Year of the Tiger

Starred review from June 27, 2022
Wong outlines her life as an advocate and educator in this stunning collection of essays, interviews, and artwork. Born to parents who emigrated from Hong Kong to Indiana in the 1970s, Wong describes how Chinese American culture and her progressive muscular dystrophy shaped her childhood. After moving to San Francisco for grad school, Wong advocated for access and disability rights, and in 2014 founded the Disability Visibility Project, “an online community dedicated to creating, sharing, and amplifying disability media and culture.” In “My Day as a Robot,” she describes using a telepresence robot to meet then-president Barack Obama in 2015 , while “The Last Disabled Oracle” is a series of imagined dispatches from the year 2029 that asks “How can we harness our imagination to create the world we want to live in right now and in the future?” Throughout, Wong references a “Tiger” spirit: “It takes a lot of big cat energy to leap into unknown situations, roar against injustice... and swipe at all who annoy me across the multiverse,” she writes. Wong’s voice is straightforward, but she sprinkles in dry humor and is adept at balancing compassion with flashes of rage. The combination of memoir, manifesto, scrapbook, confession, and rousing call to action make for a winning mix. This one’s tough to forget.

July 1, 2022

The prominent community organizer and founder of the Disability Visibility Project strikes again with an imaginative and insightful memoir about her journey as an activist and her continued fight to dismantle systemic ableism. The text is an eclectic scrapbook of essays, interviews, poems, photos, email chains, memes, and more. Every section is a new discovery that takes the reader through Wong's childhood memories, policies around public health care, bad media depictions of people with disabilities, various uses of assistive technology, and the future of pandemic-era care. It also includes accessible and collaborative elements, such as image descriptions, artwork by Wong and other artists with disabilities, and quotes from disabled and social justice organizers. Written in a refreshingly frank and honest manner, Wong explores communal joy, grief, and rage and carves out a space for all people to be in conversation with one another. VERDICT An essential read for anyone with an interest in accessible futures, community building, and social justice. Readers who enjoy Kai Cheng Thom and Adrienne Maree Brown will embrace this.--Zhui Ning Chang

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2022
A mixed-media collection of prose and other work by Asian American disability activist Wong. In the introduction, the author, who was born with a form of muscular dystrophy, claims that she never intended to be an activist. On the contrary, she writes, "Ableism conscripted me into activism." Throughout the book, Wong supports this claim in a series of pieces that describe what it is like for her--and members of the disability community in general--to navigate an ableist world. In one essay, she combines traditional prose with screenshots of text-message chains to recount how she had to drop out of her dream college because changes to Medicaid made it impossible for her to retain the health aides she needed to survive on campus. In another essay peppered with screenshots and newspaper headlines, Wong describes the injustices she faced in trying to access a Covid-19 vaccine as a high-risk individual. The essays are not just limited to writing about disability, though: The author also includes a StoryCorps conversation she recorded with her mother about Lunar New Year traditions, a guide to conducting interviews for radio and other media, and an illustrated ode to cats. As a result, Wong's collection provides a truly multidimensional portrait of a disabled writer effectively fighting the tendency of able-bodied people to treat the disability community as a monolith, an idea the author effectively deconstructs throughout the book. Not just beautifully written, the book is formally innovative, incorporating fiction (most notably, science fiction) and illustrated elements that are both profoundly insightful and consistently creative. Wong's grasp of social justice issues is as impressive as her ability to explain complex ideas clearly, passionately, and often humorously. "A memoir can only provide a glimpse of a person," she writes, "and I am presenting one that is framed by me for nefarious purposes that you will discover one day if you dare." A stunningly innovative, compulsively readable hybrid of memoir, cultural criticism, and social activism.

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