Year of the Tiger

Year of the Tiger refuses the linear arc of a heroic memoir. Alice Wong assembles essays, interviews, photographs, commissioned art, lists, conversations, social-media fragments, and political commentary into what she calls an activist’s life. The form makes room for Asian American family history, food and popular culture, disabled embodiment, assistive technology, sexuality, anger, pleasure, and the practical work of producing media from bed. Disability is neither a tragedy to overcome nor a lesson designed to improve nondisabled readers; it is a way of living and knowing within an ableist society.

The book’s feminist force comes from connecting representation to infrastructure. Wong’s work with the Disability Visibility Project demonstrates that having a platform depends on access to technology, attendant care, healthcare, money, time, and networks of trust. She challenges the demand that disabled people be grateful, inspirational, endlessly educational, or available for institutional diversity campaigns. At the same time, her humor and attention to disabled joy resist a politics organized only around damage. Interdependence appears not as personal virtue but as a social fact that exposes the fiction of the independent, productive citizen.

The collage form is intentionally partial and may frustrate readers expecting a comprehensive chronology or a general introduction to disability justice. Wong speaks from a specific Chinese American, queer, disabled, technologically mediated life and repeatedly rejects the idea that one visible activist can represent a heterogeneous community. That refusal is part of the book’s method. For FemRes, Year of the Tiger models self-representation without exceptionalism: it preserves contradiction, pleasure, access needs, and political rage while showing that care is not sentimental charity but expertise, labor, and collective power.