Yellowface

by R.F. Kuang

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

LMAO

Athena—a beautiful, Yale-educated, international, ambiguously queer woman of color—has been chosen by the Powers That Be.

And shes gay literally every checkbox

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.

And so what if it was stolen? So what if I lifted it wholesale?

The audacity is

I felt like the kind of person who now listened to Kanye.

Oh!

rhizomatic

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.

“Are you saying we’ll get in trouble because I wrote this story and I’m white?”

Twitter is gonna get her ass

And they suggest I publish under the name Juniper Song instead of June Hayward

THIS IS CRAZYYYYYYY

Candice Lee, Daniella’s editorial assistant, is the only person at Eden who doesn’t like me.

The only asian girl lmao stand on business

and she’s jealous I’ve made it big when she hasn’t. I get that—in publishing, that’s a universal dynamic. But that’s not my problem.

AINT NO WAY...

During golden hour I come off as nicely tanned, which makes me look sort of racially ambiguous.

LMFAOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I retweet hot takes about bubble tea, MSG, BTS, and some drama series called The Untamed.

This is actually insane

“Write something else!” she’d complain. “No one wants another feel-good immigrant story. Boohoo, did they think your lunch smelled bad? Did they make fun of your eyes? God, I’ve read it all before. There’s no originality.”

LOL

inauthentic stories that use troubled pasts as an entertaining set piece for white entertainment.”

ate

no one in the current wave of Chinese American novelists was producing anything of value, because none of them had lived through things like the Tiananmen Square massacre or the Cultural Revolution, and that spoiled Bay Area kids who couldn’t even speak Mandarin 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.

Athena never personally experienced suffering. She just got rich from it. She wrote an award-winning short story based on what she saw at that exhibit, titled “Whispers along the Yalu.” And she wasn’t even Korean.

In any case, Twitter discourse never does anything—it’s just an opportunity for firebrands to wave their flags, declare their sides, and try to brandish some IQ points before everyone gets bored and moves on.

Isn’t it racist, in a sense, to assume my race based on my last name?

Mama...

“She loves to write,” she says. “But she has trouble fitting in at school, especially because there aren’t many other Chinese Americans, you know, and I was wondering if you could offer some advice for her to help her feel comfortable expressing herself.” I sneak a glance at Susan, whose mouth is now pressed so thin it could have been drawn on with a pencil.

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.

GIRL WE BEEN KNEW

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?

Girl watch outt.... Gluttony is a sin

I am not the bad guy. I am the victim here.

Mama...

Isaac Asimov was a serial sexual harasser;

WhaWHAT