The book weaves a thread between historic moments in the nation's legal system such as the Brown v. Board of Education US Supreme Court case, literature such as Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior, film such as Flower Drum Song, and conceptual artists such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.
By centering her critique on the myth of the "yellow" woman rather than more politically correct, ameliorative terms such as Asian-American, Cheng hoped to address the painful and unspoken ways in which Asiatic femininity is constructed rather than necessarily claimed.
[5] In a review of the book, scholar Michelle Lee writes, "building on writers such as Mel Chen and Fred Moten, Cheng’s logic of ornamentalism suggests that objectification is no longer the threatening process which removes subjecthood, but rather prioritizes how objects become animated, highlighting how performances of liberation emerge from inorganic, inanimate places.
"[6] In an interview with Shivani Radhakrishnan for BOMB Magazine, Cheng says, "I think there is obviously a very well-developed critique of the ways in which Western modernists have appropriated racial otherness in their aesthetics.
"[7] Taken together, Cheng's works build upon race theorists such as Saidiya Hartman, Gayatri Spivak, Frantz Fanon, and Hortense Spillers to place Asian-American studies firmly within the discussion surrounding racial formation in the United States, as seen in her previous books such as The Melancholy of Race (2001) and critical reviews for the Los Angeles Review of Books that have covered Ghost in the Shell,[8] Crazy Rich Asians,[9] Minari,[10] and Mulan.