Yellowface

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 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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.