“Of course not,” Emily says finally. “Of course, anyone should be able to tell any kind of story. We’re just thinking about how to position you so that readers trust the work.”
“Well, they can trust the work,” I say. “They can trust the words on the page. The blood and sweat that went into telling the story.”
“No, of course,” says Emily. “And we don’t mean to invalidate that.”
“Of course not,” says Jessica.
“Again, we think anyone should be able to tell any kind of story.”
“We’re not censors. That’s not our culture here at Eden.”
“Right.”
Emily then shifts the conversation to where I’m based, where I might be up to travel, etc. The meeting fizzles out pretty quickly after that, before I’ve gotten a chance to get my bearings back. Emily and Jessica tell me again how excited they are about the book, how wonderful it was to meet me, and how they can’t wait to keep working with me. Then they’re gone, and I’m staring at an empty screen.
I feel awful. I shoot off an email to Brett, airing out all my anxieties. He responds an hour later, assuring me not to worry. They just want to be clear, he says. On how exactly they can position me.
As it turns out, they want to position me as “worldly.” Jessica and Emily send us a longer email detailing their plans the next Monday: We think June’s background is very interesting, so we want to make sure readers are aware of that. They highlight all the different places I lived when I was little—South America, Central Europe, a half-dozen cities in the US that were stops on my dad’s never-ending tour as a construction engineer. (Emily really likes the word “nomad.”) They highlight the year I spent in the Peace Corps in my newly written author biography, although I never went near Asia (I was in Mexico, making use of my high school Spanish, and I quit early because I got a debilitating stomach virus and had to be medically evacuated). And they suggest I publish under the name Juniper Song instead of June Hayward (“Your debut didn’t reach quite the same market we’re hoping for, and it’s better to have a clean start. And Juniper is so, so unique. What kind of name is that? It sounds Native, almost.”). Nobody talks about the difference in how “Song” might be perceived versus “Hayward.” No one says explicitly that “Song” might be mistaken for a Chinese name, when really it’s the middle name my mother came up with during her hippie phase in the eighties and I was very nearly named Juniper Serenity Hayward.
Emily helps me pitch an article about authorial identities and pen names to Electric Lit, where I explain that I’ve chosen to rebrand myself as Juniper Song to honor my background and my mother’s influence in my life. “My debut, Over the Sycamore, written as June Hayward, was rooted in my grief over my father’s death,” I write. “The Last Front, written as Juniper Song, symbolizes a step forward in my creative journey. This is what I love most about writing—it offers us endless opportunities to reinvent ourselves, and the stories we tell about ourselves. It lets us acknowledge every aspect of our heritage and history.”
I never lied. That’s important. I never pretended to be Chinese, or made up life experiences that I didn’t have. It’s not fraud, what we’re doing. We’re just suggesting the right credentials, so that readers take me and my story seriously, so that nobody refuses to pick up my work because of some outdated preconceptions about who can write what. And if anyone makes assumptions, or connects the dots the wrong way, doesn’t that say far more about them than me?
THINGS RUN MORE SMOOTHLY ON THE EDITORIAL SIDE. DANIELLA loves what I’ve done in the revisions. All she requests in her third pass are some light line edits, and a suggestion that I add a dramatis personae, which is a fancy term for a list of all the characters accompanied by short descriptions so that readers don’t forget who they are. Then it’s off to a copyeditor, who from my experience are these superhuman, eagle-eyed monsters that catch continuity errors unseen to the naked eye.
We only run into one wrinkle, a week before my copyedit pass is due.
Daniella emails me out of the blue: Hey June. Hope you’ve been well. Can you believe we’re already six months out from publication? Wanted to bring up something to get your opinion—Candice suggested that we get a Chinese or Chinese diaspora sensitivity reader, and I know it’s late in the process, but do you want us to look into things for you?
Sensitivity readers are readers who provide cultural consulting and critiques on manuscripts for a fee. Say, for example, a white author writes a book that involves a Black character. The publisher might then hire a Black sensitivity reader to check whether the textual representations are consciously, or unconsciously, racist. They’ve gotten more and more popular in the past few years, as more and more white authors have been criticized for employing racist tropes and stereotypes. It’s a nice way to avoid getting dragged on Twitter, though sometimes it backfires—I’ve heard horror stories of at least two writers who were forced to withdraw their books from publication because of a single subjective opinion.
I don’t see why, I write back. I’m pretty comfortable with the research I did.
A response instantly pings my inbox. It’s Candice, following up. I feel strongly we ought to hire a reader familiar with the history and language. June is not Chinese diaspora, and we run the risk of doing real harm if we don’t check any of the Chinese phrases, naming conventions, or textual recounting of racism with a reader better suited to catch mistakes.
I groan.
Candice Lee, Daniella’s editorial assistant, is the only person at Eden who doesn’t like me. She never makes it so evident that I have grounds to complain about it—she’s unfailingly polite in emails, she likes and retweets everything I post about the book on social media, and she always greets me with a smile during videoconference meetings. But I can tell it’s all forced—there’s something in her pinched expression, the curtness of her words.
Maybe she knew Athena. Maybe she’s one of those wannabe writers daylighting as an underpaid, overworked publishing junior staff member with a China-inspired manuscript of her own, 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.
Again, I’m quite comfortable with the research I did in preparation for this book. I don’t find it necessary to delay things for a sensitivity read at this point in production, especially since we have a tight turnaround for review copies to early readers. Send.
That should be the end of it. But an hour later, my inbox pings again. It’s Candice, doubling down. She’s addressed the email to me, Daniella, and the entire publicity team.
Dear all,
I want to emphasize again how important I feel it is that we get a sensitivity reader for this project. In this current climate, readers are bound to be suspicious of someone writing outside of their lane—and for good reason. I understand this would slow down production, but an SR would protect June from accusations of both cultural appropriation and, worse, cultural leeching. It would show that June meant to represent the Chinese diaspora community in good faith.
Jesus Christ. Cultural appropriation? Cultural leeching? What is her problem?