How I Stopped Being a Model Minority with Anne Anlin Cheng
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Hello, and welcome to the New Voices podcast. I'm your host, Stephanie Tam, writer and radio journalist, and I was born in New York and am now based in England. New Voices celebrates the brilliant women shaping how we understand China, broadly defined today, through their writing, research, and in-depth reporting.

Today, we're joined by Anne On Lin Chang, the author of Ordinary Disasters, How I Stopped Being a Model Minority, which debuted in September 2024 and was published by Pantheon. Welcome to New Voices, Anne. Thank you, Stephanie, for having me. So we're here to talk about Ordinary Disasters, but this isn't, in fact, your first book. So to start us off, would you mind just introducing yourself, who you are and what you do?

I am a professor of English literature at Princeton University. My work is very interdisciplinary. I look at literature, visual culture, critical theory, and generally I'm really interested in the intersection between politics and aesthetics. I'm the author of three books of scholarship. This is Ordinary Disaster is my fourth book, and in some ways,

I think of it as my first book in that it's a very different kind of writing. It's not academic per se. It's a collection of personal essays. It's a very different mode of writing for me. So I kind of think of it as my first book of this kind.

So how did you end up making that journey from a career in academia and very rigorous scholarship and writing to this kind of personal, deeply vulnerable, new kind of or first kind of writing, as you put it? What happened is in the last several years, I have encountered a series of crisis, basically personal, professional crises.

Also, I also think global. I think, you know, there's been a lot going on in the world. And in the midst of all that, I think what I realized is that I have been a scholar of race and gender studies for over 30 years. And yet there's still certain truth that I have not been able to say out loud to others or to myself.

And what I realized also at the same time was that in the face of so much racial antagonism in America today, it became clear to me that I felt a certain responsibility to talk to a larger audience and not just to a limited world, which is, you know, the world of scholars and students. I wanted to speak to a larger audience. So both my sense of trying to figure out

How does actually my scholarship relate to the fine grains of everyday living and my sense of wanting to talk to a larger audience? This is what led me to really explore, initially anyway, a different kind of writing. And this book is a result of that exploration.

Yeah. And in many ways, so much of your work and your scholarship has focused on and explored those complexities of race. And I'm curious, when you were turning to that personal writing, did you find that...

the sort of cerebral aspects of analysis aided you or were they more of a hindrance or how did that kind of interaction feel? You know, I could not have written this book without the years of scholarship and thinking and studying and the history and the thinking and the theoretical material that I learned from that. But at the same time, all that learning alone

would not have ever been enough in order to produce this book. So I think my work, my academic work, has definitely helped me think through some of these more complex personal issues. At the same time, in doing so, they also highlight the ways in which they haven't helped. That is to say, I think that there's a difference between knowing something and living it.

And so I think this book is trying to track, among other things, the ways in which the stuff I have learned have helped me and the ways in which the stuff I have learned have not been adequate to actually address, you know, what living has been like. So the answer is a little bit both. It does help, but also in some ways it can blind you. You know, sometimes I think knowledge is a way for you to actually displace the personal.

And maybe not consciously, oftentimes unconsciously. I mean, I think that makes a lot of sense as someone who has also worked in journalism and the sort of social professional norms of objectivity can sometimes get in the way of subjectivity and objectivity.

And yeah, I guess I'm curious too, thinking about when I have also made those transitions between that kind of objective, impersonal writing into more personal, experiential writing, whether you found that journey of finding your voice or maybe learning to write in your own voice to be especially challenging or fraught as an Asian American woman, because in some ways you're also writing against certain gendered and cultural pressures. So...

One thing that comes to mind is that to be a woman is in some ways to be socialized, to be other oriented, to put others first, or at least not to put yourself first. And then to live as a Chinese person or someone from that culture also compounds some of those self-effacing pressures. Certainly, I've experienced that additional familial layer of saving face or at least not exposing family and loved ones.

Then I feel like you add the immigrant layer or the person of color layer, and there's this whole existential experience of struggling to justify your existence, your right to take up space in this country that still labels you a foreigner, perpetual foreigner. All of those forces kind of question whether you have the right to speak to justify your writing that is essentially about, you know, yourself.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I certainly feel like to live in the West as an Asian American woman is in some ways to be living in the wake of all of these pressures that are erasing you. You actually have laid out a lot of the pressures behind a lot of the reasons why writing this book was difficult. First, I do want to say that

I just want to make a quick note that I don't think the objectivity of scholarship is actually totally true. I think that there has always been a kind of disguise of objectivity. I think that most people who...

write about something that they've studied for decades and then they write about it it clearly is personal to them you know it's never just purely intellectual but you do hide be not I don't want to hide but you do sort of put in front of all that personal connection a layer of distance right and so I think that objectivity was always never fully a true thing

But at the same time, though, because academic writing is professional writing like any other professions, you know, there are codes, there are protocols that you have to observe. And because of that, it also allows you a little hidden space. And I've always thought that through my academic work, there were issues that have always haunted me as a person. And that's why I needed to study them and think about them.

and understand history and understand culture so that it can help me work through these issues. I think a lot of my work has been motivated by my desire to understand all these categories that I found myself in. You know, I'm a Taiwanese-born person who immigrated to the U.S. as an 11-year-old. So I had to first figure out what's Taiwanese in America? What's America? What's Taiwanese versus

Chinese American? Am I Asian American? All these categories that I have needed to negotiate are, I think, worked through a lot of my scholarships. So I think there's always been a little bit of me in the scholarship. But this book is a lot of me.

The difficulty was not being objective, because as I say, I've always thought that objectivity was a certain kind of form, you know, that you occupy. But rather, just even, I mean, as you say, even writing in the first person, I think it's very difficult for women in general, but Asian American women in particular, the idea that you can claim a space in public.

Of course, at the back of my mind, I thought all the time, well, who cares about reading about, who cares about my life? And to this day, when people call this book a memoir, I kind of cringe a little bit. But on the other hand, though, one of the reasons I wrote this book was precisely to say things that I realized that I have never said, whether it's out of fear or out of a sense of

description or politeness or whatever things I haven't said to even my family or to myself and certainly to the world. And so this book is very much about breaking that silence as corny as that sounds. It really is about, it's actually scary to do so. And in fact, one of the things I did as an exercise was I wrote down a list of all the things that I was afraid to talk about.

And then I started writing about them. Oh, my gosh. That sounds so terrifying. It is terrifying. But in a way, I set myself this terrifying task precisely to overcome certain things, to overcome forms of muteness and muffling, which, you know, honestly, growing up, I did not live my life feeling like

an oppressed person, right? Because I have been tremendously invested in my sense of self-determination, agency, my hard work, all that. But it's not until a lot of disaster happened when I basically hit the wall that I realized that all the things I have used to thrive were not only not working,

but that they had in fact cost me a great deal. They've given me a lot. I've achieved a lot, as people might say, but it has also cost me a lot. And I had never actually acknowledged that cost. And so I think this book is also partially an attempt to

acknowledge the psychical and emotional injuries and wounds that I've experienced that I have never really completely acknowledged even to myself.

Oh, gosh, there's so many things that I want to pick up on there. But maybe we can just start with the discomfort that you felt about the memoir genre or perhaps labeling it and also that first person, the complexity of that. I think both of us are Maxine Hong Kingston fans, and she has that fantastic personality.

passage where she talks about the contrast between the Chinese character of the first person and how it's composed of these seven strokes and intricacies, whereas the English I was solitary and straightforward and always just very much confused her because it was so different to her conception of self. And

I wonder how you found the experience of writing in first person in a way that honors and reflects that complexity. I think I called it personal essay. I think what's uncomfortable for me about memoir is, and this is not to offend anyone, but, you know, there's a way in which memoirs sound to me like a private story and personal.

Part of what I wanted to capture in this book is not my private story per se at all, but how the private is entangled with the public.

And I sort of use my life as a way of thinking through that question. So I feel like the sort of memoir sense of, hey, this is my life story. Listen to it. This is actually not the point of this book, even though there is parts of my life that's personal. You know, people can look into it. But it's really about thinking about the connection between the private and the public, but doing so in such a way that really put myself at stake.

rather than hiding that analysis or exploration behind intellectual, like doing it through a novel. As you were just asking that question, I remember this thing that one of my former poetry teacher and who has become over the years a very dear friend, well, he has said to me years and years ago when I was still in graduate school, at the time I was really writing a lot of poetry, that was my focus. And I was saying to him that

I really love writing poems, but I just didn't think I was that good. You know, I didn't think I was bad, but I wasn't, I did not think I was an exceptional poet. And what he said to me was, at the time, he said, you know, what you need to do is find the form of your voice. And when he said that, that observation, it wasn't so much an advice, right? An advice is something you follow.

But it was an observation. And that observation has stayed with me over the years. Like at the back of my mind, I have been searching for the form of my voice. And I have to say, writing these essays, I really finally felt like at age 60, I felt like, oh, I found that form. Ah, at last. Well, I mean, in some ways that does feel like a lifetime's journey.

Related to what you were saying before about how you had studied all these things around the model minority and not identified with it, but then found yourself coming up against a lot of the harms and the kind of internalizations of things. One of the things I actually really appreciated was the nuance with which you navigate that relationship between your own identity and the model minority myth in all of its intersections and contradictions.

And I think it probably is a bit of a lifetime of trying to parse these things, the ways that things that are individual to you and your work ethic and your striving and your sociability overlap with or intersect with the model minority traits, but they're also yours, right? They are also yours.

parts of you that you would identify with and claim. So maybe we can explore some of that double bind about your own process in unraveling some of these knots, as well as how you tease apart those tangled threads between the model minority and the individual.

So the subtitle for the book is How I Stopped Being a Model Minority. And it's not a fully accurate subtitle because the real subtitle is How I Have to Keep Trying to Stop Being a Model Minority. But that got you low. No.

I should say it's an ongoing process, one, to recognize my complicity in the model minority trope and also how profoundly aspect of that trope has been internalized in myself. And then the second is the sort of the ongoing challenge of resisting it, because the truth is there's a lot of external rewards to being a model minority.

even as those rewards have come not only at a personal price, but also at a public price. I think Asian Americans...

are a particular kind of racialized minority in the United States. They are racialized like African Americans and other racialized groups, but the mode, the modality of how they get racialized is very different, right? And so the model minority is both the thing from a public white perspective, the model minority is both what makes Asian Americans tolerable

but also disliked because there's, I mean, all the anxiety about college admission, the anxiety about furtive action, that's all about that anxiety, right? About Asian Americans taking over all your jobs, all your children's, you know, places and universities, right?

So even though statistically the number of Asian Americans in U.S. universities is something like 3%, it is much lower than other racial minorities. The exception being, of course, the Ivy Leagues.

which actually are not that many schools in the world of schools. Yes, yeah. But everyone's focused on that, even though they are very much exceptions. There's a passage that I know that you have pointed out to me before that talks about at least one aspect of this question of the modern minority. So maybe I could take that. This is from page 189 from the book. Here's the irony.

The more assimilated you are, the more laborious and invisible the efforts that enable this ease, and the more unlikely you are to be cognizant of the psychical energy that has been extracted for this accomplishment. The model minority myth is an insidious identity formation for Asian Americans. It is all the more seductive and dangerous for being tied to the other imaginary reward system, the American dream.

So we have arrived at this double bind. In the face of chronic xenophobic discrimination and political neglect, Asian Americans are hungry for recognition and approval, which is why they tap into the modern minority model. At the same time, whatever recognition they do achieve risks being floated all too quickly back into the modern minority overachiever script that denies Asian American grief in the first place.

So I think for most of my pedagogical career, when I'm teaching in the classroom, I have found myself debunking the Asian, the model minority myth for Asian Americans, because I wanted them to understand that it is a myth that one, that Asian Americans are not all doctors and lawyers or professors. Two, that Asian Americans have the highest income disparity of any other racial group in the U.S.,

that three Asian American is actually a category that includes at least eight different national groups and different ethnicities. So it's simply not a real thing. It's not a social fact. But I think what I've been thinking about in the last couple of years, and certainly as part of writing this new book was, oh, it's one thing to debunk Asian American myth for Americans, for non-Asian Americans,

It's actually important for us to think about why is it that so many Asian Americans buy into the model minority myth? And I think one of the reasons is actually because it is a way of dealing with the neglect and the denigration that they suffer culturally.

And I think, you know, if one's only choice in life is to be either the yellow peril or the model minority, well, you're going to pick the model minority. When you put it like that, yes. But that says something about how limited the options are. It really is sort of like denigration, outright denigration, or...

a kind of idealization that is actually a subtle form of denigration as well. Because part of the modern minority myth is to also say, well, Asian Americans are very smart, but they're not very creative. They're really good workers, but they're not leaders. That's why the modern minority is really kind of a backward compliment. But at the same time, I think we have to acknowledge why it's such a

It has such a hold for Asian Americans because it is a mode of survival. And when you're trying to survive, you do things that may not always be that good for you in the long run, but it helps, right, in the meantime. It strikes me, too, that interesting comparison and parallel between the American dream and the model minority myth. Because I think you could argue that both of them are, in fact, myths of different sorts.

You know, there are a lot of kind of economic studies about the actual reality of there not really being all that much social mobility in America, or at least significantly less than many other countries. The American dream is a layaway plan that never pays off or that really certainly does not pay off.

The irony, it seems to me, Stephanie, is that it doesn't pay off for the very people who are invested in it. I think the super rich, they're not worrying about the American dream. They're living it. Yeah. The American dream, as a phrase, is about aspiration.

And it is precisely those who aspire to it who are often kept from it. I mean, it's also very much tied to that whole idea of the meritocracy, right? That becomes a way of kind of dismissing people who are doing less well as like...

undeserving because they haven't, you know, everyone kind of gets what they deserve in the American dream and in the kind of system of meritocracy. But that's clearly not the reality for a vast proportion of Americans. Yeah, I mean, part of the problem is like I think meritocracy is a way of not looking at systemic discrimination or ongoing political neglect.

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On the subject of ignoring inequalities, it did feel like there was a moment, I don't know if this was your experience, but certainly around the time of George Floyd and then the Atlanta shootings, it felt like there was this window of mainstream awareness, to me at least, and this kind of urgency and openness to conversations about race and that people were at least signaling that they were open to and wanting change. And

Somehow it's been just a few years and that window already seems to have closed. I'm just wondering, it feels like there's almost a violent backlash to, well, I mean, you know, right now we're speaking in February, but there's been a whole attack on DEI programs and this kind of anti-woke rhetoric and

I'm just curious, both as a scholar and a human, if you have thoughts on why there's such a small window of patience and compassion and maybe attention span when it comes to conversations about race in America, perhaps the West more broadly. I think calling it a lack of attention or short attention span is too generous. Hannah Arendt wrote about the banality of evil, right?

And part of what she meant was that not having the attention span to focus on evil or injustice, not having the mental or emotional space to pay attention to it doesn't make it less evil. So I'm being slow here because I think there's so much behind what you asked. I mean, I think one answer is that sadly,

I was not surprised by the short span. There was a brief opening right during COVID with all the anti-racism happening in the world and the huge rise of anti-Asian violence all across the U.S. and even in Canada and in Britain as well. You know, when that happened, I thought to myself, oh, wow.

And this made me sick to think that. But my first thought was, oh, finally, people can see that the racializations of Asians in the American West has these very serious consequences and impact. But I also thought this is not going to last long. And it's partially because I think that there is a very fundamental, and I've written about this even in my scholarship book,

that there's a very fundamental link between political recognition in America and injury. So somehow what earns groups of people political recognition at any given point is when they manage to really showcase their injury. But if we tie political recognition only to injury or only to like enough injury,

Then it's a very, very shallow kind of recognition. And I thought to myself, oh, OK, this is going to last for a couple of years and then it's going to disappear. And now we don't ever hear about anti-Asian violence on the national news at all. But it's still happening. If you go to anti-AAPI survey or that organization that tracks these issues, it's still happening. We're just not hearing about it.

And so that short attention is a form of serious neglect. And we should not excuse it as, oh, Americans are just, you know, they only have a short attention span. Well, you know, it's neglect.

And I find it really egregious, in fact. And I find it heartbreaking. I find it egregious as a scholar and as a social subject. But inside, I have been incredibly saddened by it. You know, during the pandemic, if you think about it, it's quite extraordinary. It's the first time that the entire world has one common enemy. That's the first time, at least in my lifetime, I've seen that. We're all fighting the same thing. And yet, instead of uniting us,

The country splintered into these terrible racist responses. And I do think it's a backlash. I think part of the problem is that we as a scholar or people who are invested in issues of social justice or people invested in thinking about equality for all, that we have underestimated the number of people who don't actually believe that or want that.

And so for every step forward, there's two step back. I felt like there is now, as you say, a backlash. I think the backlash is as far as Obama. I think having a smart black man as president was on the one hand, a moment in American history that we should be so proud of. But now we're just paying for that. Yeah. Right. The backlash is huge.

and ongoing. When you put it that way, it's deeply depressing. But also, I mean, I think you're right. I think historically, all of these things come in these kinds of cycles of backlashes. Yeah, and it's the same cycle too. That's what's depressing. You know, it's like, you think we have learned stuff from history, but you know, the whole so-called China virus is

It's just another iteration of the Yellow Peril, which is hundreds of years old. And, you know, in the 80s, with the downturn of the U.S. economy and the rise of so-called Asian tigers, that was a wave of anti-Asian. I mean, these waves keep happening because there's a very deep structure of power that

in America that can feel extremely threatened by diversity. Yeah, I wonder if you think part of that structure is also related to what you mentioned in terms of the way that race and the recognition, at least in the kind of political discourse, seems to work is that when some kind of traumatic injury happens and is showcased, then, you know,

pay attention for some time. And there's a way in which that actually feels like it is, again, centering whiteness or white guilt. It's not that minorities are worthy of attention or recognition. For being human beings, right? For being human beings who are taxpayers and citizens of America.

I saw that. That's not enough. Yeah. It's only when a white person has harmed a person of color, then that kind of injury and that guilt dynamic kicks in. Even then, it's a question of quantity.

How much injury before he counts? You know, my first book, The Melancholy of Race, which I know you know, is all about this, right? It's all about the ways in which political recognition that hinges itself on not just injury, but quantifiable injury. And so this is why we are a nation that is with grievance, but not with grief.

Yeah. Tell me more about that, because you also have a very moving chapter about grieving your father, where you also kind of bring in those concepts about how our very litigious society is comfortable in some ways with grievance, but not grief. And there is a kind of element of patience that comes with grief that grievance doesn't have. Yes, I think grievance is, one, something public.

and two, something quantifiable.

I can have a grievance against you. Well, certainly legally speaking, for me to have filed a grievance against you, I have to prove my injury. And to this day, in the U.S. legal court, it is much easier to prove material grievance and injury than it is to prove emotional injury. I would have much less luck going into court and saying, you hurt my feelings, than me going in and saying, hey, you bashed in my car.

And that costs $5,000 and you owe me that. And so I think when it comes to racial grievance, it's a very racial injury. It's complicated. I think that grievance

does do some work. I do think it's important to think about grievance. But I think the problem is that we have mistaken grievance for the process of grief, which is actually dealing with the injuries that are not necessarily easily quantifiable.

You know, that it's hard to take it to court to prove. I think grievance can do its work, especially in the sort of American litigious world. Grievance does do important political work, but we should not allow it to blind us to the grief that still has to be reckoned with in America. Do you think that there's an aspect, I suppose, just the connotation of grief and grievance

Grief does also feel like it is personal, but clearly what we're talking about is personal hurt that is due to political structures in this case. I wonder how that would, in a sort of more ideal society, how we would reckon with grief. I think that grief is a privately experienced thing that grows out of an interpersonal interaction.

You know, my grief for my father is very much obviously my thing, but it is because of my relationship with my father that I have this grief. I think that part of the problem with racism is that it's not just that it hurts someone materially, it's that it hurts someone in such a way that it became part of their interiority.

part of their psyche or part of their self-experience. And that kind of invasion is much harder to see, and it's much harder to map, and it's much harder to get over. I mean, you know, this is a very silly example, but if I were really rude to you and call you terrible names,

and then say to you, okay, here's a hundred bucks. The money helps, I'm sure, but are you going to feel okay with me? No, because actually the material compensation cannot get fully at the injury, which is more than material. But this question about how we as a nation can grieve, I think we have to first acknowledge

That we have been, that we are in many ways a racist world. That we can't even acknowledge that, which is what all this backlash is about too, right? The sort of putting back of DEI and all that. That we can't even acknowledge that there has been a historic systemic ongoing system of discrimination and injustice and inequality in America. We can't even acknowledge that, much less get over it.

The other thing that struck me always as kind of a puzzle to me is, I don't know if you've thought about this, Stephanie, but it has always struck me as really odd that most people, I mean, I think there are extreme cases where this is not true, but for most people who have racist ideas, they're so offended when they're being called a racist.

as if they know it's a bad thing to be a racist. And yet, nonetheless, I just find that so odd. You know, I mean, I think there are some extreme right wing people who would come out and say, yeah, I'm a racist. I don't think black people are real people. I don't think Asian, I think genocide is a good idea. I mean, I actually have seen people say things like that. So there are those people, right? But most people are not that extreme.

Not all races are that extreme. There's a kind of mild quotidian. Yeah, yeah, of course. And the thing that amazes me is that they're always so offended when they're caught out on it. And I think, well, why are you offended? If you know it's so bad, then why are you still holding on to these beliefs? I don't understand that.

I think a lot of your essays tease apart many of those nuances in very compelling ways. But there's a real warmth and humor and a pop culture savviness to, you know, your discussion of one of my favorite films, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. I really appreciate that analysis where you were talking about Asian pessimism. What motivated me was actually a very depressing subject or very difficult subject, which is there have been a series of

undergraduate student suicide on my home campus, several. And they have all been Asian American. And the university has not said very much at all, nothing about this fact. And I kind of wrote this essay for my students. This is from the book.

For me, the rambunctious humor of the film could not keep the dark message at bay that to be an immigrant or a hyphenated subject is to live or die in a fractured multiverse, one riven with geographic, temporal, and emotional dissonances. Without denying the reality and force of pessimism,

The mother in the movie reminds the daughter of what it means to possess frail, precious tendrils of familial and loving connections in a world of inevitable grievances and disappointments. This is where she says to her daughter, basically, the world sucks, but I still prefer to be here with you.

Even in the fictional world of the film, the possibility of such victory over hopelessness is both tender and tenuous and not at all a guaranteed outcome. Thank you. In a way, it felt like that film and the analysis drew together so many of the themes that you were discussing, the relational, the personal, political, and also that connection between all of them, the grief and the grievance. And

It's funny, I actually, when I read that, it struck me that you could have been writing those words about your own collection of essays. It's a work that reminds the reader of what it means to love in a time when everything, everywhere seems to be falling apart. And, you know, the relationships that you explore with your family and, you know, fraught as interracial marriage can certainly be, there's still this love that's really, that really comes through. And I

I wonder, since you wrote those words, I'm guessing a year or so ago, it feels like the world has only gotten weirder. And I'm wondering, what do you think it looks like to love and not lose hope in these deeply weird, unsettling times? Yeah, I think one thing I wanted to tell my students was that in a very troubling world like we live in today, living is a choice.

It takes strength to make this choice. Let's put it that way. And I really appreciated what you just said about

what my book is trying to do, which is exactly that. I feel like, you know, my ambition is not unlike Evelyn's, which is both very mundane, but also these days seems very ambitious, which is to hold on to love, you know, in a world of hatred, really. And so I think being able to hang on to that, but to hang on to it with clear eyes, right? With, you know, not...

not some kind of idealized, redemptive view of great love. But understanding that love is struggle. Love entails conflict, both internal and external. Marriages are hard. You know, my husband is the most important person in the entire world to me, other than my children. But we also have conflicts. And some of the conflicts are personal because we're just very different people. Some of it is cultural because we're

he's from a very different background than I am. As you just said, I'm in an interracial relationship, a marriage, and part of the book was thinking through, one, me coming to acknowledge that, oh, yeah, actually race does play a role in our relationship. And then to say, but what does that really mean? Because, you know, race is not just a thing. It is everything. It's where you grow up, how you grow up, your parents' value, your grandparents' value. Because

Because, you know, when you first fall in love, you don't actually even care what the other person's like families like or what race they are or, you know, like there's a way in which the person you love is so specific and individual to you that they are kind of outside of all those categories.

And in many ways, they remain that to you. But over time, as I say, when you are building a family together, which means you are creating a social world within the larger social world, then all those external things start to come into play because, in fact, they're also part of who you are.

So where you actually end the book is this kind of moving reflection on your journey from growing up in a Taiwanese Christian family to growing disillusioned with the state of religion in America. And you use this term, sustaining an ordinary faith. You talk about writing in order to sustain an ordinary faith, writing as a form of prayer and prayer.

Perhaps this is just one of those weird universe coincidences, but I was reading a New Yorker interview with the Bishop Marion Budge from the Episcopal Church. So listeners might be aware she was the one who gave the inauguration day service where

She pleaded with Trump to have mercy on migrants and others who were frightened. And she actually ended her interview by saying that writing is a form of prayer for me. And she said it involves everything, right? Every aspect of my being, all of my ego, my insecurities, my strengths. You know those rare moments when you feel like you actually have enough energy to write and other times when you feel like you're going to fall asleep in front of the screen? It's all prayer. And so that was certainly part of it.

Yeah, I wonder what you make of that comparison or what you were trying to do with the line about writing as a way of sustaining ordinary faith and if that resonates or if you were going for something else. No, I think that's very resonating. I have to go read that.

It sounds wonderful, actually. I mean, it is interesting that religion and actually, in fact, played a big role in my life as the essay reveals. But, you know, I have never talked about my religion with anybody in my professional world.

And it's because it's this fraught thing for me. You know, it's both a deep source of, for me, certainly as a child, up until very, even young, it was a deep source of comfort for me. You know, I have lots of Catholic aunts and great aunts and Episcopalian mother and grandmother. But I had always been able to hold on.

that part of me private, not too high, but because the privateness of that has been very important to me. It is like my one haven. But I have always been able to keep my sense of spirituality separate from what I think of as institutional religion, churches and so forth. But in the last several years, seeing the

Seeing the ways in which so much hatred and violence in America are being exercised in the name of Christianity, in the name of God, is so devastating to me. It's so frightening that I feel like I just have retreated more and more into my own. And what I realized writing this book was that the writing is my closest thing to feeling

You know what people would call meditative, right? It is because I'm really bad at mindfulness. I've tried, you know, exercises, apps, you know, classes, everything. I just can't do it. But the writing is my version of a communion with myself and forces that I feel are larger than myself.

And so it is a place of, it's also a place of peace where I can arrive at emotional and psychological and, you know, psychical clarity. So, yeah, I think I would totally agree with that statement.

So we also have a special New Voices segment where we talk about how we are taking care of ourselves these days outside of work. Something I've found very life-giving is setting aside half an hour at the start of the day to meditate, pray, cuddle my cat. As someone whose mind often gravitates towards anxiety, it's very centering and comforting to have that quiet time in the morning before getting swept up in the demands of the day.

What are your recommendations for self-care, Anne? Two things. One is obviously you have to find the thing that allows you, that gives you that meditative relief. You know, for me, it's writing. Sometimes painting does that too, but for me, but I,

People need to find whatever it is that's their own thing. So that's the first thing. And then when you find it, nurture it. But the other thing I was going to say was, and this is more about, I think, for a lot of women. I realized recently that the two driving primary directive in my life for a very long time has been guilt and duty.

Everything is about guilt and duty. And so ever since I wrote this book, which helped me realize that, I think writing this book sort of changed how I live my life, for which I'm really grateful. So my second advice is find out the two negative forces behind

or the one, whatever the predominant negative force is driving your life, and then learn to let it go. I wanted to add one more thing because this is my own New Year resolution. You know, in the face of so much negativity in the world, I think the most important thing that everyone should do is actively pursue joy. Yeah.

That's nice. It's nice to have the permission and the endorsement. It's actually, we need the permission. That's so sad, but we do need it. We need the permission. Anne, thank you so much for this conversation and for writing this book. Good to see you, Stephanie. You've been listening to The New Voices Podcast. Our producer is Wing Kuang and our editor is Rebecca Liu. Music is by April Zhu.

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