Yellowface

by R.F. Kuang

I don’t say that out loud. If you tell Athena off for being tactless, she gets overly, exaggeratedly apologetic, and that’s harder to put up with than just swallowing my irritation.

MOURNING IS STRANGE. ATHENA WAS ONLY A FRIEND, NOT A close friend. I feel like a bitch saying it, but she just wasn’t that important to me, and she doesn’t leave a hole in my life that I now need to build detours around.

She hugged me in that light, detached way of hers, the way that made it seem like she was a supermodel who’d hugged a line of a hundred fans and now no longer knew how to put real emphasis into this action, hugging.

“That’s not what Adele Sparks-Sato is claiming,” says Jessica. She pronounces Adele’s last name like she’s reading some exotic soup ingredient from a grocery list. Sparks Sa-touuu.

But she is terrified of what lies inside those Moleskines. That is clearer now than ever. I’m speaking to a mother who, when it comes down to it, would really rather not confront what dark things lay buried in her daughter’s soul. No mother wants to know her child that well. Here, then, are the terms of our bargain—she’ll keep my secrets, as long as she never has to confront Athena’s.

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.

I keep winding up on admissions pages of various graduate school programs. I don’t filter for degrees in any one field in particular. I consider them all—law, social work, education, even accounting—because they all promise a gateway into a wholly different life, after an appropriately long period of educational hand-holding in which I don’t have to do any thinking for myself.