Yellowface Rf Kuang Quotes

Reading lets us live in someone else’s shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller.

Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic

Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic. Writing is creating something out of nothing, is opening doors to other lands. Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much.

Reading should be an enjoyable experience, not a chore.

Not every girl has a rape story. But almost every girl has an “I’m not sure, I didn’t like it, but I can’t quite call it rape” story.

But the best revenge is to thrive.

What more can we want as writers than such immortality? Don't ghosts just want to be remembered?

Awards don’t matter—at least, I am told this constantly by the people who regularly win them.

This industry is built on silencing us, stomping us into the ground, and hurling money at white people to produce racist stereotypes of us.

It's like pressing a bleeding sore repeatedly, trying to see how far you can go with your tolerance for pain, because if you know the limits of it, you gain some sense of control over it.

The truth is fluid, there is always another way to spin the story.

The cultural constructions are clear: so many Chinese ghosts are hungry, angry, voiceless women. In taking Athena's legacy, I've added one to their ranks.

Every writer I know feels this way about someone else. Writing is such a solitary activity. You have no assurance that what you’re creating has any value, and any indication that you’re behind in the rat race sends you spiraling into the pits of despair. Keep your eyes on your own paper, they say. But that’s hard to do when everyone else’s papers are flapping constantly in your face.

Life is so short. Why do we build up these walls?

Who has the right to write about suffering?

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.

It’s hard, after all, to be friends with someone who outshines you at every turn.

I need to create. It is a physical urge, a craving, like breathing, like eating; when it’s going well, it’s better than sex, and when it’s not, I can’t take pleasure in anything else.

which is why revulsion for Rupi Kaur’s poetry has become a millennial personality trait.

Every time she tried to branch out to new projects, they kept insisting that Asian was her brand, was what her audience expected. They never let her talk about anything other than being an immigrant, other than the fact that half her family died in Cambodia, that her dad killed himself on the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen. Racial trauma sells, right? They treated her like a museum

I wonder if that’s the final, obscure part of how publishing works: if the books that become big do so because at some point everyone decided, for no good reason at all, that this would be the title of the moment.

For the first time since I submitted the manuscript, I feel a deep wash of shame. This isn’t my history, my heritage. This isn’t my community. I am an outsider, basking in their love under false pretenses. It should be Athena sitting here, smiling with these people, signing books and listening to the stories of her elders.

Most of the accounts that participate so clearly do not care about the truth. They’re here for the entertainment. These people love to have a target, and they’ll tear apart anything you put in front of them.

Maybe it was Highlander Syndrome—I’ve read about that before, the way members of marginalized groups feel threatened if someone else like them starts finding success.

I would have liked Allie better if she were a shy, bookish type I could have taken on shopping sprees at indie bookstores instead of an iPhone-addicted, TikTok-obsessed basic bitch in training.

(I thought about posting a phone screenshot of my statement drafted in the Notes app, but Notes app apologies have become a genre in and of themselves, and not a very respectable one.)

Reading let's us live in someone else's stories. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller.

But that's what I need right now: a child's blind faith that the world is so simple, and that if I didn't mean to do a bad thing, then none of this is my fault.

I've written myself into a corner. The first two-thirds of the book were a breeze to compose, but what do I do with the ending? Where do I leave my protagonist, now that there's a hungry ghost in the mix, and no clear resolution?

Publishing gossip, it turns out, is a lot of fun when you’re speculating about other people’s misfortune.

I dub historical exploitation novels: inauthentic stories that use troubled pasts as an entertaining set piece for white entertainment.

and who thought that Asian identification boiled down to being annoyingly obsessed with bubble tea and BTS were diluting the radical force of the diaspora canon.

Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic. Writing is creating something out of nothing, is opening doors to other lands. Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much. To stop writing would kill me. I'd never be able to walk through a bookstore without fingering the spines with longing, wondering at the lengthy editorial process that got these titles on shelves and reminiscing about my own. And I'd spend the rest of life curdling with jealousy every time someone like Emmy Cho gets a book deal, every time I learn that some young up-and-comer is living the life I should be living. Writing has formed the core of my identity since I was a child. After Dad died, after Mom withdrew into herself, and after Rory decided to forge a life without me, writing gave me a reason to stay alive. And as miserable as it makes me, I'll cling to that magic for as long as I live.

This is what I love 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.

But now, I see, author efforts have nothing to do with a book’s success. Bestsellers are chosen. Nothing you do matters. You just get to enjoy the perks along the way.

I’m a work of art. All construct. I’m Athena Del Rey.

Two wrongs don't make a right, obviously, but the internet is very bad at recognizing this.

We have one of those skin-deep friendships where you manage to spend a lot of time together without really getting to know the other person.

She’s using the pen name Juniper Song to pretend to be Chinese American. She’s taken new author photos to look more tan and ethnic, but she’s as white as they come. June Hayward, you are a thief and a liar. You’ve stolen my legacy, and now you spit on my grave.

We must make space for the subaltern voices, the suppressed narratives.

personality makeover. Or maybe not. The more I think about it, the more this sounds like the plots of Ratatouille and Mulan combined.

Since the most annoying symptom of anxiety is refusing to believe the obvious and rational explanation

But isn't that what ghosts do? Howl, moan, make themselves into spectacles? That's the whole point of a ghost, is it not? Anything to remind you that they're still there. Anything to keep you from forgetting.

I’ve labored for years to learn my craft. Perhaps the core idea of this novel wasn’t mine, but I’m the one who rescued it, who freed the diamond from the rough.

Don't we all want a friend who won't ever challenge our superiority, because they already know it's a lost cause? Don't we all need someone we can treat as a punching bag?

I don't need to impress him. I'm impressive enough as is.

It’s about wishing you knew who your parents were. It’s about needing things from your parents you’ll never get.

I want what Stephen King has, what Neil Gaiman has. Why not a movie deal? Why not Hollywood stardom? Why not a multimedia empire? Why not the world?

We should do this more,” she keeps saying. “Junie, honestly, how have we never done this before?” “I don’t know,” I say, and then in an attempt to be deep, “Maybe we were afraid of how much we’d like each other.

It all reeks of desperation, but I can't look away. It's the only thing linking me to the only world I have any interest in being at part of.

The night I watch Athena Liu die, we’re celebrating her TV deal with Netflix. And this will become, in time, my story once again.

My refuge was books, when I didn't like the world around me. I would read

People always describe jealousy as this sharp, green, venomous thing. Unfounded, vinegary, mean-spirited. But I’ve found that jealousy, to writers, feels more like fear. Jealousy is the spike in my heart rate when I glimpse news of Athena’s success on Twitter—another book contract, awards nominations, special editions, foreign rights deals. Jealousy is constantly comparing myself to her and coming up short; is panicking that I’m not writing well enough or fast enough, that I am not, and never will be, enough. Jealousy means that even just learning that Athena’s signing a six- figure option deal with Netflix means that I’ll be derailed for days, unable to focus on my own work, mired by shame and self-disgust every time I see one of her books in a bookstore display.

But I can't quit the one thing that gives meaning to my life. Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic. Writing is creating something out of nothing, is opening doors to other lands. Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much. To stop writing would kill me.

Athena never personally experienced suffering. She just got rich from it.

writing is fundamentally an exercise in empathy. Reading lets us live in someone else’s shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller.

Neither of my parents are, um, Asian.” I want to die. I want to open the car door and roll out onto the highway and be obliterated by oncoming traffic.

If the French like you, then you're doing something very wrong.

I don't create so much as I collect,' explained the poet. 'The world is already so rich. All I do is distill the messiness of human life into a concentrated reading experience.

And they don’t get that film is a totally different medium, and requires different storytelling skills,” says Justin. “It’s a translation, really. And translation across mediums is inherently unfaithful to some extent. Roland Barthes. An act of translation is an act of betrayal.

I can't ignore the damage. I have to track the exact trajectory of the hurricane, because knowing the precise moment it'll hit and where will make things hurt less. At least, my brain is convinced this is so.

Okay, yes, I know how bad this looks. Like Taylor Swift, I had no intention of becoming a white supremacist Barbie. Obviously I'm not a Trumper—I voted for Biden! But if these people are hurling money at me, is it wrong of me to accept? Should we not celebrate scamming cash from racist rednecks whenever we get the chance?

that’s the fate of a storyteller. We become nodal points for the grotesque. We are the ones who say, “Look!” while everyone peeks through their eyes, unable to confront darkness in full force. We articulate what no one else can even parse. We give a name to the unthinkable.

So that night it’s only Athena and me at a loud, overpriced rooftop bar in Georgetown. She’s flinging back cocktails like she has a duty to prove she’s having a good time, and I’m drinking to dull the bitch in me that wishes she were dead.

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 or 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 don’t have yellow fever. I’m not one of those creepy dudes who write exclusively about Japanese folklore and wear kimonos and pronounce every loan word from Asian languages with a deliberate, constructed accent. Matcha. Otaku. I’m not obsessed with stealing Asian culture—I mean, before The Last Front, I had no interest in modern Chinese history whatsoever.

Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much.

She couldn’t show that pain to anyone else until she’d perfected the way she wanted to tell it, until she had complete control over the narrative.

But I’ve no clue what I have to offer her—I don’t possess anywhere near the clout, the popularity, or the connections to make the time she spends with me worthwhile.

Mrs. Liu is gorgeous. It’s true what they say —Asian women don’t age. She must be in her mid fifties by now, but she doesn’t look a day over thirty.

There are no Cinderella stories - just hard work, tenacity, and repeat attempts at the golden ticket.

Reading lets us live in someone else's shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller.

Watching someone warp your image and tell your story however they choose, knowing you have no power to stop it? No voice? That's how we all felt, watching you. Pretty awful, huh?

Every time I see Tom, I wonder what it would be like to go through life with the easy contentment of a rock.

She was mortal after all, they're thinking. She was just like us. And in destroying her, we create an audience; we create moral authority for ourselves.

The original draft made you feel dumb, alienated at times, and frustrated with the self-righteousness of it all. It stank of all the most annoying things about Athena. The new version is a universally relatable story, a story that anyone can see themselves in.

I’m trying to funnel this awfulness into something lovely. My salacious roman à clef will become a horror novel. My terror will become my readers’ terror. I will take my fugue state of delirious panic and compost it into a fertile bed of creativity—for aren’t all the best novels borne from some madness, which is borne from truth?

I sometimes wonder how my work would be received if I pretended to be a man, or a white woman. The text could be exactly the same, but one might be a critical bomb and the other a resounding success. Why is that?

We screamed back and forth a little more, relishing the other's presence at the other end of the line, for it was so nice to know someone who understood this exact dream, who knew how mere words can become sentences can become a completed masterpiece, how that masterpiece can rocket you into a wholly unrecognizable world where you have everything - a world you wrote for yourself.

It will surely become one of the most talked-about books in the industry, and when it does, my name will be ruined forever. I will always be the writer who stole Athena Liu’s legacy. The psycho, jealous, racist white woman who stole the Asian girl’s work.

we owe nothing to the dead. Especially when the dead are thieves and liars, too.

reading discourse about myself is like prodding at a sore tooth. I’m compelled to keep digging, just to see how far the rot goes.

I felt, as Kanye put it, harder, better, faster, and stronger. I felt like the kind of person who now listened to Kanye.

It’s not like I took a painting and passed it off as my own. I inherited a sketch, with colors added only in uneven patches, and finished it according to the style of the original.

I’m amazed by how good I look, especially in the photos we took outside. During golden hour I come off as nicely tanned, which makes me look sort of racially ambiguous.

Florence Pugh will play me. That girl from Crazy Rich Asians will play Athena.

Alt-right free-speech proponents have made me their cause célèbre. I and my pretty, Anglo-Saxon face have become the perfect victim of the left-wing fascist cancel-culture mob.

If publishing is rigged, you might as well make sure it’s rigged in your favor.

Most authors are pickier about killing their darlings.

But that’s what I need right now: a child’s blind faith that the world is so simple, and that if I didn’t mean to do a bad thing, then none of this is my fault.

I am, in fact, rather astounded by my mental resilience.

The words burn like coals inside my chest, fueling me, and I must pour them all out at once before they consume me.

I don’t create so much as I collect,” explained the poet. “The world is already so rich. All I do is distill the messiness of human life into a concentrated reading experience.

You are so wonderfully easy to work with. Most authors are pickier about killing their darlings.

That museum visit was disturbing, but it didn’t surprise me. I’d seen Athena steal before. She probably didn’t even think of it as theft.

I feel like a meme of a clueless white person. The wildest thing about all this is that even now I cannot stop composing. I'm trying to funnel this awfulness into something lovely. My salacious roman à clef will become a horror novel. My terror will become my readers' terror. I will take my fugue state of delirious panic and compost it into a fertile bed of creativity — for aren't all the best novels borne from some madness, which is borne from truth? Perhaps, if I can capture all my fears and constrain them safely on the page, this will rob them of their power. Don't all the ancient myths tell us that we gain control over a thing once we name it?

When you’re in the zone, drafting doesn’t feel like an effortful artifice. It feels like remembering, like putting down in written form something that has been locked inside you all along.

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.

But in recent years, I’ve developed another theory, which is that everyone else finds her as unbearable as I do. It’s hard, after all, to be friends with someone who outshines you at every turn.

Writing isn't the whole world, Junie. And there's plenty of careers that won't give you such constant heartbreak. That's all I'm saying." But writing is the whole world. How can I explain this to her?

Have you ever wondered the mechanics of popularization? How does someone go from being a real person, someone you actually knew, to a set of marketing and publicity points, consumed and lauded by fans who think they know them, but don't really, but understand this also, and celebrate them regardless?

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.

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’ve torn that from her. I’ve denied a mother her daughter’s final words. If I tell her the truth now, Mrs. Liu will at least get those words back. She’ll see the effort that occupied the last years of Athena’s life.

It’s going to be fine,” he says. “These things always feel like the end of the world when they’re happening. But they’re not. Social media is such a tiny, insular space. Once you close your screen, no one gives a fuck. And you shouldn’t, either, all right?

I don’t know,” I murmur. “Honestly, Mr. Lee, I don’t know if I was the right person to tell this story.” He clasps my hands tighter. His face is so kind, it makes me feel rotten. “You are exactly right,” he says. “We need you. My English, it is not so good. Your generation has very good English. You can tell them our story. Make sure they remember us.” He nods, determined. “Yes. Make sure they remember us.

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 mean 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 the complexity, the humanistic nuance that perhaps Athena was too close to the project to see.

God, I miss my high school days, when I could flip my notebook open to an empty page and see possibility instead of frustration. When I took real pleasure in stringing words and sentences together just to see how they sounded. When writing was an act of sheer imagination, of taking myself away somewhere else, of creating something that was only for me.

leave behind a mountain of pages that scream, Juniper Song was here, and she told us what was on her mind.

THE BEST WAY TO HIDE A LIE IS IN PLAIN SIGHT.

now, I see, author efforts have nothing to do with a book’s success. Bestsellers are chosen. Nothing you do matters. You just get to enjoy the perks along the way.

Okay, yes, I know how bad this looks. Like Taylor Swift, I had no intention of becoming a white supremacist Barbie.

And I'm drinking to dull the bitch in me that wishes she were dead.

Until I couldn't tell anymore where my stories ended and theirs began.

Don’t we all want a friend who won’t ever challenge our superiority, because they already know it’s a lost cause? Don’t we all need someone we can treat as a punching bag?

It's a translation, really. And translation across medium is inherently unfaithful to some extente. Roland Barthes. An act of translation is an act of betrayal.

I am innocent in the court of public opinion. And at least for now, Athena’s ghost has been banished.

Maybe we were afraid of how much we’d like each other.

My mouth works, but nothing comes out. What is she doing here? Didn’t she move to Bumfuck, Nowhere, Oregon? And since when did Candice know Athena?

I’ll confess, I’m enjoying this a bit. It feels good to know that someone out there also knows as well as I do that Athena was a thief.

believe

We have one of those skin-deep friendships where you manage to spend a lot of time together without really getting to know the other person

He’s one of those assholes who leaves read receipts on.

I’ve wondered, before, how authors who were canceled—and I mean canceled for good reasons, like sexual harassment or using racial slurs—felt after they were iced out of publishing.

what is an author without an audience

And for all the work I put into it, all those hours of effort—why shouldn’t it be my name on the title?

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.

especially since it was an indie publisher instead of one of the Big Five—HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan.

But who’s going to follow all of that? It’s hard to sympathize with the stakes in the absence of a main character.

yellowface,

They slouch casually like they don’t care how they’re perceived, but I can tell how badly they want to impress me.

They’ve got the classic fledgling talent mentality—they know they’re good, or could be good, but they crave acknowledgment of this fact, and they’re terrified of rejection.

A well-phrased barb right now could irreparably destroy their confidence. But the right words of encouragement could help them fly.

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,

Saying this out loud makes me want to cry. I hadn’t realized how much this terrified me: being unknown, being forgotten.

A musician needs to be heard; a writer needs to be read. I want to move people’s hearts.

I want the world to wait with bated breath for what I will say next. I want my words to last forever.

I had this sudden fear that she would interrogate me, or accuse me of killing her daughter—but instead she kept apologizing, as if Athena had been very rude to die in my presence.

I am the victim of a dreadful hoax.

My only sin is loving literature too much, and refusing to let Athena’s very prenatal work go to waste.

They call The Last Front a “white savior story.” They don’t like that I’ve shown valor and bravery by white soldiers and missionaries; they think it centers the white experience. (But those men did exist. One missionary, Robert Haden, drowned trying to save a Chinese man when the steamship Athos was torpedoed by German submarines. Doesn’t his death matter, too?)

My book even gets chosen for a national book club run by a pretty white Republican woman who is mostly famous for being the daughter of a prominent Republican politician, and this gives me some moral discomfort, but then I figure that if the book club reader base is largely Republican white women, then wouldn’t it be good for a novel to broaden their worldviews?

Someone else tweets a photo of me taken off my Instagram paired with a photo of Scarlett Johansson, captioned: Corporate wants you to find the differences between these two images LMAO.

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.

MEANWHILE, I DO MY DUE DILIGENCE. I research. I read every single one of the sources that Athena cited in her draft, until I’m as much an expert on the Chinese Labour Corps as anyone can be.

She used to write as June Hayward, tweets a user named reyl089. But she published her book about China as June Song. Fucked up, right? The literal definition of yellowface, writes one reply.

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.

Most authors would confess they hear an inner editor, an internal naysayer that hampers and nitpicks their attempts at first drafts. Mine has taken the form of Athena. Haughtily she peruses and dismisses every story idea I attempt: "too trite", "too formulaic", "too white". She's even harsher at the sentence level: "the rhythm's off", "that imagery doesn't work", "seriously, another em dash?

I bask in imagining my critics’ crestfallen faces as they realize that simply being Asian doesn’t make them historical experts, that consanguinity doesn’t translate into unique epistemological insight, that their exclusive cultural snobbishness and authenticity testing are only a form of gatekeeping, and that when it all comes down to it, they haven’t a fucking clue what they’re talking about.

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 canceled forever. Reputations in publishing are built and destroyed constantly online.

Ever since The Last Front came out, I have been victim to people like Candice and Diana and Adele: people who think that, just because they’re “oppressed” and “marginalized,” they can do or say whatever they want.

Uninspired colonizer trash, one reads. Another iteration of the white woman exploitation sob story formula: copy, paste, change the names, and voila, bestseller, reads another. And a third, which seems way too personal to be objective: What a stuck-up, obnoxious bitch. Brags too much about being a Yalie. I got this during a Kindle sale, and you can bet I made sure to get every one of the two hundred and ninety-nine cents I spent back.

When I took real pleasure in stringing words and sentences together just to see how they sounded. When writing was an act of sheer imagination, of taking myself away somewhere else, of creating something that was only for me.

I bask for a moment, imagining what kind of chaos I’ve sown over at Eden’s office this morning. And though I would never say this out loud about a fellow woman—the industry is tough enough as it is—I hope I got that bitch fired.

Her lack of formality strikes me as rather unprofessional. I rankle a bit that Susan’s acting like she’s picking her daughter up from school instead of chauffeuring an acclaimed guest. But no, no, that’s my own bias coming through.

So I simply must continue to live with this ghost, to grow accustomed to her face lingering on the backs of my eyelids. We must find some other equilibrium of coexistence that does not involve my giving her the only thing she wants.

How does someone go from being a real person, someone you actually knew, to a set of marketing and publicity points, consumed and lauded by fans who think they know them, but don’t really, but understand this also, and celebrate them regardless?

Can’t you understand what it was like?” I beg. “Even a little bit? Athena had fucking everything. It wasn’t fair—” “Is that how you justify it?” “But it’s true, isn’t it? Athena had it made. You people—I mean, diverse people—you’re all they want—

It was a heated workshop,” I say. “Skylar Zhao is a talented writer, but she doesn’t know how to take criticism. I wonder, actually, if this is the first time she’s had to confront the fact that her writing isn’t as wonderful as she thinks it is.

Feels bad, doesn’t it?” Candice drops the recorder in her backpack. “Watching someone warp your image and tell your story however they choose, knowing you have no power to stop it? No voice? That’s how we all felt, watching you. Pretty awful, huh?

People always describe jealousy as this sharp, green, venomous thing. Unfounded, vinegary, mean-spirited. But I’ve found that jealousy, to writers, feels more like fear. Jealousy is the spike in my heart rate when I glimpse news of Athena’s success on Twitter—another book contract, awards nominations, special editions, foreign rights deals. Jealousy is constantly comparing myself to her and coming up short; is panicking that I’m not writing well enough or fast enough, that I am not, and never will be, enough.

Brett proposes that perhaps, instead of bringing in an outsider, we can have Candice do the sensitivity read instead. Candice responds curtly that she is Korean American, not Chinese American, and that Brett’s assumption otherwise is a racist microaggression.

I once read somewhere that Asian people are so polite because they have this cultural concept of letting each other save face. They might be judging the shit out of you on the inside, but on the outside, at least, they’ll let you walk away with your pride intact.

Many beloved titles are IP,” says Brett. “It’s just not common knowledge that they are. And anyways, it wouldn’t be a permanent career move, just something to help you get over this slump. It seems like you might do better if you have . . . some preexisting scaffold.

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—and no matter how hard I work, or how well I write, I’ll never be Athena Liu.

I do consider suicide. In the later hours of the night, when the ongoing press of time feels like too much, I find myself researching carbon monoxide and razor blades. In theory, it seems like an easy way to escape this suffocating dark. At least it would make my haters feel terrible. Look at what you did. Look what you drove her to. Aren’t you ashamed? Don’t you wish you could take it all back? But it all seems like so much trouble, and despair as I might, I can’t make peace with the idea that I will depart from the world without so much as a final word.

Instead I have to face them head-on. I’ll write about us. Well, no—a fictionalized version of us, a pseudo-autobiography in which I blur fact and fiction. I’ll describe the night she died in all its heart-stopping, lurid detail. I’ll describe how I stole her work and published it.

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 the complexity, the humanistic nuance that perhaps Athena was too close to the project to see.

AFTER THAT, I ASK EMILY TO DECLINE MOST EVENT INVITATIONS on my behalf. I’m done with schools, bookstores, and book clubs. I’m selling at the level where personal appearances aren’t going to move the needle on sales, so I don’t need to keep exposing myself as bait for further controversy.

The hardest part is keeping track of all the characters. We change almost a dozen names to reduce confusion. Two different characters have the last name Zhang, and four have the last name Li. Athena differentiates them by giving them different first names, which she only occasionally uses, and other names that I assume are nicknames (A Geng, A Zhu; unless A is a last name and I’m missing something), or Da Liu and Xiao Liu, which throws me for a loop because I thought Liu was a last name, so what are Da and Xiao doing there? Why are so many of the female characters named Xiao as well? And if they’re family names, does that mean everyone is related? Is this a novel about incest? But the easy fix is to give them all distinct monikers, and I spend hours scrolling through pages on Chinese history and baby name sites to find names that will be culturally appropriate.

Ever since The Last Front came out, I have been victim to people like Candice and Diana and Adele: people who think that, just because they’re “oppressed” and “marginalized,” they can do or say whatever they want. That the world should put them on a pedestal and shower them with opportunities. That reverse racism is okay. That they can bully, harass, and humiliate people like me, just because I’m white, just because that counts as punching up, because in this day and age, women like me are the last acceptable target. Racism is bad, but you can still send death threats to Karens.

Last year, a YA writer was driven off social media for encouraging her fans to leave one-star reviews on another writer’s debut (afterward, it transpired the debut writer had stolen her fiancé). In any case, both writers involved just signed new, six-figure deals for their follow-up trilogies.

But I need to survive this, somehow. And the truth would destroy me. So I simply must continue to live with this ghost, to grow accustomed to her face lingering on the backs of my eyelids. We must find some other equilibrium of coexistence that does not involve my giving her the only thing she wants.

Have you ever wondered at the mechanics of popularization? How does someone go from being a real person, someone you actually knew, to a set of marketing and publicity points, consumed and lauded by fans who think they know them, but don’t really, but understand this also, and celebrate them regardless?

same five websites. People make up absurd rumors about me. Someone says 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 unlikable and way too obsessed with their family duties to the point of disbelief.)

unabashedly praises the missionaries’ role in converting laborers. The Last Front hardly breaks new ground; instead, it joins novels like The Help and The Good Earth in a long line of what I dub historical exploitation novels: inauthentic stories that use troubled pasts as an entertaining set piece for white entertainment.

I just don’t think you should touch people without their permission,” says Tom. “Like, that’s an etiquette thing, not a race thing.” “Oh, come on, it wasn’t like she was, like, assaulting her,” says Rory. “It was a compliment. And it’s so crazy to call Chelsea a racist—I mean, she’s a Democrat. She voted for Obama—oh, hey, honey.

I’M OVERSTATING MY BEWILDERMENT. THE CONDITIONS OF EXORCISM are no great mystery. I know what this ghost wants, what sort of ending could make this all go away. It’s such a simple truth, loath as I am to admit it: that Athena wrote The Last Front, that I am at best a coauthor, that even though I deserve some credit for this novel, she does, too.

Sensitivity readers are readers who provide cultural consulting and critiques on manuscripts for a fee. Say, for example, a white author writes a book that involves a Black character. The publisher might then hire a Black sensitivity reader to check whether the textual representations are consciously, or unconsciously, racist. They’ve gotten more and more popular in the past few years, as more and more white authors have been criticized for employing racist tropes and stereotypes. It’s a nice way to avoid getting dragged on Twitter, though sometimes it backfires—I’ve heard horror stories of at least two writers who were forced to withdraw their books from publication because of a single subjective opinion.

I think it's very dangerous to start censoring what authors should and shouldn't write.' ... 'I'd hate to live in a world where we tell people what they should and shouldn't write based on the color of their skin. I mean, turn what you're saying around and see how it sounds. Can a Black writer not write a novel with a white protagonist? What about everyone who has written about World War Two, and never lived through it? You can critique a work on the grounds of literary quality, and its representations of history--sure. But I see no reason why I shouldn't tackle this subject if I'm willing to do the work. And as you can tell by the text, I did do the work. You can look up my bibliographies. You can do the fact-checking yourself. Meanwhile, I think writing is fundamentally an exercise of empathy. Reading lets us live in someone else's shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller. And as for the question of profit--I mean, should every writer who writes about dark things feel guilty about it? should creatives not be paid for their work?

Can’t you understand what it was like?” I beg. “Even a little bit? Athena had fucking everything. It wasn’t fair—” “Is that how you justify it?” “But it’s true, isn’t it? Athena had it made. You people—I mean, diverse people—you’re all they want—” “Oh my God.” Candice presses a palm against her forehead. “You really are insane. Do all white people talk like this?

I glance around, feeling stupid. I’m clearly intruding on the employees’ off hours between meals, and I feel awkward taking up so much space. There’s nothing I want to eat here. The menu consists entirely of different kinds of soup dumplings. I don’t know what a soup dumpling is, but it sounds gross. The strong, musty, dumpster-like smell wafting from the kitchen doors is killing my appetite.

You can’t shut it out. You lose all sense of security, because at every moment—when you’re sleeping, when you’re awake, when you’ve just put your phone down for a few minutes because you’ve hopped in the shower—dozens, maybe hundreds, maybe thousands of strangers are out there, mining your personal information, worming their ways into your life, looking for ways to mock, humiliate, or worse, endanger you.

I think it's very dangerous to start censoring what authors should and shouldn't write." I open strong, and this gets some approving murmurs from the crowd. But I still see some skeptical faces, especially from the other Asians present, so I continue. "I'd hate to live in a world where we tell people what they should and shouldn't write based on the color of their skin. I mean, turn what you're saying around and see how it sounds. Can a Black writer not write a novel with a white protagonist? What about everyone who has written about World War Two, and never lived through it? You can critique a work on the grounds of literary quality, and its representations of history—sure. But I see no reason why I shouldn't tackle this subject if I'm willing to do the work. And as you can tell by the text, I did do the work. You can look up my bibliographies. You can do the fact- checking yourself. Meanwhile, I think writing is fundamentally an exercise in empathy. Reading lets us live in someone else's shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller. And as for the question of profit—I mean, should every writer who writes about dark things feel guilty about it? Should creatives not be paid for their work?

I don't know," I murmur. "Honestly, Mr. Lee, I don't know if I was the right person to tell this story." He clasps mu hands tighter. His face is so kind, it makes me feel rotten. "You are exactly right," he says. "We need you. My English, it is not very good. Your generation has very good English. You can tell them our story. Make sure they remember us." He nods, determines. "Yes. Make sure they remember us.

Now that the story’s been complicated, it’s not so satisfying to lambast me for stealing from a lovely, innocent victim. Now Athena is a pretentious snob, a maybe-racist (no one can really make up their minds on that one), a definite Han Chinese supremacist, and a thief in her own right for her representations of Korean and Vietnamese characters. Athena is the liar, the hypocrite. Athena Liu Is Posthumously Canceled.

No one in their right mind could call this stealing. That’s what’s most fucked up about this whole debacle. Mother Witch is my original creation. All Athena contributed was a couple of sentences, maybe some underlying imagery. She was the catalyst, nothing more. Who knows where she would have taken the rest of the story? I certainly don’t—and I bet that, whatever it was, it’s nothing like what I ultimately publish. And yet it’s this story that brings me down.

BRETT’S WRONG. THIS WON’T BLOW OVER. TWITTER SCANDALS ARE like snowballs; the more people that see it, the more who feel it necessary to weigh in with their own opinions and agendas, creating an explosion of discourse branching off the instigating conversation. Past a critical mass of visibility, everyone in the industry starts talking about it. And @AthenaLiusGhost, whoever they are, has nearly a thousand followers by now. They’ve reached that critical mass.

The next afternoon, I take the green line out to Chinatown, which—despite having lived in DC for nearly five years—I’ve actually never been to. I’m a bit apprehensive because I saw on Reddit that DC’s Chinatown has the highest crime rates in the city, and when I get out of the metro station, the whole place does carry a menacing air of neglect. I walk with my hands shoved into my pockets, fingers tightly wrapped around my phone and wallet. I wish I’d brought pepper spray.

Where’s Candice?” I ask, trying to get my bearings through small talk. “Oh, Candice isn’t here anymore,” says Daniella. “She left a while ago.” “Oh.” I wait, but Daniella doesn’t elaborate. I try not to overthink it. Editorial assistants come and go all the time. They’re underpaid entry-level employees in the most expensive city in the world—ill-treated, overlooked, and overworked with minimal opportunities for advancement. It takes inhuman drive to hack it in publishing. Probably Candice just couldn’t take it. “That’s too bad.

they suggest I publish under the name Juniper Song instead of June Hayward (“Your debut didn’t reach quite the same market we’re hoping for, and it’s better to have a clean start. And Juniper is so, so unique. What kind of name is that? It sounds Native, almost.”). Nobody talks about the difference in how “Song” might be perceived versus “Hayward.” No one says explicitly that “Song” might be mistaken for a Chinese name, when really it’s the middle name my mother came up with during her hippie phase in the eighties and I was very nearly named Juniper Serenity Hayward.

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 for gospel. If you recommend a book on social media, people actually drive out that day to buy it.

I don’t care,” she says curtly. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, but we want no part of it. Actually, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” She probably doesn’t have the right to kick me out. I’m not causing a public disturbance; I haven’t done anything illegal. All I did was make casual conversation with a waiter. I consider standing my ground, enforcing my rights as a customer, insisting that they call the police if they want to remove me. But I’d rather not go viral for yet another reason. I can imagine the YouTube title: “Chinatown Karen Insists She’s Not ICE.

Actually, Peggy . . .” I pause, then sigh. A few possible explanations flash through my mind. Skylar is oversensitive, she’s making things up, she’s the one who provoked me in the first place, she’s turned the class against me. But then I take stock of the whole situation, and it’s astoundingly pathetic. I don’t need to engage in a she-said, she-said battle with a seventeen-year-old. I’m too big for this. “I think I’m going to have to leave,” I blurt. “Sorry, that’s probably not the news you were expecting. But my mother—I’ve just heard that she’s not doing so well—” “Oh, June. I am very sorry to hear that.

I retweet hot takes about bubble tea, MSG, BTS, and some drama series called The Untamed. I learn it’s important to be anti-PRC (that’s the People’s Republic of China) but pro-China (I’m not terribly sure how that’s different). I learn what “little pinks” and “tankies” are and make sure I don’t inadvertently retweet support for either. I decry what’s happening in Xinjiang. I Stand with Hong Kong. I start gaining dozens more followers a day once I’ve started vocalizing on these matters, and when I notice that many of my followers are people of color or have things like #BLM and #FreePalestine in their bios, I know I’m on the right track. And

Something sharpens in my chest then. The same feeling I’d always had watching Athena succeed; the vinegar-sour conviction that this wasn’t fair. Now Candice is sauntering in front of me, flaunting her spoils, and I can already see how the industry will receive her manuscript. They’ll fucking go wild for her, because the narrative is simply so perfect: brilliant Asian artist exposes white fraud, wins big for social justice, sticks it to the man. Ever since The Last Front came out, I have been victim to people like Candice and Diana and Adele: people who think that, just because they’re “oppressed” and “marginalized,” they can do or say whatever they want. That the world should put them on a pedestal and shower them with opportunities. That reverse racism is okay. That they can bully, harass, and humiliate people like me, just because I’m white, just because that counts as punching up, because in this day and age, women like me are the last acceptable target. Racism is bad, but you can still send death threats to Karens. And I know one thing. I will not let Candice walk away with my fate in her hands. Years of suppressed rage—rage at being treated like a stereotype, like my voice doesn’t matter, like the entirety of my being is constituted in those two words, “white woman”—bubble up inside me and burst.

Honestly, I'm relieved. Finally someone's calling Athena out on her bullshit, on her deliberately confusing sentence structures and cultural allusions. Athena likes to make her audience "work for it." On the topic of cultural exposition, she's written that she doesn't "see the need to move the text closer to the reader, when the reader has Google, and is perfectly capable of moving closer to the text." She drops in entire phrases in Chinese without adding any translations—her typewriter doesn't have Chinese characters, so she left spaces and wrote them out by hand. It took me hours of fiddling with an OCR to search them online, and even then I had to strike out about half of them. She refers to family members in Chinese terms instead of English, so you're left wondering if a given character is an uncle or a second cousin. (I've read dozens of guides to the Chinese kinship nomenclature system by now. It makes no goddamn sense.) She's done this in all her other novels. Her fans praise such tactics as brilliant and authentic—a diaspora writer's necessary intervention against the whiteness of English. But it's not good craft. It makes the prose frustrating and inaccessible. I am convinced it is all in service of making Athena, and her readers, feel smarter than they are. "Quirky, aloof, and erudite" is Athena's brand. "Commercial and compulsively readable yet still exquisitely literary," I've decided, will be mine.

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 canceled, forever. Reputations in publishing are built and destroyed, constantly, online.