YEAR OF THE TIGER by ALICE WONG BOOK REVIEW GOODREADS

 

     Teems with her creativity and is crammed with people in the disability justice movement. This is the life of an Asian-American woman in a wheelchair, interdependent on others to keep alive and working. She will never run out of fantastic things to do for her disabled life so that all disabled people can just imagine what they can do. She is pure fire, but she isn’t super-human, and is just as vulnerable as the next disabled person and has learned how to really take care of herself and  loves her friends and family deeply and is ferociously protective.

     She knows and writes how it is to be enmeshed in systems, medical, state, etc. She belongs to a “mycelia network”. Her “nefarious purposes” just may be discovered if you stick around long enough. Alice calls this book an “impressionistic narrative”. In 2024 she is fifty years old.

     Reading this could teach you a whole range of feelings might be internalized ableism. Read about her being beamed to the White House to be commended by President Obama. Learn how much she was inspired by Star Trek and says her genes were mutated and she’s a disabled oracle.

     Every disabled person can relate to how like her; we have to explain and defend our rights, spending precious hours on people who don’t realize their non disabled privilege. But it’s not all impairment related, she goes into gender presentation and sexuality and the message that our being the way we are isn’t acceptable. This book’s about originality, beauty and flexibility in who we are.

     Alice is disability activism and culture multiplied. She started when she moved to college in San Francisco, Ca. They remodeled a part of the college’s garage for an accessible room. She moved through activism to radio, interviewing, started other movements like “Crip the Vote” and “Access is Love”. Lately, she is editing books of disabled people’s stories. This book is about growing up in a Korean family in the Midwest and is full of drawings and photos.

     And the end of the day, she says she is ready to go to sleep and “appear in someone’s nightmare”.

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