Yellowface

“He settled in Canada afterward,” says Mr. Lee. So he does understand what we’re saying. His English is slow and halting, but all his sentences are perfectly grammatical. “I used to tell all the children at school that my uncle fought in World War One. So cool, I thought! My uncle, the war hero! But nobody believed me. They said that the Chinese were not in World War One.” He reaches out to take my hands in his, and I’m so startled by this that I let him. “You know better. Thank you.” His eyes are wet, shining. “Thank you for telling this story.”

My nose prickles. I have the sudden urge to bawl. Susan has gotten up to chat at another table, and that’s the only thing that gives me the courage to say what I do next.

“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.”

He gives my hands one last squeeze and tells me something in Chinese, but of course I don’t understand a word.

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.

“And do you remember how that felt?” she asked him. “Can you describe it for me? Everything you can remember?”

Jesus Christ, I thought. She’s a vampire.

Athena had a magpie’s eye for suffering. This skill united all her best-received works. She could see through the grime and sludge of facts and details to the part of the story that bled. She collected
true narratives like seashells, polished them off, and presented them, sharp and gleaming, to horrified and entranced readers.

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. The way she described it, this process wasn’t exploitative, but something mythical and profound. “I try to make sense of the chaos,” she told the New Yorker once. “I think the way we learn about history in classrooms is so antiseptic. It makes those struggles feel so far away, like they could never happen to us, like we would never make the same decisions that the people in those textbooks did. I want to bring those bloody histories to the fore. I want to make the reader confront how close to the present those histories still are.”

Elegantly put. Noble, even. When you phrase it like that, it’s not exploitation, it’s a service.

But tell me, really, what more right did Athena have to tell those stories than anyone else did? She never lived in China for more than a few months at a time. She was never in a war zone. She grew up attending private schools in England paid for by her parents’ tech jobs, summered on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, and spent her adult life between New Haven, NYC, and DC. She doesn’t even speak Chinese fluently—she’s admitted in interviews that she “spoke only English at home in an attempt to better assimilate.”

Athena would go on Twitter and talk about the importance of Asian American representation, about how the model minority myth was false because Asians were overrepresented at both the low and high ends of the income spectrum, how Asian women continued to be fetishized and made victims of hate crimes, and how Asians were silently suffering because they did not exist as a voting category to
white American politicians. And then she’d go home to that Dupont Circle apartment and settle down to write on a thousand-dollar antique typewriter while sipping a bottle of expensive Riesling her publisher had sent her for earning out her advance.

“I’m kind of worried, you know, that the industry isn’t that interested in this kind of story. Like, growing up, I didn’t see
any books like that on shelves, and it’s more of a quiet, introspective literary novel instead of, like, a high-octane thriller, so I don’t know . . .”

“I don’t think you have anything to worry about,” I assure her. “If anything, it’s easier now than ever to be Asian in the industry.”

Her brows furrow. “Do you really mean that?”

“Absolutely,” I say. “Diversity is what’s selling right now. Editors are hungry for marginalized voices. You’ll get plenty of opportunities for being different, Emmy. I mean, a queer Asian girl? That’s every checkbox on the list. They’ll be slobbering all over this manuscript.”