‘That slippery moment between who and what you are’: Anne Anlin Cheng on beauty, cultural fantasy and the politics of getting dressed

The scholarship of Princeton University professor Anne Anlin Cheng traverses many disciplines — literature, gender and sexuality studies, film — in rigorous and lively analyses of racial politics and aesthetics that jump nimbly from, say, Greek etymology to the costumes of Kim Novak and Maggie Cheung. She is the author of four books, including Ornamentalism (Oxford University Press, 2018), a study of Asiatic femininity in western culture that inspired the 2025 exhibition Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie, now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Her latest title, Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority (Pantheon, 2024), named one of the best books of 2024 by Hyperallergic, combines memoir and cultural criticism in a searing and intimate exploration of what it’s like to be an Asian American woman in the current moment. In May, she joined Michelle Cheng, Senior Specialist in Chinese Works of Art, at Christie’s Rockefeller Center for a conversation about her research and the experiences of Asian Americans today.

The following excerpt from Ordinary Disasters comes from the essay ‘The Look’:

Excerpt from Ordinary Disasters

In ancient Greece, the word for adornment, kosmos, means both “decoration” and “world order.” This is why the words cosmetics and cosmology share an etymological root. Presumably there was a time when the act of self-adornment was not seen as shallow or superficial but as originating from a desire to have the human body echo and be in tune with the invisible forces of the universe: the body as world and the world as body. In this view, the decorated human body itself serves as a carrier, a micrograph, of the visible world. (In modern Greek, a gossip is someone who will tell your business to the whole kosmos, reminding us that “makeup” — putting a face on — is connected to a kind of citizenship, a signing up to participate in the glamor of sociality.) The ornament of clothing, far from being inert or fake, promised to expand the body’s periphery, extending its connection to the world. We humans, especially women, have long lost that sense of undividedness from the world.

Maybe that kind of connection was always no more than a human wish, but surely there was a time during human development when such at-oneness with the world existed. Psychoanalysts postulate what they call the oceanic or, rather aptly, pre-mirror stage, when you do not yet see your own reflection as an Other. For a woman, that moment could only be pre-womanhood, before a girl has to think about having a relationship with her body. There’s this story that my mother loves to tell about the time I went to my elementary school in Taipei not only out of uniform but also wearing the most garish outfit. That year my grandparents had returned from their annual trip to America and brought back for me the surprising gift, not of more dresses, but of a pantsuit. The top was bright canary yellow, made from some synthetic, textured fabric that was in truth a little itchy but reminded me of a sea of bubbles. The shirt sported sharp button-down collars and a long, wide, bright orange tie. The sleeves ballooned out extravagantly, like bells, only to cinch back in tightly at the wrist by a row of five small, covered buttons. Then there was the bottom: a pair of front-seamed, bell-bottom pants, in orange, of course.

I had never seen anything so cool in all my life. I insisted on wearing this glowing yellow-orange mirage to school, even though it was school picture day. My mother warned me that she would not come get me at school or make excuses for me should I be sent home. I told her not to worry. To this day, my mother does not know, nor do I recall, what tale I spun to get the teachers to allow it. Somewhere out there in photo graveyards there is a photograph of two neat rows of Taiwanese kids in black and white uniforms...and then me, in my bright yellow and orange bell-bottom suit and tie.

*

I miss that girl, not because she enjoyed being seen but because she didn’t care that she was. Her pleasure in that outfit was more felt than remembered. Imagine that: to be so at home in the world, so undivided from your own body, that what you wear is but an extension of being in the world.

*

The British cultural theorist Rachel Bowlby, who writes smartly about the experience and history of shopping, once described the checkout counter as a moment of anxiety, of de-transcendence, when you fall from shopping’s pleasures of hunting and gathering into the reality of having to pay. I think of the moment of getting dressed, of the “checkout” moment in the dressing room, as a similar though much more potential-filled moment: a psychical exchange when you have given up a little of yourself in order to be a little of the thing you love, and in being that thing, you become a little more yourself.

Of course, that room for play — that slippery moment between who and what you are — is tricky. There is both freedom and danger in sliding between being a person and being a thing, especially for a woman of color, who is always already made into an object (of desire, of use, of denigration). It is politically dicey to talk about a woman finding escape in being thinglike. But, sometimes, for those bodies made heavy by mainstream cultural fantasies, disappearing into synthetic self-extensions — that is, fashion — can provide a temporary relief from the burdens of having bodies and their inevitable weighty visibility. Sometimes you cover yourself up in order to reveal more of yourself, and sometimes the covering relieves you of being you.

*

Ordinary Disasters is out now from Pantheon. Excerpt courtesy of the author and Pantheon.

Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through 17 August 2025.