'Year of the Tiger': Memoir
Alice Wong of the Disability Visibility Project tells the story of her activism and her life.
The first time I encountered Alice Wong it was on Twitter, where, as @sfdirewolf, she has more than 73,000 followers. People kept retweeting her into my feed, so eventually I hit the follow button myself to find out more about her. I could have just waited to read her debut memoir, “Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life,” which has become one of my favorite books of 2022.
Wong is the founder and director of Disability Visibility Project, described on its website as “an online community dedicated to creating, sharing, and amplifying disability media and culture.” Her memoir blends essays, opinion pieces, conversations and other work she has done for that cause with chapters about growing up and living with spinal muscular dystrophy.
“Year of the Tiger” is fierce, as when Wong castigates radio for perpetuating ableism by featuring only the voices of those who can speak smoothly, quickly and clearly. It’s sly, as when she appears on comic W. Kamau Bell’s Denzel Washington podcast and matches him joke for joke while they review a movie in which Washington plays a disabled crime investigator. And it’s unapologetic in pointing out that 32 years after the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act, a key component of U.S. civil rights legislation, disabled Americans are still fighting not to be marginalized and erased.
It doesn’t, or shouldn’t, take much thought or imagination for an able-bodied (for now) person to recognize how many barriers exist for disabled people. Wong describes how for her, just going about an ordinary morning — getting out of bed, showering, dressing, eating breakfast, logging onto her computer to start working — requires help at every moment, from both people and technology. (She jokes that she’s a cyborg, due to the various internal and external modifications her body has undergone.)
But who among us hasn’t required help, or doesn’t expect to, at some point? Wong deftly illustrates how accommodations for disabled people add value for all of us. As a graduate student, she told an administrator on her campus that she couldn’t reach elevator buttons for higher floors from her wheelchair. She proposed that the buttons be arranged horizontally as well as vertically. When the new horizontal button panels were installed, they got used not only by people in wheelchairs but also by people who found other passengers standing between them and the vertical panels.
“Year of the Tiger” is a compelling read that helped me think about ableism in ways I haven’t before. Wong tells her story and makes her case with anger, wit, indignation and incisiveness. I’m eager to continue learning from her.