Disability rights activist Alice Wong is bringing awareness to Asian American women with disabilities in her new memoir “Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life.”
The memoir was released over a month ago but is still gaining traction in the press.
“When I wrote my memoir, Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life, I wanted to comfort, encourage, and welcome Asian American women and girls who are still finding their way, struggling with their identities, and told all kinds of bullshit from their communities,” Wong writes in an excerpt from her memoir published in Teen Vogue.
The Chinese American writer stopped walking at eight years old due to muscular dystrophy. According to SF Chronicle, doctors predicted she would not live past her 18th birthday, but now she travels around in her motorized wheelchair and assistive ventilator device at 48 years old.
“Year of the Tiger” is divided into seven sections: Origins, Activism, Access, Culture, Storytelling, Pandemic and Future. According to SF Chronicle, the memoir captures Wong’s origins before embracing her identity and her advocacy work as an activist.
She was initially “unsettled” to be in a genre involving disabilities because of certain stigmas surrounding it. “I will not excavate my innermost secrets and traumas for your consumption,” she wrote in the memoir.
However, the pandemic caused Wong to reconsider. What resulted was a “mosaic” of work styled in a righteous anger, as described by Wong’s editor Anna Kaufman at Vintage Books to the LA Times.
“Her willingness to speak truth to power, her ability to cut through the noise and remind people of what’s really important — I have no problem calling her the empress of the internet,” said U.S. disability rights program officer Rebecca Cokley, according to the LA Times.
Wong is the eldest daughter of immigrants from Hong Kong and grew up in Indiana. For most of her adult life, she has lived in San Francisco.
According to the National Women’s History Museum, Wong was appointed to the National Council on Disability by former President Obama in 2013. The council advises the government on policies, programs and practices that affect people with disabilities.
In 2014, Wong became the founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project, an online community that brings awareness to disability media and culture.
“One of the things that really gives me joy is the fact that there are so many amazing, brilliant, creative disabled people out there,” Wong said to comedian W. Kamau Bell in October 2020. “But part of my rage — and it’s a very real rage — is that most people don’t really know about them.”
An ableist society may view individuals with disabilities as suffering and miserable. Challenging those who cannot see past the limitations of a disabled body, Wong writes about her happy childhood, her love of food, her joy of writing and being a sci-fi nerd, according to SF Chronicle.
“I refuse to apologize or feel shame about the way my body works and how I navigate the world,” Wong wrote in her memoir.
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AsAmNews is published by the non-profit, Asian American Media Inc.
We are supported through donations and such charitable organizations as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. December 3 is Giving Tuesday. Will you consider a tax-deductible donation to Asian American Media Inc and AsAmNews?
Please follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube and X.