“Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life” Is Hampshire College’s 2024 Common Read

Chosen by the faculty for the 2024–25 academic year, Hampshire’s Common Read is a memoir from Alice Wong, founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project, an online community dedicated to creating, sharing, and amplifying disability media and culture. Wong fights for access and representation for people with disabilities from all backgrounds and in the book uses her unique talent to present an impressionistic scrapbook of her life as an Asian American disabled activist, community organizer, media maker, and dreamer.
 
Published in 2022, Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life is a creatively written memoir that explores disability justice through a variety of writing styles, among them short personal essays, blog posts, podcast interviews, and graphics. Wong deploys a wide range of conceptual frameworks in disability and “crip studies” to consider her intimate connection to technology, the impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the community-building capacities of digital media, and the importance of state-sponsored health insurance programs, such as Medicaid, to expand access to multiple forms of living arrangements for disabled people.
 
Dominant narratives about disability in the United States tend to center on either the “harrowing” realities of living with or the “triumphant” realities of overcoming disability. Wong refuses to duplicate these problematic framings and questions why these types of narratives sell so well. By contrast, her text is filled with joy, community, and an accessible analysis of the social production of disability and the harms an ableist society enacts on disabled people.
 
Furthermore, as a text that deploys an intersectional lens for analysis, Wong considers disabled/abled as not a singular binary but as part of a larger social, political, economic, and epistemological nexus that requires analyses of race/racist systems of power, gender, sexuality/sexual orientation, nation/state of origin, and age. This focus, and the praxis it requires to create a new future for disabled people, makes Year of the Tiger an ideal text for Hampshire College’s Common Read, as it fits well with our anti-racism mission, our transdisciplinary academic structure, and our commitment to studying the urgent challenges of our contemporary and shared social world.

Year of the Tiger is a national bestseller, winner of the Northern California Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, and one of USA Today’s Must-Read Books. Anna Leahy of The Washington Post praised the work: “Memoir will be redefined for many readers by Wong’s candid voice, tenacious spirit and necessary truths.”
 
The Common Read originated as part of the College’s annual orientation program for new students. Each year, a book is selected to be read and discussed together as a community, helping to foster collective learning and interactive dialogues about urgent real-world problems. Students will have several opportunities to discuss the Common Read in their first year at Hampshire, beginning at orientation.
 
Author Photo: Eddie Hernandez Photography.