I recently became aware of a lengthy Disk Horse about Asian-American literature overtaking literary Twitter.
Well hey, I happen to be an Asian-American Literature (TM), and I thought what this Disk Horse needs is yet another opinion, because the horse hasn’t been beaten to death so hard already that it needs scraping off the side of the road . . .
The stage: A story was published. As anyone in short fiction knows, usually very little comes of this. Most short stories, good or bad, struggle to get any attention at all. However, this story set off opinions on the level of “Cat Person” or the Bad Art Friend.
Twitter started dragging the story and author somewhere in January or February.
Most internet hate fests last 24 hours. This one I just found out about because it’s still going on.
The story is called “Hatchling.” What was its crime? Why, being written by an Asian American woman being, in some people’s opinions, a middle-of-the-road piece that had some craft issues.
That’s it.
Oh yeah, and the author has a Stegner fellowship at Stanford, so deserves all this. Or something.
I have a policy of never mentioning Wallace Stegner without pointing out that he plagiarized his Pulitzer-winning novel (from a female writer named Mary Hallock Foote). This is not a secret. As far as I’m concerned, Stanford should repudiate the association with him and the Pulitzer committee should rescind the award, but I expect they’re never going to.
Along with Paul Engle, Stegner was one of the forefathers of the highly complicated and somewhat horrifying history of creative writing pedagogy. Stanford is absolutely wild about being his home university, presumably because it rings them into the historical annals of Creative Writing As A Field (TM) alongside Iowa, where Engle was.
The extent to which Stanford lionizes Stegner is frankly a Twilight Zone to me given that he’s . . . you know . . . a plagiarist. I suppose it does make a twisted amount of sense given the twisted history of Creative Writing As A Field, of which Stegner’s theft is only the beginning. It’s a subject I know quite a lot more about that than I ever intended to, and involves the Cold War, the U.S. State Department, soft power propaganda, and the CIA.
The current structure of our literary world and MFA system has a number of bizarre wrinkles to it given that history. That is not to denigrate those in the literary world or their(our) accomplishments. It just is.
All that is to say, a Stegner fellowship—which comes with a grant of $75,000 per year—is highly prestigious, in some circles, and somewhat laughably if genuinely lucrative given how scarce money is in writing. One would still forgive confusion from people not in litfic, however: are authors really morphing into jealous piranhas over a fellowship named for a plagiarist with a stipend that pays less than an entry-level software developer role?
This feels to me intertwined with Stegner’s name still being on one of the most sought-after fellowships in writing in the first place—which feels to me intertwined with issues such as submission fees still being considered widely acceptable in litfic—which in turn feels, to me, intertwined with why a bunch of internet mouths lost their fucking minds over someone receiving an honor they deemed her too ungenius for.
There’s not a lot of money in writing. But prestige costs little to manufacture into reality, and its shortage, however artificial, is its own commodity.
“Correction: Asian-American women.
I imagine that if any litfic authors read this, they’re now unseasonably annoyed. Who am I, a genre writer, to come in and criticize litfic?
You’re not wrong. I am a genre writer! I am proud to be a genre writer.
Admittedly, I am slightly more literary than I ever intended to be. My last book was recognized by several literary awards including the ALA Carnegie Medal (my publisher was the only genre publisher on there!), and both that book and several of my short stories are being taught in college classes or included in textbooks. Beyond yearning for genre boundaries to be a bit more porous for everyone’s benefit, I am already—like it or not, to some small degree—part of the historical literary conversation.
I do like it, incidentally. It’s hard to overstate how humbled I am by people recognizing the extreme amounts of work I put into my classical connections and allusions (at least, I assume—unless they just like the sword fights).
What I don’t like is 90% of my conversations with people in litfic. Don’t get me wrong, the other 10% are perfectly lovely. I have nothing against litfic folks per se; some of the friends and colleagues I most respect are diehard litfic. But it seems there are certain things in litfic that are Not Said or Not Done, and as someone from a low-context Ask culture (the Northeastern U.S., y’all) and accustomed to genre publishing, that drives me wild.
(I am given to understand, for instance, that my refusal to read David Foster Wallace makes me uncultured, and if I’d just read him, I’d get it. I have no intention of ever reading David Foster Wallace, and everything people say to tempt me to read him makes me more convinced I never want to read David Foster Wallace. Life’s too short.1)
It bothers me that this has been my experience. One would think literary fiction would be the domain of thought provocation, not the domain of the herd. Though I am, simultaneously, aware that the people I meet in litfic circles have a selection bias in the population, one predicated—unknowingly by most—on a history of privilege and interference by the U.S. State Department . . . so on a meta level, I suppose I understand why I encounter this so often. And obviously, it should go without saying that #NotAllLitfic. But I’m coming around to a point.
That point is about “Hatchling.”
I have not read “Hatchling”, partly because I wanted to write this without having read it. This post is not about “Hatchling.” It’s about the reaction to “Hatchling.”
I cannot find a single negative review of “Hatchling” that claims it does anything worse than make use of overused tropes or turns of phrase that didn’t agree with the reader’s digestion.
The writer of the story, meanwhile—whose name is Rucy Cui—is not famous, or wealthy off her writing, or a bestseller. Yet she has become a flashpoint for everything litfic feels is wrong with Asian American Women Writing Literature Today (TM) — criticisms leveled mostly by white and Asian men, a suspicious number of whom also appear to claim a creative stake in the literary scene but I daresay are not themselves Stegner fellows (bets on how many of them applied and were rejected?).
Has this same segment of internet ever fallen so hard on the head of a unknown white male writer? One who published a short story about, say, whiskey or affairs or the dreadful ennui of how nobody could possibly understand them?
If not, one might start to suspect this smacks of—dare I say it—racism and misogyny. But one would not have to suspect, because they’re saying the quiet part out loud.
“Is there a single group who promotes their own self hatred as voluntarily as Asian American women?”
Every quote interspersed in this post is a real thing someone said on the internet in a conversation about “Hatchling.” They put their actual fingers on actual keys and said these words.2
Most of the would-be literati mocking “Hatchling” have not even read the story. Of those that have, it’s become the trendy move to take gleeful entertainment in picking apart everything the author possibly did wrong, all for nothing more than internet points.
And you call yourselves writers?! Thoreau’s mom may have been doing his laundry the whole time, but at least “Walden” was worth reading!
There will be some critics who argue their reaction was not based in racism and misogyny. Okay, but dragging an unestablished writer—and let’s be real, a Stegner fellowship, while an undeniable cap feather, does not mean a writer is “known” or has “made it” except in the minds of a select few—and dragging her this gruesomely, for what, a few tortured metaphors, or perhaps an accusation of insufficient creativity? It’s not any different from bullying. It’s bullying, and it’s cruel.
We all put our work out there to be read. We acknowledge that readers have the right to criticize us and express opinions about our fiction. It comes with the territory. We also know readers don’t always realize how most of us writers are not aloof from the world in our tents sewn of respect and money, and that most of us—even working writers like me, or award winners, or Stegner fellows—are fortunate to make a living from writing at all, and are neither wealthy nor secure nor storied. (I once saw a person say with a straight face that a Hugo winner should be able to demand $400/hour for writing. As someone who has won a Hugo, I can tell you that is . . . very, very false.)
But people in publishing should know this. Writers and critics and professionals who self-define as litfic should know this. Tearing down another creative for laughs when you admit she’s done nothing more wrong than hundreds or thousands of other writers—who were lucky enough, I suppose, not to do it while being Asian or female—is reprehensible. And a reader penning a genuine Goodreads review is a far cry from hate-reading a short story writer just to jump on the bandwagon about how she’s everything wrong with publishing another Asian diaspora woman.
Hell, waxing on about a famous author that way would still be a shitty and bigoted thing to do.
I hope you’re proud of yourselves.
“It’s very easy to see that this isn’t just bad writing, it’s lazy worthless pap. Everyone can see that, and people who claim otherwise are being dishonest.” [in response to someone who liked the story]
The highly decorated author and extremely decent human Vajra Chandrasekera once wrote a marvelous thread on social media that I now can’t find, but that has stuck with me a long time. It posited: what if, instead of being discontent with what an author wrote, you asked yourself, what if they intended to write it this way? What would that mean?
As a reader and writer of color, this resonated with all the times I’ve seen white reviewers characterize something they didn’t like as “bad writing” when to me it was a clear cultural allusion. What would it mean, if you took that small step to assume what the writer did was purposeful?
Of course, sometimes a piece just isn’t to one’s taste, and there’s nothing wrong with literary criticism of craft. But I’ve found that though Vajra’s question was a balm for me as a writer, it was far more valuable to me as a reader.
It’s made me a smarter reader, a better reader. It’s given me enjoyment and profound understanding of some books and stories that I otherwise never would have found, when I took that step of asking—but what if that was intentional? What would the author mean?3
It is possible to look at the criticisms of “Hatchling” and ask this question, which none of the self-righteous keyboard malignancy allows space for. So let’s take a brief moment ourselves with some of the lines from the story that made people so big mad, and question the content of the criticism in the first place.
“My white boyfriend and I are newly returned from holiday travels…” (the opening, bold mine)
Twitter cannot get over the story starting with this phrase, because how dare the author start with such an overused trope. How dare she!
I would like to point out, first of all, that some Asian women have white boyfriends, and some white boys have Asian girlfriends, and that it is ridiculous to call a single racial pairing verboten in literature. Are there ways an overuse or a mishandling of such a trope can be damaging? Sure. But let’s not assume that’s what’s happening after three words, shall we?
Speaking of which—three words. The first three words. Every author knows the opening of a story is paramount, the hook that grabs us by the inside of our cheek till we can’t stop reading. So let’s give Rucy Cui the benefit of the doubt, as a Stegner fellow who presumably knows something of the genre she is writing. Let’s ask Vajra’s question. What if she did it intentionally? What if she was trying to provoke a reaction?
Assume she knows this is a hot button. Why start with “my white boyfriend”? Why keep repeating the phrase?
To me it suggests that she’s setting up provocation, satire, a style where she’s trying to drive in a needle. I don’t know as I haven’t read the story. But I like where Vajra’s question could lead, and it starts me with an open mind.
“We fucked on every flat surface available to us, including the vertical ones—bathed in equatorial sweat and pheromones, slick as babies.“ (2nd par, bold mine)
Oh, the mockery, from a Twitter over-proud of its own smartassery.
Why would a writer—a Stegner fellow, let’s remember; nobody criticizing this will let us forget—use a comparison to infants in a near-pornographic metaphor?
Vajra’s question, again: let’s assume she knows she’s doing this. Come on, the most amateur writer would never write that unintentionally, especially in the oft-reexamined first sentences; I assume a Stegner fellow would certainly notice she had done this. What does it mean, if she knew and meant to write it?
I’m not gonna lie, I actually love this metaphor. I love how provocative it is. It puts me in a mind of intense incongruity, of immaturity. It’s obviously not sexualizing babies, but it seems to be setting the characters in a state of grossly problematic naivete, where they’re about to romanticize things that should never be romanticized at all.
Maybe the story will pan out on this, maybe it won’t. But my brain is primed if it does.
“I picture myself, a code monkey: with big-warm-fuzzy-secret heart.”
Cui is primarily being condemned for those above two lines—”my white boyfriend” and “slick as babies” (oh that my own literary crimes would ever number as few as two lines in a story people didn’t read . . .). Those who did read the full story, however, seem biased toward nitpicking for every craft decision they disagreed with, particularly Cui’s prose.
The above is a line pulled out by one such critic as evidence of Cui’s failure as a writer.
I don’t have to ask Vajra’s question here, because I already know how badly the critic misunderstood what Cui was doing. That line is an extremely obvious reference to a Jonathan Coulton lyric,4 a cultural touchstone that’s well-known enough in certain circles that I referenced the song once in a book myself (and heard from delighted readers about it, so people did get it).
It’s fine for some things to be outside a critic’s scope. None of us can know everything. But it gives me very little confidence that this critic’s review of this piece can be trusted, when they so fundamentally miss what the author was trying to say. A critic who, by the way, never stops to consider that they might not be the right audience for “Hatchling.”5
People’s main problems with “Hatchling” outside of individual lines seems to be that (1) Cui got a Stegner fellowship and they want to berate her for not deserving it, and (2) Cui’s story got published and they’re sick of the subjects she wrote about dominating Asian-American literature.
I saw precious few critics engaging with the idea that if they have issues with what subjects are privileged in Asian American literature, their ire would be better aimed at the people in power in publishing, rather than at a single writer who was putting out—as far as they know—authentic work.
Sure, we Asians get stereotyped and pigeonholed in publishing. Sure, I get tired of what publishing “allows” us to do, and how carefully we have to work to not have our careers shaped by assumptions.
You know who I fault for that? Publishers.
If people think Stanford isn’t choosing its fellows well, if people think the Georgia Review should pick stories on other subjects—you know who they should complain about? Stanford and the editors of the Georgia Review.
For all we know, Cui has written a wide panoply of other work that doesn’t include these topics, and has found particular themes privileged by gatekeepers—which is not an absurd speculation given that I personally know people who’ve encountered this. It’s not her, or their, fault if publishing fails to recognize Asian creativity that falls along less well-trodden lines.
Yet somehow she’s blamed. Ridiculous.
But let’s say for the sake of argument that these topics are entirely what Cui writes and that it’s all she wants to write. One review complained of “the story check[ing] off several shibboleths of the genera: how much stress her immigrant parents put her through, how white people can’t tell Chinese people apart, the cultural insensitivity of her boyfriend’s parents.”
You know what? We write what we know. If people don’t want us to write about being constantly confused with each other, maybe they should stop confusing us. The number of times reviewers have mixed me up with Rebecca Kuang boggles the mind, and our styles are entirely different. One might give some grace for our names being a bit similar, except that every time I mention this in a group chat, other Asian authors chime in with similar stories, many of whom don’t have similar names at all.6 Not to mention the Asian author who had a magazine publish a completely different author’s photo with her name on it . . .
Many of us also have immigrant parents, or had particular cultural pressures put on us or—
Look, I agree that publishing shouldn’t privilege certain types of Asian narratives at the expense of all else. That sucks, and I hate it, and I hate how it limits us.
That doesn’t mean those stories should be struck entirely. That doesn’t mean those experiences don’t happen.
Another critic scolded Cui for including the experience of being called “chink” in the story. I don’t know about Cui, but the first time I was called that—complete with eye-pulling—is burned into my brain.
These are real things. Who are you, to claim we should not be permitted to include them?
Cui is, in fact, permitted to write about them even if she never experienced them at all, if nothing close ever happened to her. Because—surprise!—she’s writing fiction. Presumably, she’s informed by the family and community around her, by the news and how people see her and react to her as an Asian woman. Presumably, both she and many people she knows have years, and years, and years of collective experience being Asian and living in the world.
And she is, as you all keep reminding us, a Stegner fellow. If she wants to experiment with that endless expertise of material, I say all power to her. I may not like everything she writes—heck, I may not like anything she writes!—but whether I end up a fan of her work or not, I respect her figuring out her place in the canon.
I also hope she realizes that she seems to have done something profound in “Hatchling”, to garner such deep reactions from people. The best literature has often provoked the most discomfort. We shall have to see how history remembers Cui’s piece and the ensuing firestorm.
“We need to start shaming asian women for this”
Whenever I’ve mentioned Wallace Stegner’s plagiarism to litfic circles, they get uncomfortable and don’t want to discuss it.
In SFF, one of our writers called out the lionized John Campbell’s racism and fascism in an acceptance speech for an award named after him.
The name of the award (and several others) was subsequently changed as SFF had a reckoning with itself. We’re far from perfect, but we push not to look away from our feet of clay.
A year later, that author won a second prestigious award for her speech calling out Campbell.
The author’s name was Jeannette Ng. She is, incidentally, an Asian woman.
As I said, this post is not about “Hatchling.”
It’s funny, isn’t it, how “Hatchling”‘s critics can claim bigotry against Asian diaspora is tired and “over”, all while proving it’s alive and well. And it’s tragic that so much of it comes from Asian men. Why does it give you so much enjoyment to shred another Asian diaspora experience, condemning it for any iota of difference from your own? What does that say about you, that such a thing gives you joy?
Litfic isn’t the only genre that has a problem with people constantly needing to prove they’re the smartest in the room. As much as I appreciate SFF’s willingness to reckon with its demons, it’s also the scene that brings us social phenomena such as “fake geek girls”, “the geek social fallacies”, or the Open Source Boob Project. On the darker side of SFF still crouch those convinced Roko’s basilisk is going to come for them if they can’t rationalize becoming rich off building the next Torment Nexus (if you know, you know).
All our communities are human; that comes with both the brightest genius and the darkest horror.
But if you are someone who felt the need to drag Rucy Cui over “Hatchling”—look, I’m tired. Go outside, touch grass, hire a therapist, and consider that you just might be everything wrong with litfic today.
Then go write something worth reading, even if your mom has to do your laundry.
- He accepted writing a book about infinity and then got all the math wrong. Why would you do that? At least E.T. Bell’s fabricated mathematical nonfiction only made up the people . . . I fail to see how I could relate to DFW on anything. ↩︎
- Believe it or not, there are worse ones I didn’t include. Such as the many, many comments mocking Rucy Cui’s name, or the (thankfully rarer) posts that I found genuinely frightening. ↩︎
- Incidentally, I am someone who likes nothing better than a story that makes me google things afterward. I love anything that will improve my critical reading skills. ↩︎
- As a staunch free culturist who licensed all his music under Creative Commons, Coulton is significantly less risky to quote in a story than almost any other recording artist in a notoriously litigious industry. Don’t try this
at homewith other lyrics, kids. ↩︎ - It’s only fair to note that I at least appreciated this reviewer’s insistence on full, critical reading and their disparagement of the glib pile-ons, though I’m disappointed they opted to join in on same. When a rabid mob is after a colleague with pitchforks, opining that “She really was annoying though” is miserably poor form. No one is muzzled by such a consideration, at least not any more than by dictates like “don’t be a shithead”—after all, if a person desires a meaty critical conversation on the topic du jour it can almost universally be had in much greater depth within the walls of the literary group chat. Reviewing publicly is a noble and difficult art that I respect, but there are countless other unseen short stories one could review; the only reason to dump on this one is that people will click (and, one presumes, then feel smugly justified in their own non-reading of the story). In other words: internet points. ↩︎
- I also get mixed up with Ted Chiang, though that one’s more forgivable as we have thematic similarities in our short work, so much that I’ve been hired as a “budget Ted Chiang.” I am not half the genius Ted Chiang is, sadly. Despite the similarities, however, it’s a bit unreal that I’ve multiple times seen ARRIVAL credited to me or ZERO SUM GAME to Ted—the latter of which is even weirder as it’s not anything close to what he writes. But Asian authors and math I guess? Anyway, I can’t think of a time I’ve been mixed up with a non-Asian writer, which is rather statistically improbable from a random sampling. ↩︎
