Yellowface

I’m not obsessed with stealing Asian culture—I mean, before The Last Front, I had no interest in modern Chinese history whatsoever.

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.

“And without us, these stories wouldn’t get told.”

I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE THINKING. THIEF. PLAGIARIZER. AND PERHAPS, because all bad things must be racially motivated, Racist.

The truth is fluid. There is always another way to spin the story, another wrench to throw into the narrative.

Without Athena, who am I?

Give me your bruises and hurts, she told us, and I will return to you a diamond.

Blocking out the negativity, because when you’re a writer, all that matters is the story within.

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

I lie there for hours every night, awash in every cruel thing the internet has ever said about me. It’s cathartic, in a perverse way. I like to concentrate all the negativity, to take it all in at once. I take comfort in the fact that it could literally not get any worse than this.