I get a liquor cabinet. I am now the sort of person who has a liquor cabinet.
I write a check for the entirety of my remaining student debt, lick the envelope, and send it off to the Department of Education. No more Nelnet emails for the rest of my life, thank God. I get health insurance. I go to the dentist, and when it turns out I’ll have to fork over several thousand dollars to get all these undetected cavities drilled out, I pay the bill without blinking. I see a primary care physician, even though there’s nothing wrong with me, just for a physical, just because I can.
I start buying nice whisky, even though I can’t taste whisky without thinking of Athena and those stupid old-fashioneds. I start shopping at Whole Foods. I become addicted to their jalape?o corn bread. I start getting my clothes at brand-name outlets instead of the thrift store. I throw out my cheap Etsy jewelry and stop wearing anything that doesn’t feature ethically, sustainably sourced gemstones.
When tax season rolls around, I ask my sister, Rory, who’s an accountant, to handle things. I send her my 1099s for this year; within minutes she responds, Jesus Christ, are you serious???
Hell yeah, I email her back. Told you writing would work out.
I DO PAY THINGS FORWARD. I’M NOT LYING WHEN I SAY I WANT TO make a positive contribution to the Asian community. I make a check out to the Asian American Writers’ Collective for two thousand dollars, just as I’d promised, and I’ll keep making those yearly contributions so long as my royalties are this good. I graciously accept a request to serve as a mentor for Scribblers’ Fairy Godmothers, a program that pairs an underrepresented writer with a published writer who can coach them through the vicissitudes of the industry.
I’m glad to be spreading my generosity. Athena never made efforts to send the ladder down to her fellow writers of color. If anything, she found them annoying. “My inbox keeps filling up with wannabe writers who think I’ll spend hours writing them advice letters just because we have the same vaguely ethnic background,” she’d complain contemptuously. “‘Hi Miss Liu, I’m a sophomore in high school, and as a fellow Asian American woman I admire you so much.’ Shut up. You’re not special; you’re a dime a dozen.”
Athena seemed more than just minorly irritated that Asian American writers clustered admiringly around her. She seemed to actively despise them. She hated it whenever I brought up debut novels that were compared to hers in the press. She’d bitch about how they were unoriginal, too try-hard, too obviously catered to an ethnic niche in the marketplace. “Write something else!” she’d complain. “No one wants another feel-good immigrant story. Boohoo, did they think your lunch smelled bad? Did they make fun of your eyes? God, I’ve read it all before. There’s no originality.”
Maybe it was Highlander Syndrome—I’ve read about that before, the way members of marginalized groups feel threatened if someone else like them starts finding success. I’ve experienced that, too—every time I see a publishing announcement about a young girl hitting it big with her debut, I want to claw my eyes out. Maybe she was terrified someone was going to replace or surpass her.
But I’m going to be better than Athena. I am a woman who helps other women.
I’m matched with a girl named Emmy Cho, who sends me an effusive email about how much she admires my books. Emmy is based out in San Francisco, so we do our first mentoring session over Zoom. She’s pretty in a fresh-faced, innocent way—like a cute bunny rabbit, like a defanged Athena, and I instinctively feel an urge to sweep her under my coat and protect her.
She tells me about her current work in progress, a coming-of-age novel about a queer Korean American girl growing up in the Midwest in the nineties, based largely on her own experiences. “It’s a bit like that film The Half of It, if you’ve seen it?” She has this adorable habit of tucking her hair behind her ears every time she finishes a sentence. “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.”
Emmy laughs nervously. “Well, okay.”
“Just write the best thing you can and put it out there,” I say. “You’ll be a hit, I promise.”
We chat a little bit more about how her querying process has gone so far (lots of partial requests, but no solid offers yet) and about her feelings toward the manuscript (she’s confident in her narrative voice, but doesn’t know if she’s attempted too many overlapping timelines).
As the hour draws to a close, Emmy clears her throat and says, “Um, if you don’t mind me asking, are you white?”
My surprise must show on my face, because she immediately apologizes. “Sorry, I don’t know if that’s cool to say, I just, um, like, Song, that’s kind of ambiguous, so I just wanted to know.”
“I am white,” I say, more frostily than I’d intended. What is she insinuating? That I can’t be a good mentor to her unless I’m Asian? “Song is my middle name. My mother gave it to me.”
“Okay,” Emmy says, and tucks her hair back behind her ears again. “Um, cool. I was just asking.”
Eight
OF COURSE, I HAVE MY DETRACTORS. THE MORE POPULAR A BOOK becomes, the more popular it becomes to hate on said book, which is why revulsion for Rupi Kaur’s poetry has become a millennial personality trait. The majority of my reviews on Goodreads are five stars, but the one-stars are vitriolic. Uninspired colonizer trash, one reads. Another iteration of the white woman exploitation sob story formula: copy, paste, change the names, and voila, bestseller, reads another. And a third, which seems way too personal to be objective: What a stuck-up, obnoxious bitch. Brags too much about being a Yalie. I got this during a Kindle sale, and you can bet I made sure to get every one of the two hundred and ninety-nine cents I spent back.
The first time I get tagged in a bad review on Twitter (All the hype led me wrong, won’t be reading anything more from this author), I text Marnie Kimball and Jen Walker, my new friends from the BookCon after-party. They’d given me their numbers and insisted that I reach out if I was ever having a hard time navigating the industry. Since then our group chat, cheekily named “Eden’s Angels,” has been my go-to source of support and industry gossip.
How do you get over rude shit people say about you online? I ask. This is so demoralizing. It’s like they have a personal vendetta. Like I, personally, once kicked their dog or something.
Rule one: Do Not Read Reviews. Marnie does that weird thing older women do where she uses extra spaces and capitalizations, though I can never tell if they’re intentional or typos. If they had anything good to say, they would have written their own books. They are Petty Little People.
Let them scream in their own echo chambers, writes Jen. Performing outrage is a bonding activity for them. Gives them serotonin hits, literally, there’s research on this. Don’t let it get to you. They’re sheep.