Alice Wong, a writer and disability rights activist who was born with muscular dystrophy and whose independence and writing inspired others, has died. She was 51.
Wong died Friday at a hospital in San Francisco due to an infection, said Sandy Ho, a close friend who has been in touch with Wong’s family.
Ho called her friend a “luminary of the disability justice movement” who wanted to see a world where people with disabilities, especially those of marginalized demographics who were people of color, LGBTQ+ people and immigrants, could live freely and have full autonomy over their lives and decisions.
The daughter of Hong Kong immigrants, Wong writes about her own story – about growing up with a neuromuscular disease, coming into herself and her activism – and about how US policies and systems fail disabled people, queer people, immigrants and people of color. She used a powered wheelchair and an assistive breathing device and described herself as a “disabled cyborg”.
In her 2022 memoir, Year of the Tiger, Wong tells of the discrimination and bullying she faced growing up in Indiana, which sparked her unwavering commitment to dismantling systemic ableism.
Wong founded the Disability Visibility Project in 2014, initially as an oral history project designed to collect the stories of disabled people. She has shared these histories in two books, Disability Visibility and Disability Intimacy.
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