elaine Qiao

“They treated her like a museum,” R. F. Kuang writes in Yellowface. Here, Kuang’s white, culturally appropriating protagonist reflects on her dead Chinese best friend and fellow author, Athena. Throughout her career, Athena was brutally tokenized: “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.” I walked away from the book terrified of being pigeonholed, of making it in the industry just to be a token Asian author. But even beyond that fear, I wasn’t sure if I had enough to be tokenized. What did I have to say about racial trauma?

In my final year of high school, I grappled with the themes of my senior thesis. “Commonspeak,” inspired by the Mandarin dialect 普通话, was a multi-genre exploration of the things that go unsaid or are spoken too colloquially. In forty-six pages, I wrote essays, short stories, poems, and plays on race, sexuality, and religion. But before the chapbook was ready to publish, I had been nervous about tackling identity at all. 

Having voiced these qualms, my thesis adviser pointed me to the work of Langston Hughes. In his essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes starts off recounting an exchange with a budding poet. “One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, ‘I want to be a poet—not a Negro poet.’” I was set off balance, because I, just a few years prior, had uttered similar words on not wanting to be known as an Asian writer. “I doubted then that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great poet,” Hughes condemned. Panic ensnared me in that moment, as his words pointed out what I had yet to conceptualize.

To shun one’s racial identity in an art where racial systems can not be fully extracted is to desire proximity to whiteness. This is perhaps especially true in literature, where every word holds political weight and double-entendre. I wanted to be known beyond my own identity—to showcase mastery and artistry that would allow me to construct new worlds and try on characters unconstricted. In other words, I had associated innovative literature with the raceless. But as only white folks can afford to live life without acknowledgement of race, I was in reality aspiring to a Eurocentric tradition and discrediting my own literary heritage. 

In preparation for my senior thesis, I read Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif,” a story that, in her words, is an “experiment” in the “removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.” The story forces readers to implicate themselves, confronting their own preconceptions. How do we know what we know about race? Why do we find ourselves inextricable from it? I’ve always questioned whether race is such a focus in the negative space of the novel because I knew Morrison’s project going in, or if this novel is a keystone text in proving race’s intricate presence within narrative. Is what younger me sought possible? Is there even such a thing as a raceless story? A preliminary answer would seem no, though I admit I’m unsure.

Now, I question my original reluctance to interact with race in my work. Disengaging with Eurocentrism and becoming an unabashed author of color now seems obviously healing and correct. Even apart from discussions on the nature of race’s existence in literature, I wonder what motivated my aversion to it at all. What withheld me from this conclusion for so long? 

Part of my fatigue stems from tropes within the Asian American literary repertoire. There are a few pervasive, massively recurring images within the AAPI literary tradition that invoke a mild irritation in me upon reading. Fruit, cut and peeled after a fight. The smelly lunch parable. Tiger moms. While plenty of authors subvert these tropes or incorporate them meaningfully, my earliest exposure to racial writing, particularly amongst young writers, features a reliance on racial tropes that don’t feel thoughtfully handled. These few images feel like a token to marketably diverse writing—using the vetted few narratives guaranteed to be relatable, or at least recognizable enough to a white audience wanting to know the Asian American experience. 

In publishing spaces, there’s discourse on whether writers of color need to reinvent the wheel every time. It’s true that these expectations aren’t extended to white authors, and disparate standards for authors of color are an indication of racial repression within the industry. The illusion that there’s only so much space for racial stories not only intensifies competition between authors of color—it also prevents us from collective transformation in our craft. If the literary space remains domineeringly white, we naturally start resorting to the narratives we know will sell. So, I do believe it’s worth publishing a piece that feels like a genuine attempt to represent, even if it falls short in specificity or heart. Yet in a chicken-or-the-egg manner, I feel we are doing a disservice to our evolution as artists if we forgo all effort to innovate. Recycling these clichéd images makes lived experience feel trite. It’s corporate. Who are these stories written for?

It doesn’t help, too, how many of the already limited mainstream Asian narratives remain intentionally, maliciously rooted in a desire to assimilate. How mixed identity, particularly for Wasians, is treated as a ticket towards whiteness, instead of a meaningful exploration of racial liminality. Take skin-deep The Summer I Turned Pretty, where Belly’s race comes most times as an afterthought, and she spends the entire series navigating her relationship with two white love interests. Instead of interacting with her multiraciality, her Korean background is never addressed, making her mixed heritage feel like an excuse to make her a more palatable character to the white mainstream. 

A quote widely misattributed to Yeats but likely abridged from Morrison reads: “Read what you like, write what you must.” For a while, I didn’t enjoy reading about my race because I didn’t feel seen with the existing Asian American media, and I wasn’t sure what I really had to say about my own identity. It was a vicious cycle: without having discovered resonant AAPI voices, I had no frame of reference for Asian authorship, and by avoiding these themes in my own writing, I failed to seek out peers or predecessors in this literary sphere. I tried skirting by and writing craft first. I was more concerned with flowery symbolism, Greek allusions, and reciting the Western classics. My command of language turned white. 

Before reading “Politics and the English Language,” I made a hasty assumption after taking one look at rule five of Orwell’s six rules for writing: “Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.” I flinched at the idea of erasing cultural language in this way. Yet what Orwell was critiquing was the “decadence” of the English language, the way pretentious preference for Greek and Latin words affords “slovenliness” and “vagueness” to our writing. 

Amy Tan addresses this in her essay “Mother Tongue.” She confesses the distaste she had internalized towards her mother’s broken English and the way she overcompensated in her writing. One example she provided read: “‘That was my mental quandary in its nascent state.’ A terrible line, which I can barely pronounce,” Tan joked. Language stands so central to racial identity, especially in America, that foreign accents and grammatical errors feel damning. And in an immigrant culture that encourages academic eminence, it’s perhaps unsurprising that many Asian American writers adopt grandiloquent voices. 

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The moral here isn’t simply that writing about race as an author of color is good. I’d argue that it’s crucial. We risk forsaking ourselves if we avoid it.

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Tan says that she envisions her reader as her mother when she writes. I’ll admit I’m not quite there yet, but my own mother’s reaction is the first I imagine whenever I submit a new piece for publishing. I don’t know where the balance between artistry and accessibility is, and I’m not sure if I’m already missing the point by positioning the two as opposites. But there must be some middle ground between honing craft and overindulging in ivory tower theatrics. 

I’ve been exploring multilinguality in my writing, incorporating Mandarin without feeling compelled to justify or translate. Gloria Anzaldúa, of one of my favorite multigenre projects, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, says of her Chicana heritage: “Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language.” In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” Anzaldúa articulates that to legitimize the languages she speaks, Chicano Texas Spanish, Tex-Mex, English, or some other fusion without accommodation to English speakers is to legitimize herself. We remain illegitimate subjects until our language reflects our identity and invigorates our mother tongues. 

The moral here isn’t simply that writing about race as an author of color is good. I’d argue that it’s crucial. We risk forsaking ourselves if we avoid it. I believe we’re allowed to decenter race—after all, POC stories should also pass the Race Bechdel Test. But in a world where language is just as oppressive as it is radical, we cannot afford to tiptoe around our heritage. We need explorations of race that spur the growth of new literary traditions, beyond that of Hemingway, or Dickens, or even Woolf. If there’s enough of us to saturate an industry increasingly insistent on its whiteness, perhaps we can save one another from becoming racial museums.

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