February 11, 2026
Title
Anne Cheng
Professor of English at Princeton University, affiliated faculty in the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies and on the Committee on Film Studies, and former director of the Program in American Studies
Title
Anne Cheng
Professor of English at Princeton University, affiliated faculty in the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies and on the Committee on Film Studies, and former director of the Program in American Studies
Anne Cheng and Ferris Olin, introducer
Minutes of the 18th Meeting of the 84th Year
George Bustin presided over the meeting held at the Jewish Center of Princeton. Frances Slade led the group in the invocation. Kathryn Trenner read the minutes for Edward Tenner’s talk the previous week, “Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge: Essays in Unintended Consequences”. There was 1 guest, Jay Woolston, guest of Rogers Woolston. Total attendance was 119.
Ferris Olin introduced the speaker, Anne Cheng, Professor of English at Princeton University. Prof. Cheng is also an affiliated faculty member of the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies and the Committee on Film Studies, and the former director of the Program in American Studies. She is the author of three scholarly books: The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief; the award-winning Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface; the Influential Ornamentalism. Her recent fourth is a set of personal/cultural essays and the basis for her Old Guard presentation, Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority.
Prof. Cheng began her talk by sharing two defining facts about herself. She is a Taiwanese immigrant who grew up in the American South and a scholar with 30 years of experience in her field. After undergoing chemotherapy in 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic, she explained, she began writing in a more personal voice, a choice she describes as “both scary and soul-saving.” She then read passages from two chapters of her most recent book, glossing them with anecdotes and commentary.
The first, “Trip to Disney,” is a warm family memoir that compares a teenage visit to Disney World with her parents and a later return with her own (no longer young) children. It is also a cultural critique that views Disney World as the Las Vegas for Americans with small children, where hours of waiting yield two minutes of thrill.
Reflecting on the 1950s aura of the park’s Tomorrowland, an exhibit that testifies “more to the past than the future,” Prof. Cheng observed that “our visions of the future always bear the time stamp of the present and, in this way, are always dated.” She also argued that “Disney cosmopolitanism” stages “internationalism as parochialism,” offering a fantasy of enjoying a safely contained “foreign Other” within American borders.
The second reading is from “Striving,” which Prof. Cheng calls “a manifesto to myself.” This chapter appraises her long commitment to teaching, research, and institutional service, noting that she had been, in her words, “the model minority” whom she “deconstructed with her students in the classroom.” She described the pressure of being the institution’s poster child for diversity, while knowing that “the perseverance being praised was also burdensome to others.” Asian Americans live the paradox of “stereotype and erasure,” the obligation to speak up, paired with the sense that doing so—as a visible minority—means one had already “lost the game.”
Prof Cheng’s Question and Answer session proved to be a candid and expansive conversation about seven topics.
1. Asked about racism, Prof Cheng said that as a child she didn’t recognize racism and that her family believed that hard work and accomplishments would protect her from it.
2. On sexism, she noted anecdotally that the remark “you argue like a man” was not meant as a compliment.
3. Regarding DEI, Prof. Cheng emphasized the absolute importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives even as she faulted the institutional implementation that becomes a numbers-driven exercise that reinforces stereotypes.
4. On the relation of personal essays to scholarship, she affirmed the importance of reaching “a larger audience,” one that is not already part of the “choir.”
5. Addressing hope, she pointed out that her book’s final essay centers on prayer and cited Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World as a model of growth emerging from and alongside disaster.
6. In response to a specific question about Affirmative Action, she discussed both its harms and benefits, sharing a personal anecdote about being publicly labeled an affirmative action hire. She criticized the Supreme Court’s embrace of “colorblindness” as “downright reprehensible” and described affirmative action as an imperfect but necessary response to systemic inequality.
7. Lastly, tucked into a response about her daughter’s experience at Princeton, Prof. Cheng praised Princeton’s extraordinary success in achieving economic diversity in the student undergraduate population.
Respectfully submitted,
Constance W. Hassett
Ferris Olin introduced the speaker, Anne Cheng, Professor of English at Princeton University. Prof. Cheng is also an affiliated faculty member of the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies and the Committee on Film Studies, and the former director of the Program in American Studies. She is the author of three scholarly books: The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief; the award-winning Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface; the Influential Ornamentalism. Her recent fourth is a set of personal/cultural essays and the basis for her Old Guard presentation, Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority.
Prof. Cheng began her talk by sharing two defining facts about herself. She is a Taiwanese immigrant who grew up in the American South and a scholar with 30 years of experience in her field. After undergoing chemotherapy in 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic, she explained, she began writing in a more personal voice, a choice she describes as “both scary and soul-saving.” She then read passages from two chapters of her most recent book, glossing them with anecdotes and commentary.
The first, “Trip to Disney,” is a warm family memoir that compares a teenage visit to Disney World with her parents and a later return with her own (no longer young) children. It is also a cultural critique that views Disney World as the Las Vegas for Americans with small children, where hours of waiting yield two minutes of thrill.
Reflecting on the 1950s aura of the park’s Tomorrowland, an exhibit that testifies “more to the past than the future,” Prof. Cheng observed that “our visions of the future always bear the time stamp of the present and, in this way, are always dated.” She also argued that “Disney cosmopolitanism” stages “internationalism as parochialism,” offering a fantasy of enjoying a safely contained “foreign Other” within American borders.
The second reading is from “Striving,” which Prof. Cheng calls “a manifesto to myself.” This chapter appraises her long commitment to teaching, research, and institutional service, noting that she had been, in her words, “the model minority” whom she “deconstructed with her students in the classroom.” She described the pressure of being the institution’s poster child for diversity, while knowing that “the perseverance being praised was also burdensome to others.” Asian Americans live the paradox of “stereotype and erasure,” the obligation to speak up, paired with the sense that doing so—as a visible minority—means one had already “lost the game.”
Prof Cheng’s Question and Answer session proved to be a candid and expansive conversation about seven topics.
1. Asked about racism, Prof Cheng said that as a child she didn’t recognize racism and that her family believed that hard work and accomplishments would protect her from it.
2. On sexism, she noted anecdotally that the remark “you argue like a man” was not meant as a compliment.
3. Regarding DEI, Prof. Cheng emphasized the absolute importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives even as she faulted the institutional implementation that becomes a numbers-driven exercise that reinforces stereotypes.
4. On the relation of personal essays to scholarship, she affirmed the importance of reaching “a larger audience,” one that is not already part of the “choir.”
5. Addressing hope, she pointed out that her book’s final essay centers on prayer and cited Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World as a model of growth emerging from and alongside disaster.
6. In response to a specific question about Affirmative Action, she discussed both its harms and benefits, sharing a personal anecdote about being publicly labeled an affirmative action hire. She criticized the Supreme Court’s embrace of “colorblindness” as “downright reprehensible” and described affirmative action as an imperfect but necessary response to systemic inequality.
7. Lastly, tucked into a response about her daughter’s experience at Princeton, Prof. Cheng praised Princeton’s extraordinary success in achieving economic diversity in the student undergraduate population.
Respectfully submitted,
Constance W. Hassett