Yellowface

She’s unbelievable. She’s literally unbelievable.

So of course Athena gets every good thing, because that’s how this industry works. Publishing picks a winner—someone attractive enough, someone cool and young and, oh, we’re all thinking it, let’s just say it, “diverse” enough—and lavishes all its money and resources on them. It’s so fucking arbitrary. Or perhaps not arbitrary, but it hinges on factors that have nothing to do with the strength of one’s prose. Athena—a beautiful, Yale-educated, international, ambiguously queer woman of color—has been chosen by the Powers That Be. Meanwhile, I’m just brown-eyed, brown-haired June Hayward, from Philly—no matter how hard I work, or how well I write, I’ll never be Athena Liu.

Though I feel the vicious kind of jealousy, too, watching Athena talk about how much she adores her editor, a literary powerhouse named Marlena Ng who “plucked me from obscurity” and who “just really understands what I’m trying to do on a craft level, you know?” I stare at Athena’s brown eyes, framed by those ridiculously large lashes that make her resemble a Disney forest animal, and I wonder, What is it like to be you? What is it like to be so impossibly perfect, to have every good thing in the world? And maybe it’s the cocktails, or my overactive writer’s imagination, but I feel this hot coiling in my stomach, a bizarre urge to stick my fingers in her berry-red-painted mouth and rip her face apart, to neatly peel her skin off her body like an orange and zip it up over myself.

I suffer through half an hour of the wake before I make up an excuse to leave—I can only take so much pungent Chinese food and old people who can’t or won’t speak English. Mrs. Liu presses against me, sniffling, as I say my goodbyes. She makes me promise to keep in touch, to let her know how I’m doing. Her tear-smudged mascara leaves clumpy stains on my velvet blouse that won’t come out, even after half a dozen washes, so eventually I throw the whole outfit away altogether.

Fine. Here’s how I really felt, when things came down to it.

At Yale, I once dated a graduate student from the philosophy department who did population ethics. […] Some of his arguments were a little extreme—he didn’t think, for instance, that there is any moral obligation to follow wills of the deceased if there is an overriding interest in redistributing wealth elsewhere, or that there are strong moral objections to using cemetery grounds for, say, housing for the poor. The general theme of his research was under what circumstances someone counts as a moral agent that deserves consideration. I didn’t understand much of his work, but his central argument was quite compelling: we owe nothing to the dead.

Especially when the dead are thieves and liars, too.

And fuck it, I’ll just say it: taking Athena’s manuscript felt like reparations, payback for the things that Athena took from me.

We soften the language. We take out all references to “Chinks” and “Coolies.” Perhaps you meant this as subversive, writes Daniella in the comments, but in this day and age, there’s no need for such discriminatory language. We don’t want to trigger readers.

We also soften some of the white characters. No, it’s not as bad as you think. Athena’s original text is almost embarrassingly biased; the French and British soldiers are cartoonishly racist. I get she’s trying to make a point about discrimination within the Allied front, but these scenes are so hackneyed that they defy belief. It throws the reader out of the story. Instead we switch one of the white bullies to a Chinese character, and one of the more vocal Chinese laborers to a sympathetic white farmer. This adds to the complexity, the humanistic nuance that perhaps Athena was too close to the project to see.

“My debut, Over the Sycamore, written as June Hayward, was rooted in my grief over my father’s death,” I write. “The Last Front, written as Juniper Song, symbolizes a step forward in my creative journey. This is what I love most about writing—it offers us endless opportunities to reinvent ourselves, and the stories we tell about ourselves. It lets us acknowledge every aspect of our heritage and history.”

I never lied. That’s important. I never pretended to be Chinese, or made up experiences that I didn’t have. It’s not fraud, what we’re doing. We’re just suggesting the right credentials, so that readers take me and my story seriously, so that nobody refuses to pick up my work because of some outdated preconceptions about who can write what. And if anyone makes assumptions, or connects the dots the wrong way, doesn’t that say far more about them than me?

I have to steel myself before I walk through the doors. My publisher for Over the Sycamore set up a “multi-city” bookstore tour for me, but each store I visited never had an audience of more than ten people. And it is painful, truly painful, to struggle through a reading and Q&A when people keep leaving in the middle of your sentences. It’s even worse when the store manager hovers and makes awkward small talk about how it’s probably because it’s the holidays, and people are busy shopping, and they didn’t have quite enough time to advertise that the attendance numbers were so low. After the second stop I wanted to call it quits, but it’s more humiliating to cancel a book tour altogether than to struggle through it, minute by minute, your heart sinking the entire time as you realize your irrelevance, your foolishness to ever hope.

“That’s precisely my approach,” Heidi exclaims. “I look for the gaps in history, the stuff no one else is talking about. That’s why I wrote an epic fantasy romance about a businessman and a Mongolian huntress. Eagle Girl. It’s out next year. I’ll have Daniella send you a copy. It’s so important to think about what perspectives aren’t embraced by Anglophone readers, you know? We must make space for the subaltern voices, the suppressed narratives.”

“Right,” I say. I’m a little surprised Heidi knows the word “subaltern.” “And without us, these stories wouldn’t get told.”

“Precisely. Precisely.”

Let them scream in their own echo chambers, writes Jen. Performing outrage is a bonding activity for them. Gives them serotonin hits, literally, there’s research on this. Don’t let it get to you.

That’s good advice, if only I had the mental fortitude to not care so much about what people think of me. I keep reading through Goodreads tirades, vicious tweet threads, and condescending Reddit posts. I keep clicking on negative articles when they show up in my Google Alerts, even when the title promises nothing but self-righteous vehemence.

I can’t help it. I need to know what the world is saying about me. I need to sketch out the contours of my digitally perceived self, because at least if I know the extent of the damage then I’ll know how much I should be worried.

“Hi,” she says, and her voice wavers for a moment. She’s not used to picking fights in front of a live audience. “I’m Chinese American, and when I read The Last Front, I thought … I mean, I found a lot of deeply painful histories. And I wanted to ask you, why do you think it’s okay for white author—I mean, an author who isn’t Chinese—to write, and profit from, this kind of story? Why do you think you’re the right person to tell it?”

She lowers the mic. Her cheeks are flushed. She’s gotten a big rush from this. No doubt she thinks that this is some grand public callout, that this is the first time I’ve heard this objection. […]

But I’ve prepared this answer. I’ve been preparing this answer since I started writing the book.

“I think it’s very dangerous to start censoring what authors should and shouldn’t write […]”

I thought this was a joke at first. […] Or that perhaps, hopefully, we’d spend a few minutes here while she saw whatever she wanted to see and then remove ourselves to a cool, air-conditioned bar where we could sip fruity drinks and talk about, you know, life and publishing. But it was quickly apparent Athena wanted to linger here all afternoon. She would stand for ten minutes in front of each life-sized, black-and-white cutout, whispering under her breath as she read about the subject’s life story. Then she would touch her fingers to her lips, sigh, and shake her head. Once I even saw her wipe a tear from her eye.

“Imagine,” she kept murmuring. “All those lives lost. All that suffering for a cause that they didn’t even know if they believed in, just because their government was convinced domino theory was true. My God.”

People make up absurd rumors about me. Someone says that my past reviews on Goodreads are racist. (All I did was write once that I couldn’t relate to an Indian writer’s romance novel, because all the characters were unlikeable and way too obsessed with their family duties to the point of disbelief.) Someone says that I regularly harass and bully people who criticize my work. (I put out a snide subtweet about a particularly dumb review of Over the Sycamore, once, and that was three years ago!) Someone claims that I once hit on them at a convention by “complimenting their skin in a very racist way.” (All I said was that their red dress really brought out the yellow undertones in their skin. Jesus, I was just being nice. I didn’t even like the dress that much.)

But Twitter is real life; it’s realer than real life because that is the realm that the social economy of publishing exists on, because the industry has no alternative. Offline, writers are all faceless, hypothetical creatures pounding out words in isolation from one another. You can’t peek over anyone’s shoulder. You can’t tell if everyone else is really doing as dandy as they pretend they are. But online, you can tune into all the hot gossip, even if you’re not nearly important enough to have a seat in the room where it happens. Online, you can tell Stephen King to go fuck himself. Online, you can discover that the current literary star of the moment is actually so problematic that all of her works should be cancelled, forever. Reputations in publishing are built and destroyed, constantly, online.

But, my God, I want to be back in the spotlight.

You enjoy this delightful waterfall of attention when your book is the latest breakout success. You dominate the cultural conversation. You possess the literary equivalent of the hot hand. Everyone wants to interview you. Everyone wants you to blurb their book, or host their launch event. Everything you say matters. If you utter a hot take about the writing process, about other books, or even about life itself, people take your word as gospel. If you recommend a book on social media, people actually drive out that day and go buy it.

But your time in the spotlight never lasts. I’ve seen people who were massive bestsellers not even six years ago, sitting alone and forlorn at neglected signing tables while lines stretched around the corner for their younger, hotter peers.

I’ve put on a stiff upper lip in public, but Geoff’s Twitter antics rattled me more than I let on. Athena Liu’s Ghost. A grotesque choice of name; surely chosen to surprise and provoke, but there’s more truth to it than even Geoff knows. Athena’s ghost has anchored itself to me; it hovers over my shoulder, whispering in my ear every waking moment of the day.

It's maddening. These days I’ve started dreading the thought of trying to write, because I can’t write without thinking of her. Then, of course, my thoughts inevitably spiral beyond the writing to the memories: the final night, the pancakes, the gurgling sounds she made as she thrashed against the floor.

I thought I’d gotten over her death. I was doing so well mentally. I was in a good space. I was fine.

Until she returned.

But isn’t that what ghosts do?

I try to focus on the positives. I can find some good narrative potential here, if I pay attention. Maybe this is the heartwarming story of a Chinatown restaurant going out of business, until the owner’s daughter quits her soulless corporate job to turn the family business around with the help of the community, social media, and a magic, talking dragon. Maybe I can give my bitchy waitress a sympathetic backstory and a personality makeover. Or maybe not. The more I think about it, the more this sounds like the plots of Ratatouille and Mulan combined.

Stop looking through the white gaze, I caution myself. I can’t make up stories about these people without knowing a thing about them. I have to talk to the locals. Make friends, understand where they’re coming from, learn the quirky details that only Chinese Americans could know.

I used to think mean teachers were a special kind of monster, but it turns out that cruelty comes naturally. Also, it’s fun. Teenagers, after all, are unformed identities with undeveloped brains. No matter how clever they are, they still don’t know much about anything, and it’s easy to embarrass them for their ill-prepared remarks.

Skylar gets the worst of it. Technically her story—a whodunnit set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, in which none of the witnesses will cooperate with the police because they have their own secrets and codes of honor—is not bad. […] Still, her inexperience shows. Skylar’s exposition is clumsy in parts, she makes use of quite a few contrived coincidences […] and she hasn’t figured out how to toe the line between tense and histrionic dialogue.

I could gently correct these tendencies while encouraging Skylar to think up the solutions herself.

But enter professional publishing, and suddenly writing is a matter of professional jealousies, obscure marketing budgets, and advances that don’t measure up to those of your peers. Editors go in and mess around with your words, your vision. Marketing and publicity make you distill hundreds of pages of careful, nuanced reflection into cute, tweet-size talking points. Readers inflict their own expectations, not just on the story, but on your politics, your philosophy, your stance on all things ethical. You, not your writing, become the product […]

And once you’re writing for the market, it doesn’t matter what stories are burning inside you. It matters what audiences want to see, and no one cares about the inner musings of a plain, straight, white girl from Philly. They want the new and exotic, the diverse, and if I want to stay afloat, that’s what I have to give them.

Dad played the guitar during his time off; he understood. A musician needs to be heard; a writer needs to be read. I want to move people’s hearts. I want my books in stores all over the world. I couldn’t stand to be like Mom and Rory, living their little and self-contained lives, with no great projects or prospects to propel them from one chapter to the next. I want the world to wait with bated breath for what I will say next. I want my words to last forever. I want to be eternal, permanent; when I’m gone, I want to leave behind a mountain of pages that scream, Juniper Song was here, and she told us what was on her mind.

I’ve entertained, occasionally, the question of what literary redemption might look like. What if I begged my haters for forgiveness? What if, instead of holding the line, I admitted everything and just made an attempt at reparations?

Diana Qiu has an article up on Medium titled “June Hayward Must Make Amends, and Here’s How.” The twelve-item laundry list includes things like: “Provide public proof she’s taken a training course in racial sensitivity,” “Donate the entirety of her earnings from The Last Front and Mother Witch to a charity selected by an objective committee of Asian American writers,” and “Post her tax returns from the last three years to confirm how much she profited from Athena Liu’s work.”

Tax returns. Is she fucking serious? Who does Diana think she is?

I can stand to be a pariah. But […] to kowtow to the Twitterati and prostrate myself before the taunting, smug crowd—I would rather die.

But as I dig into the past, I find myself lingering on good memories, too. There are more of them than I realized. I haven’t let myself dwell on college for so long, but once I scratch the surface, it all comes bubbling to the fore. Starbucks every Tuesday after our Women in Victorian Lit seminar […] Nights at slam poetry events during which we’d sipped ginger beers and giggled at the performers, who were not real poets, and who would one day certainly grow out of this nonsense. A Les Mis sing-along party at a drama major’s apartment […]

As I transcribe all of this, I wonder if our friendship had indeed been as strained as I’d perceived it. Was that jealous tension always there? Were we rivals from the start? Or had I, in the throes of my insecurity, projected it all against Athena?

It’s hard for me to really feel sorry for Geoff. This is, after all, the same man who once threatened to leak nudes of Athena on Reddit if she didn’t back him up against a Locus reviewer. But I can see the truth in his eyes, the pain. Athena always thought that what she did was a gift. A distillation of trauma into something eternal. Give me your bruises and hurts, she told us, and I will return to you a diamond. Only she never cared that once the art was made, once the personal became spectacle, the pain was still there.

But the normal methods of dispelling ghosts, the ones that worked in all the stories, seem insufficient. I doubt Athena will be happy with offerings of food, incense, or burnt paper. Which isn’t to say I don’t try. Deep down I know its stupid, but I’m desperate enough to hope the rituals might at least calm my mind. I order incense sticks on Amazon and kung pao chicken from Kitchen No. 1 and place both before a framed photo of Athena, but all it does is stink up my apartment. I print paper cutouts of the things I imagine Athena could want in the underworld—stacks of money, a lavish apartment, the entire IKEA catalogue—and light them up with a match, but that only sets off the fire alarm, which pisses off my neighbors and lands me with a hefty fine.

Candice’s voice hardens. “Do you know what it’s like to pitch a book and be told they already have an Asian writer? That they can’t put out two minority stories in the same season? That Athena Liu already exists, so you’re redundant? This industry is built on silencing us, stomping us to the ground, and hurling money at white people to produce racist stereotypes of us.

“You’re right, though. Every so often someone in this industry develops a conscience and gives a nonwhite creator a chance, and then the whole carnival rallies around their book like it’s the only diverse work ever to exist. I’ve been on the other side. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve been in the room when we pick our one spicy book of the season, when we decide who’s educated and articulate and attractive but marginalized enough to make good on our marketing budget.”

The truth is fluid. There is always another way to spin the story, another wrench to throw into the narrative. I have learned this now, if nothing else. Candice may have won this round, but I won’t let her erase my voice. I will tell our audience what they ought to believe. I will undermine all of her assertions, ascribe new motivations, and alter the sequence of events. I will present a new account that is compelling precisely because it aligns with what our audience, deep down, really wants to believe: that I have done no wrong, and that this is, once again, an instance of nasty, selfish, overdemanding people fabricating a tale of racism where there isn’t one. This is cancel culture gone deadly. Look at my cast. Look at my hospital bills.