She sat down next to me where I was hunched over and said, “You know, the evil stepmother is a much better and much more important role. You get to really act instead of lying down pretending to be a dead person most of the time.” But what about my pretty dress? I asked; the evil stepmother must wear an ugly cloak. Years later I can still hear in my mind’s ear the certainty in my mother’s voice when she replied, “You can still wear your dress under the cloak. You will know it’s there even if other people can’t see it.”
Freud thought that vanity and narcissism were primarily female pathologies, that beautiful women were by nature self- absorbed and dangerous, exerting a fatal charm much like, in his words, “cats and large beasts of prey.” For him, the other side of female self-gazing is the male gaze. For the Brothers Grimm, Snow White offered a cautionary tale about female conceit and deadly competition. The emergence of the daughter must mean the death of the mother. But a woman might tell what passes between women differently. Perhaps a story about double vision: beauty real and unreal; expectations imposed and imagined; role playing and secret freedoms; the arrival into self-sufficiency; and the hold of old attachments. Embedded within the enmity between mothers and daughters are also love’s mutual reflections: what’s in the mirror vacillates, sometimes unseen, sometimes too close, to the beholder.
I have a photo that my mother took of the play.
In the photograph, I am hunched over with a snarl on my face, the poison apple in one hand. You can see the little prince, his entrance premature, pressing in from the threshold; behind him, a sliver of my teacher’s face. I had just entered from stage right, slowly and diffidently, dragging one foot behind me, my body bent over. I thought I was doing a good job playing an infirm old woman, but I also secretly knew that the posture forced my cloak to gape open, letting fall the spill of icy blue tulle.
About the book
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.
About the author
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. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Cheng is the 2023–2024 Ford Scholar in Residence at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She is a professor of English and a former director of American Studies at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.