“For my next video,” drawls Kimberly Deng, “I will be doing an Annie Waters makeup tutorial, featuring a turmeric face mask and white tears.”
The whole conversation sparks the creation of the “Annie Waters meme,” which involves pictures of bland and mediocre-looking white women paired with the caption, taken from the book, “She was a lithe young thing, with hair the color of the rising sun and eyes like the ocean, and the men could not keep their eyes off her as she floated past.” Quite a lot of these memes employ the least flattering photographs of me my haters can find online.
I want to point out how outrageously cruel and sexist this is, but the Eden’s Angels assure me that silence is my best defense. When you let trolls know they’ve hurt you, they win, says Jen. You can’t let them think they’re getting to you.
Since I can’t issue any takedowns in person, I often rehearse pretend arguments in the shower.
“Actually,” I tell my shampoo bottle, “just because Chinese people were being discriminated against doesn’t mean that they couldn’t be racist as well. And actually, it’s well documented that the Chinese laborers did not get along with Arabs and Moroccans—according to one of my sources, the Chinese would call them ‘black devils.’ Interethnic conflicts are a thing, you know.”
In response to accusations that I glorified Western missionaries, I would say, “It’s just as essentialist to claim broadly that not a single Chinese soldier found comfort in Christianity. The missionaries were often discriminatory and patronizing, yes, but we know from reports and memoirs that there were true converts, and it seems racist in turn to argue that conversion was impossible just because they were Chinese.”
And in response to Kimberly Deng’s idiotic clickbait, I would say, “Actually, it does fucking make sense that there are scenes set in Canada, because the laborers were first shipped to Canada, and then to France. You could have learned that from Wikipedia.”
I bask in imagining my critics’ crestfallen faces as they realize that simply being Asian doesn’t make them historical experts, that consanguinity doesn’t translate into unique epistemological insight, that their exclusive cultural snobbishness and authenticity testing are only a form of gatekeeping, and that when it all comes down to it, they haven’t a fucking clue what they’re talking about.
I’ve gotten so good at having these arguments in my head that I am, in fact, extremely well prepared when one of my detractors confronts me in person. That night, I’m at a historical fiction speaker series hosted by an indie bookstore in Cambridge. The audience has been polite so far, if a little challenging with their questions. It’s mostly Harvard and MIT students, and I remember well from my time at Yale that undergraduates at elite universities always think they know more than they do, and that they consider it their greatest achievement to take down a public intellectual. So far I’ve fielded off questions about my name change (“As I’ve said before, I chose to write under my middle name to signify a fresh start”), my research process (I have a standard bibliography that I rattle off now), and my engagement with the Chinese American community (here, I trot out the Athena Liu Scholarship I fund at the Asian American Writers’ Collective’s summer workshop).
Then a girl in the front row takes the mic. I know before she opens her mouth that this will go badly. She’s dressed like a right-wing meme of a social justice warrior—dyed purple hair buzzed into an undercut; floppy beanie, knit arm warmers, and a dozen pins and badges on her vest proclaiming her loyalty to BLM, BDS, and AOC. (Look, we’re all liberals here. But come on.) She’s got this breathless, wild-eyed look on her face, like she’s been waiting her entire life for this chance to take me down.
“Hi,” she says, and her voice wavers for a moment. She’s not used to picking fights in front of a live audience. “I’m Chinese American, and when I read The Last Front, I thought . . . I mean, I found a lot of deeply painful histories. And I wanted to ask you, why do you think it’s okay for a white author—I mean, an author who isn’t Chinese—to write, and profit from, this kind of story? Why do you think you’re the right person to tell it?”
She lowers the mic. Her cheeks are flushed. She’s gotten a big rush from this. No doubt she thinks that this is some grand public callout, that this is the first time I’ve ever heard this objection. No doubt everyone’s riveted, glancing between her and me as if expecting us to go to blows.
But I’ve prepared this answer. I’ve been preparing this answer ever since I started writing the book.
“I think it’s very dangerous to start censoring what authors should and shouldn’t write.” I open strong, and this gets some approving murmurs from the crowd. But I still see some skeptical faces, especially from the other Asians present, so I continue. “I’d hate to live in a world where we tell people what they should and shouldn’t write based on the color of their skin. I mean, turn what you’re saying around and see how it sounds. Can a Black writer not write a novel with a white protagonist? What about everyone who has written about World War Two, and never lived through it? You can critique a work on the grounds of literary quality, and its representations of history—sure. But I see no reason why I shouldn’t tackle this subject if I’m willing to do the work. And as you can tell by the text, I did do the work. You can look up my bibliographies. You can do the fact-checking yourself. Meanwhile, I think writing is fundamentally an exercise in empathy. Reading lets us live in someone else’s shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller. And as for the question of profit—I mean, should every writer who writes about dark things feel guilty about it? Should creatives not be paid for their work?”
Profiting from someone else’s suffering. God, what a cruel way to put it. Athena used to struggle with this, publicly, performatively.
“I am ethically troubled by the fact that I can only tell this story because my parents and grandparents lived through it,” she once told Publishers Weekly. “And sometimes it does feel like I’m exploiting their pain for my profit. I try to write in a way that is honoring them. But I remain aware that I can only do this because I am the privileged, lucky generation. I have the indulgence to look back, to be a storyteller.”
Please. I’ve always found that line to be a cop-out. There’s no need to dress it up. We are all vultures, and some of us—and I mean Athena, here—are simply better at finding the juiciest morsels of a story, at ripping through bone and gristle to the tender bleeding heart and putting all the gore on display.
Of course I feel somewhat icky when I inform a captivated audience that British officers were told they could quell disturbances by shooting those laborers responsible. It feels both thrilling and wrong to recount this, the same way racking up likes for my thread about Athena’s death felt wrong. But that’s the fate of a storyteller. We become nodal points for the grotesque. We are the ones who say, “Look!” while everyone peeks through their eyes, unable to confront darkness in full force. We articulate what no one else can even parse. We give a name to the unthinkable.
“I think this discomfort with my writing about tragedy speaks to our larger discomfort with acknowledging it happened at all,” I conclude. “And that is, unfortunately, the lot of anyone who writes a war novel. But I won’t let that stop me from telling untold histories. Someone has to do it.”
Smattered applause. Not everyone agrees with me, but that’s fine—at least I haven’t gotten any boos. With questions like this, that in itself is a victory. The SJW girl looks like she wants to say more, but the bookstore staff have already passed the mic on to the next audience member, who wants to know about where and how I get my inspiration. I smile, touch my fist to my chin, and launch into another perfectly rehearsed answer.