White writers and characters of color, part two

Two weeks ago, I posted some thoughts about white writers creating stories about characters of color. It was a meditation born of several things, among them the fact that I am a white writer who often writes about characters of color, the fury around American Dirt, and the recent selection by the publishing house I work for of a book of short stories by a white writer about black kids in Baltimore, stories born out of his twenty-two years of work there. 

This is just a very brief addendum to say that Adam Schwartz, the winner of our contest this year and soon-to-be author of The Rest of the World, published his own apologia for writing stories about characters of color recently. 

I'll let his commentary speak for itself for the most part, but I wanted to add something he shared with me. I wrote that he had been told by a potential editor that his book was wonderful (it is), but that she couldn't see how she could publish it "in the current climate." Adam told me this week that it was an agent, not an editor, although really, in publishing, you need one before you can get the other, usually. He also showed me a lengthy piece of the email he got from that editor. It was pretty devastating. He asked me not to share more than a short piece of it. 

Basically, she praised his book, but then said that, among other things, there is a cultural movement now to let diverse voices tell their own stories, and while this movement is important and a necessary corrective, it might overreach at times. The final line she told him was that "at this cultural moment, it’s hard for me to imagine being an effective advocate for The Rest of The World. For this reason, as much as I admire it, I think I need to step aside."

I've said this already, but I don't want to act like there is some phantom reverse racism going on in publishing. There isn't. Adam eventually got his book published with us. You could say it all worked out. But I think it's clear there is suspicion and trepidation about white writers and characters of color. Maybe that suspicion is justified, and maybe there is still space to earn your right to write those stories as a white writer, but after American Dirt, I think it's going to be even harder to earn it. Which makes it all the more unfortunate that this particular novel got the emperor's clothes treatment by one reviewer after another until someone finally called it out for being naked. There are a lot of books like Adam's that are going to have a hard time being read now because someone pushed the wrong book by the wrong white writer. 

The artlessness is the point: "Kim Ji-Young, Born 1982," by Cho Nam-joo

Where is the line between art that is polemical and art that is political? A similar question might be, "Where is the line between art that is didactic and art that holds a particular thematic position on a question concerning ethics or morality?" Nowadays, "didactic" is almost always a pejorative; we don't trust art when its main purpose seems to have been to teach us a lesson. But we don't have the same reservations about polemical art.

By polemical art--more specifically, by a polemical work of fiction--I mean this: a work that follows the Western courtroom model of disclosing the truth, rather than an objective, dispassionate recorder of truth. In a polemical narrative, it isn't the narrator's job to try to tell a balanced story. It's to tell the side of the story you're on with as much force as you can, and if someone wants to refute it, they can write their own story.

One problem with a polemical narrative like this is that it can be hard to differentiate between what is polemical and what is propaganda. This will likely come down to whether you as a reviewer happen to agree with the stance taken by the narrator.

Kim Ji-Young, Born 1982, by Korean author Cho Nam-joo, is without doubt a polemical work of fiction. It's possible the movie based on her book will be the next South Korean film to get the attention of the West, after Parasite swept the Academy Awards this month. The book has already had years of attention in Korea, where it seems to have landed at the exact right place at the exact right time to become a key cultural touchstone in South Korea's #metoo movement.

And did South Korea ever need it. Life is not good for women in South Korea. The gender pay gap is greater there than it is in any advanced nation. An astounding number of women face domestic violence, and it is still customary to try to convince women not to press charges. Confucianism, which influenced Korea for centuries, was openly misogynistic, and even though South Korea has done an amazing great leap in the last 70 years, there are some ideas that just won't die. A South Korean awakening to these problems was necessary and good for the country's future.

What's the book about?

I haven't seen the movie Kim Ji-Young. What I have to say here is about the book. There is an English translation of the novel, but I've only read Cho's original Korean, and any passages here are my own translations.

Kim Ji-young was the most common name for girls in South Korea in 1982, the year the novel's main character was born. The name is indicative of how very ordinary she is. "Compared to her peers, she was neither late nor early" to get her period, and "neither ahead nor behind" describes KJY in every way. KJY is meant to be an everywoman. Her struggles are the struggles of every Korean woman. There is an analysis of the novel in the back of my e-book version, written by Korean author Kim Ko Yeon-ju. Kim Ko titled her analysis, "We are All Kim Ji-Young." That KJY was meant to represent the struggles of all Korean women was not a subtle point.

KJY doesn't face any especially dramatic traumas in her life. As a Financial Times interviewer of Cho put it, the book doesn't have a villain. But KJY is still troubled. As the book opens, she is seemingly being possessed by older Korean women, who are speaking through her. (This is almost the only comical part of the book, as the young KJY is suddenly speaking like a grandma from the sticks.) At this point, I was reminded immediately of The Vegetarian by Han Kang, which I've talked about before. In Han's novel, a woman responds to the difficulties of being a woman in Korea by choosing to fade away, becoming more and more spiritual and less rooted to the world. The story begins with her behavior vexing her husband, who had always counted on her ordinariness. It ends with the main character in a mental institution, on the brink of death.

But Kim Ji-Young doesn't match the drama of The Vegetarian. After an intriguing opening, one in which it seemed that generations of women close to the main character were literally forcing her to find her voice by talking through her, the book slows down into a straightforward chronological grind through a series of microaggressions against Kim from the moment she is born to the birth of her own child. The most serious thing that happens in the book is a hidden camera in the bathroom at KJY's office that was responsible for sending nude videos of her's office mates to a room on the Internet. But KJY herself is not one of the people who was revealed in those videos; she had left work to have her child just before it happened. The second worst event is possibly when Kim was almost attacked by someone who followed her home on a bus when she was in high school. She was saved by a random old woman on the bus who got off to help her. The worst part of that affair was the way her father blamed her for it: "Why do you go to a tutoring office so far away from home? Why do you talk to random people? Why is your skirt so short?"

There isn't any one major traumatizing event. That would destroy the point, because it would make the main character extraordinary. The point is that her experiences should all be something every woman in Korea can relate to, and that the cumulative effect of these experiences, along with a culture that abhors women in a million spoken and unspoken ways, are enough to cause mental illness.

Intentional dullness

The narrative style, such as it is, stands out mainly for being entirely non-literary. It neither ascribes to nor achieves any aesthetic achievement. It is the most basic prose, reading often more like a rough draft full of ideas for a novel rather than the painstaking result of dreaming people into life. It's easy for me to believe Cho wrote it in a few months, as she says she did. It reads like that. One of the most arresting characteristics of the prose is the way it intersperses non-fictional facts about South Korean women's lives, complete with footnotes, at nearly two dozen points in the narrative. Having dropped a fact, the narrative then motors on, like we're watching a historical reenactment of an overtly fictional woman's life in Korea rather than watching the development of a fictionally "real" woman's life unfolding behind the suspension of doubt a good story brings. "In 1999, the year Kim Eun-Young (my note: the older sister of the main character) was twenty, a bill outlawing sexual discrimination was passed, and in 2001 when Kim Ji-Young turned twenty, the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family was founded." An endnote follows, along with some commentary on the mixed results of these laws, and then the narrative just picks back up in the next paragraph.

The story drones on and on like this, because the objective isn't to bring the reader into the story by making it feel real, thereby making us ultimately sympathize with Kim Ji-Young. It's to bludgeon the reader, to wear the reader down into accepting the point-of-view of the story. In a way, this is really effective, because it's similar to how the story argues women in Korea have been worn down. They're aware they're being treated unfairly, but the costs of standing up for oneself and finding one's voice always seem to outweigh the benefits. So women are silent, until the weight of oppression piles up and they buckle under it.

The novel isn't so much a story with a beginning, middle, and end as it is an extended essay which uses a running series of vignettes about "Jane Doe" to illustrate points.

The effectiveness of a non-aesthetic aesthetic

I can't really argue the novel wasn't effective, given how culturally relevant the book became. Since I'm always wringing my hands about whether fiction can even do any good, maybe this approach is a good one, one that should be used more often. Maybe people don't need a cerebral, spiritual meditation full of heartbreaking beauty like The Vegetarian or Easy Woman, another novel I liked about the struggles of Korean women in the modern world. Kim Ji-Young, unlike most literary novels, certainly had an observable impact.

The Financial Times article I linked above mentioned in passing that some commenters have remarked on the "artless" style of Cho's prose. It then argues that the ordinariness is the point. But this is sleight of hand, substituting "ordinariness" for "artlessness." There are thousands of excellent novels about ordinary people. Whether this is a great novel is up for debate not because Kim is so ordinary, but because there is no apparent effort to even try to forge the raw material of the novel using the skill of a novelist. It's one thing for every woman, no matter how ordinary, to see herself in Kim Ji-Young. It's another thing for every writer, no matter how ordinary, to see herself in Cho.

An essay by Jon Baskin has been making the rounds a lot lately. It's called "On the Hatred of Literature." He argues that the prevailing ideology surrounding literature of the last fifty years--one that held sway when I was a student--was suspicious of emotional attachments to literature because we as readers thought works said true and/or beautiful things. Rather, we were to hold ourselves in a cool, aloof detachment from the work, seeing it as always produced by, and therefore bound to perpetuate, a certain political power hierarchy. This has ended up weakening literature, Baskin argues, by making it impossible for anyone who loves it for the reasons all people have ever loved it do to study it seriously. To quote Baskin at length:

There is nothing wrong with literature participating in—or being used as material for—social and political debates: from Ulysses to The Golden Notebook to Beloved, many of the great works of twentieth-century fiction have served as touchstones in cultural conversations. Surely, though, we lose something when this is all we can figure out to do with literature—as any of the authors of those novels would passionately attest. To their credit, Lerner’s novels at least recollect the possibility of aesthetic enchantment, even if they do so from a remote distance. The viral success of two recent short stories published in magazines, Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person” and Tony Tulathimutte’s “The Feminist,” gives a more straightforward sense of the way the hatred of literature often manifests itself, in our public discourse, in the simple conflation of fiction and social commentary. (The lack of literary sensibility in these millennial morality tales was a feature rather than a bug: it was what allowed them to generate takes in the same register as the newest fragment of cultural testimony in The Cut.) That language, style and perspective clearly matter to Lerner, however, only makes his distrust of literary experience all the more telling. Not only his turn from aesthetics to politics, but also the suspicious theoretical commentary he embeds at the very heart of his narratives—as one critic has put it, a Lerner novel arrives already armed with “its own critique, and its own defense”—give evidence of just how far the hatred of literature has advanced. No wonder the haters were “cancelling dinner dates” (Joanna Biggs, London Review of Books) when the review copies arrived in the mail; Lerner is their man on the inside.

I did not personally find "Cat Person" as flat a morality tale as Baskin did; at the very least, I found it an interesting kind of experiment, because the story was a kind of Rorshach Test, designed nicely to get everyone who read it to see what they assume to be true about sexual violence as reflected in the story. But her follow-up was far less interesting, and it begins with a line I think shows the limits of the female imagination to see sex through a man's eyes. And I think "the simple conflation of fiction and social commentary" about describes Kim Ji-Young perfectly. There are limits to what polemical fiction can accomplish. Although it may get a lot of clicks or sales, as much from hate as from love, it won't convince many people to change their minds. Polemics aren't meant to do that. They're meant to win a formal debate according to the terms laid down. They're meant to get those who agree with you involved. They're meant to stir up latent convictions. But they aren't meant to convince. Those who don't share the right politics in the view of the polemicist are swine, and if they trample the pearl of wisdom offered, that's just what pigs do. 

When Kim Ji-Young almost wanted to be more

I happen to agree with a lot of the politics of the novel. But that doesn't mean I found reading the novel interesting or even, to use a Christian word, edifying for my political beliefs. I found the novel all the more boring because I agreed with it. Cho said she thought many women who have reacted to the book are braver than she is, and that the book is braver than she is. But the book isn't really all that brave. It could have been much more provocative if it had even the slightest bit of aesthetic merit. I've heard this all before, and the novel didn't really make me feel the urgency of anything it wanted to say.

But at times, it wanted to be more. There is a really nice moment when Kim's friend from her job she has quit to raise her child comes to see KJY and the baby. The friend gives the baby a few gifts, but also gives KJY a tube of lip gloss:

"What's with this lip gloss?" Ji-Young asked."I'm wearing it now. Isn't the color nice? It matches our skin tone."Maybe because she was a woman, she knew not to say, "Don't just sit around the house; get dressed up" or something like that. It was nice. She just said the color seemed like it suited her. That was it. Nice and simple. Kim Ji-Young felt better, and she opened up the lip gloss there on the spot and put it on. It really did look good on her, and she started to feel better still. 

There was an opportunity for more moments like these. The old woman who saves Kim from her stalker tells her it wasn't her fault, and KJY cries, she is so happy to be understood. The best feminist fiction has strong bonds between women. But the bonds in the story are all relatively transitory. They're the kind of thing that happen when you write a novel in eight weeks and don't bother to build a world or backstories for anyone besides the main character. We completely lose sight of Kim Ji-Young's older sister halfway through the novel. No female character stays for long besides Ji-Young. 

The effect of polemical fiction 

I hate when I find myself making statements that sound like conservative talking points, but here I go. The problem with polemical fiction is that in a democracy, winning an argument often means showing there is a more critical need to fix your problem than to fix some other problem. That means you have to show how terrible it is, and if it doesn't seem terrible enough, then you need to find ways to make is sound worse. The end result can be the fetishization of suffering. Women aren't just still struggling to get the equality they deserve and getting fed up with the catch-22 they're in, they're actually dying from psychological trauma. 

There is a lot of space given to how awful child birth is in the novel. There's a story to this. Part of the battle of the sexes in Korea right now (a battle that is far more vitriolic than anything going on in the U.S. right now) goes like this: Men say that if women want real equality, they should also be required to serve mandatory terms in the armed forces, like South Korean men are. Women often respond by saying that their patriotic duty comes from having children. Which isn't really the same thing, but you can make it seem like more the same thing if you really play up the horrors of it.

I'm not about to mansplain to women about why childbirth isn't bad. Mrs. Heretic's childbirth was terrible, and I had a front row seat for all twenty-two hours of it. It's nasty and barbaric, and I can't believe humans come into the world like that.

But nobody is making women have children. Yes, there is social pressure to have children, but having a child isn't mandatory like going into the military is for men. Presumably, women have children because they want to most of the time. And if you're going to do that, it's important not to focus on how horrible it can be, because that's just not a good life strategy for dealing with things that are hard. If you want to be a dancer, you can't focus on how hard it is training. You have to find ways to get past the hard parts so you can get the rewards you want.

Polemical stories--and a polemical approach to life in general--reduce resiliency, because we focus on how bad the situation is for us. We need to in order to make our complaint count for maximum points in the zero-sum game of wrangling for public dollars and attention. In Kim Ko Yeon-ju's analysis after the novel, she goes so far as to say that the current generation of 30-something women in South Korea actually have it worse in some ways than their mothers did. This is laughable. Their mothers lived in a military dictatorship. Their mothers came from crushing poverty. Their mothers had children they had to raise without help from husbands, while still having to hold grueling part-time jobs themselves just to survive.

What is true is that women today are psychologically troubled in ways their mothers weren't, and that they might in some ways be less happy. But we always knew that would be part of throwing off tradition and trying to find a new path. The old ways stuck around so long because they were comforting. Sartre introduced us to the notion that when we stop relying on tradition to tell us how to live our lives and take responsibility for our own happiness, we can experience a kind of nausea when we realize that our own happiness really is up to us. It can be miserable being a woman in a culture that legally considers women less equal, but there can be assurances in making yourself believe it's all part of God's plan. Taking responsibility as an equal member of society, and all that means, comes with challenges the history of the world hasn't prepared us for.

For women of Kim Ji-Young's generation, who were told they could have it all, only to find how hard it is to try to have it all, many of them might really be less happy than their mothers. Their mothers weren't equal, but nobody told them they were. Having been told their happiness wasn't that important, they set aside political goals for the moment and set about to find what happiness was allowed to them. But Kim Ji-Young's generation was told both that they were equal and that they weren't. They spend their energies struggling with the cognitive dissonance of this more than trying to find ways to be happy. Political struggle is noble, but it comes with a cost. We shouldn't act like the struggle can be fought for free.

The need for solidarity and consensus-building

One thing that strikes me in this book is how little women seem to help one another to be happy. Kim Ji-Young has no lasting female relationships that matter, other than her mother. Women do not share their burdens. There is no community of shared concerns. I do not think this was true of the generation before them. The atomization and individualization of culture in South Korea has come along at the same time as the semi-modernization of women's legal standing, and it is wreaking havoc on women who suddenly feel lost trying to find what their freedom/not freedom means.

The book is a long complaint. It offers no solutions. There is little female solidarity to overcome lingering inequality and seek to chart a new path in the absence of traditional rules to guide the way. There are no male allies to work with, only men relatively more or less guilty of being complicit with the patriarchy.

Complaint is necessary. Complaint is de rigeur. I would never tell any oppressed group to just be grateful for what they have and to try to be happy. But it is important to realize that complaint has psychological costs. So does independence. Real stories that sustain us for the long haul don't hide this from us. They don't leave us, like KJY was when she faced the realities of motherhood, bitter that nobody told us the truth. The truth is that you should absolutely fight for your freedom, but that when you get it, you are absolutely going to be overwhelmed with the responsibilities freedom brings.

There is a scene in the book where Kim Ji-Young is accused by passing men of being a "momasite" (Korean: momchoong/맘충). That's a portmanteau of the English word "Mom" and the Korean word for "insect" or "worm." The "choong" part of the word can also mean "parasite," and that is the sense here. The men saw her drinking a coffee with her child in the park, and think she is living the easy life off her husband's money. Speaking of Parasite, there is something Bong Joon Ho's movie has in common with Kim Ji-Young. In Parasite, the poor people down below fail to realize they have common cause. They could all have lived off the rich family if they had just worked together. But they couldn't, and so they ruined a golden opportunity for all of them to improve their lives. Kim Ji-Young's main character is in the same place. South Korea isn't just a rat race for women. There are men struggling with high real estate prices and slow growth of wages. Many are just giving up. The "3-quit generation" and the "7-quit generation" refer to how many young South Koreans are just choosing not to have families.

That means that women aren't alone in their struggle. Men are able to understand many of the things women in South Korea are going through, because they're going through the same things. Women are right to call out behavior in men that unfairly blames women or criticizes them. They are right to demand to be free from violence. But although the book didn't attack men, as some of its critics claim it did, it also didn't seek to find any common cause with people who are suffering from many of the same things described in the book.

A good story will bring others into a movement. It will do that by creating empathy, but also by being so damn beautiful, it's hard to fight it. An argument in the form of a notional story won't do those things.

American Blurt: The quest for the hot take is not good for literature

I have humble goals nowadays with this blog, but even those humble goals seem to get waylaid. I had planned to blog through the O.Henry Anthology, but unlike last year, I was only going to blog stories I really connected with, rather than the whole thing. So it was supposed to be easier on me. But after reading Rachael Kondo's "Girl of Few Seasons," the fourth story in the anthology, I got a little sidetracked. Then I got a lot sidetracked, and this post is the result of that sideways meandering. I didn't really have strong feelings about Kondo's story either way, and I could have just passed it by, but I was interested in Kondo's use in the story of Hawaiian Pidgin, also known as Hawaii Creole English. I wondered whether she might have been a user of the language at home, or if she had just used it in a story. Most of the use of HCE in the story was pretty light, the kinds of things most people who live in Hawaii (I lived there for four years in the 90s) pick up and use casually, stuff like "pau hana."

It turns out Kondo has written engagingly and thoughtfully on the subject of using HCE in literature. Pidgin is, in fact, part of her heritage. Her grandmother was among those Japanese imported laborers who helped create the language we now have, although it has morphed from what her grandmother once spoke. The use in Kondo's story of HCE was the story's biggest success; she used it to effectively establish scene and tone. It wasn't overdone, and it felt like it belonged.

Still, I wondered whether there might be some who would take offense to her use of HCE. Although Kondo's grandmother spoke it at home, I get the sense Kondo herself doesn't, or at least not beyond the casual level of most Hawaii residents. She--to her credit, with a great deal of honesty--explains how she grew up programmed to think that speaking "correct" English put her family on a level above the kids around her who spoke HCE. Although her understanding of the language has since matured greatly, I don't get the sense she speaks HCE at home currently much more than any resident of Hawaii. (Even the most foreign haole who lives there for a while will eventually pick up at least some.)

Last year, I wrote about a controversy within literary circles that erupted when a white poet wrote about the experiences of a (possibly) black homeless man. Some readers took offense to the poem's use of what they viewed as African-American Vernacular English. More accurately, they seemed to take offense to the poet's use of AAVE, charging (without proving) that the language was inaccurate and exploitative. Kondo's story, however, didn't seem to enrage anyone. Not that I thought it should, but I wondered rather vaguely why this story didn't, but a poem like "How To" did.

Maybe one of the reasons Kondo's story didn't cause any controversy is because Hawaiians seem to be pretty chill about the use of racial stereotypes. This photo is a comedian born with the name Shawn Kaui Hill, who, using the stage name "Bu La'ia," was all over Hawaiian TV when I lived there in the 90s. As you can see, he is wearing an afro wig and has a tooth blacked out. I was always shocked by his act and the fact it was considered so non-offensive, he was used in commercials doing his over-the-top goofy pidgin schtick. If nobody objected to this, it's hard to believe anyone would object to a story like "Girl of Few Seasons," which is obviously aiming for a sensitive portrayal of characters who speak HCE. It likely wouldn't matter to the community that the writer isn't fully a native speaker.  

American Dirt

I'd have just passed on from thinking about this story without feeling the need to write anything about it, but then the whole public storm surrounding American Dirt happened, and I've been mired in thinking about that and trying in vain to write about it ever since. It's a bit of a personal issue for me. I'm a white, male author who writes a lot of his stories from the point-of-view of people of color. To me, there's nothing exploitative about this. I'm a translator. I'm fascinated by the people I've come in contact with as a translator. I've bought my access to their stories the hard way, by putting in the work to learn other languages and cultures. But some of the dialogue online about Dirt seemed to take the same assumption some took about the poem "How To": if you aren't yourself a member of the same racial and socio-economic community as the characters you write about, you shouldn't write about them, ever. As a guy who wrote this story about an Ethiopian maid and this story about an Ethiopian-American runner and this story about a couple of Eritrean refugees and this story about an Ethiopian-American translator dating a Korean girl, I was sort of dismayed by some of the posts I saw about this book.

The actual story, not the story you'd get on Twitter

My dismay had something to do with how I came to learn about it mostly through posts I saw on Twitter. I'm not going to dignify the posts I saw by re-posting them, but I think they're probably good examples of the inherent limitations of Twitter. It's a great place to recommend thoughtful pieces posted elsewhere, and you can show your support or dislike for the story in an abbreviated form, but almost anytime anyone tries to express something substantive about real ideas, it inevitably gets turned into exaggeration and gratuitous provocation. The quest for traffic, clicks, and overall relevance leads to always looking for a hot take. It's not enough to say that a book may have meant well, but the decision by the publishing industry and Oprah to turn the book into a pampered darling is puzzling, given that there are far better treatments of the same subject by more talented writers who know the subject better. You have to instead scream about how white writers can never, ever write about people of color because it's always exploitative and appropriative.

Among all the heat created by Twitter, I managed to find a bit of light on Latino USA, which interviewed four people, including the author. There is also a nice chronology of the controversy on their page, including how one particularly stinging attack on the book by Myriam Gurba came to be. How it all went down was something like this:

-American newsrooms started getting advanced copies of American Dirt in late 2019. There were blurbs from respected authors, including Don Winslow, who called the book "A Grapes of Wrath for our time." The author praised writer Luis Urrea in the introduction, whom she said she read thoroughly as part of her research.
-Some Latina writers also praised the novel, including Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, and Reyna Grande.
-Myriam Gurba wrote a fierce take-down of the book, but had a hard time getting it published, because, according to what she says she was told, she was too negative.
-After the book came out, nothing much happened, but then Oprah put it in her book club, which is about the best thing that can happen to a writer as far as sales go.
-At that point, people actually started to notice not only Gurba's criticism, but that of other Latinx writers as well.
-Some people, like actress Salma Hayek, took back their support for the book. One person who did not retract her support was House on Mango Street author Sandra Cisneros, who insisted she thought the book had merit.
-Twitter lost its mind.

The rest of this long post, condensed

When you actually listen to the four people on Latino USA, you'll find that even the most strident of them (Gurba) isn't saying anything like "white people shouldn't write about people of color." That's Twitter dumbing down the conversation. I think literary figures should be very careful of how they interact with Twitter to keep from being part of the dumbing down the medium often leads to.

The longer version

I'll start by condensing what Gurba, Cisneros, Luis Urrea, and the author of American Dirt herself said about the controversy during the hour-long Latino USA program. I think everyone had at least a decent point or two.

Gurba: The book is trash. It wasn't well researched, it was schlock, it traded on a certain version of Mexico that only exist in the uneducated white imagination. She doesn't buy that this book needs to exist in order to humanize Mexicans to Americans who otherwise wouldn't engage with a book like this (i.e., who wouldn't read a book by a writer with a Latino name). She feels Mexicans are capable of telling their own stories. Ultimately, she says she wouldn't have been so angry about the book if it hadn't been billed as such worthy fare, if it hadn't been compared to Steinbeck. If it had been sold as a narco-romance piece of mierda instead, she wouldn't have fretted about it.

My take: In many of her comments, she is presenting her beef as with the publishing industry even more than with the book. She's right, of course. It's mystifying why some books become media darlings and some get gently ignored. There have been great books about the border already, none of which got the media push this pulp novel did. I do think her piece is a little heavy on its joy in Spanglish swear words and a little light on actual literary criticism and interaction with the text. It's going for the hot take, and as a result, it's not great criticism. Instead, it's a polemic about a number of things, only one of which is this book. She starts off her essay by saying that when she tells gringos her father was a publicist in Mexico, their eyes get wide, meaning they are all surprised Mexico even has publicists. I have to wonder if she is intentionally seeking out the stupidest white people on the planet. Starting off in this way makes me think that, even though she said her objection isn't to who wrote it but how she wrote it, it's also maybe a little bit about who wrote it.

And while I accept that Mexicans can tell their own stories just fine, thank you very much, my life's work is in translation, and it is possible that a white writer who really does the work (which American Dirt did not do) to understand his subject may be more successful translating that work into the target audience's idiom than a Mexican writer. When I translate Korean to English, what I really want is to have a native Korean speaker who learned English and a native English speaker who learned Korean working together. Those produce the best overall translations. I think stories in the real world might also work best if we had natives of multiple worlds trying to speak to certain topics. Of course, the problem with American audiences is that we tend to only lean on the work "in translation," the one from the writer who comes from our own community. It's hard to even get Americans to watch a movie that has subtitles.

Cisneros: If you've never heard Cisneros speak, her voice is a little distracting. She's got kind of a Mickey Mouse squeaky voice. And some of what she said was a little nuts. She had a valid point that there's room for more than one person's story. A white lady can tell a story about the border and so can a Chicana from Matamorros and so can a Chinese journalist from Chengdu. What she's mostly been criticized for is saying that American Dirt is necessary because some people just wouldn't read a book by someone with a Latino name. At first, I didn't think that's what she was saying in the interview. I thought she was saying someone would read Dirt because it was a trashy beach novel but they might not read someone like Reyna Grande because it's "serious" fiction. But the interviewer asked if she meant people wouldn't read someone with a Spanish name, and Cisneros agreed that's what she meant.

My take: Cisneros is definitely wrong to co-sign the publishing industry pushing a book about Mexico by a white lady if they're only doing it because they think they can sell that better than a book by someone named Hernandez.

While I agree that there ought to be enough room for everyone to tell their story, I wonder if the fact that pragmatically, there really isn't enough room for everyone is part of why Gurba is so angry. There can only be so many Oprah Book Club books. If this one gets in, there won't be room for a Latinx writer to get a book about the border onto her list. The book industry's quest for equality sometimes helps writers of color, but it can also hurt them. A publisher might not take on a second Chinese-American writer if they already have one who sells well, because they'd think they'd be cannibalizing their own sales. Ethnic groups are sales niches to them, and there's a zero sum game competing for the dollars of a shrinking pool of readers. If a Latinx writer wrote a book about the border this year, nobody would touch it, because we already have one of those. It's kind of easy for Cisneros to talk about there being room for everyone when she's living off the royalties of a book that has sold millions of copies to school children. I have to really ask myself, if I ever really break through, am I possibly making my voice the one American readers will read on certain topics, and if so, is that right? Like most writers, I couldn't stop writing if I tried (I've tried! I'm trying right now!), so I doubt this concern will make me stop, but it ought to sober up my dreams a bit.


Urrea: Luis Alberto Urrea has written a couple of stunning books about the border. They were non-fiction. The best-known is The Devil's Highway. That book is a generation old now. A few people have pointed out that American Dirt seems to plagiarize from Urrea.  Luis spoke slowly during this interview, audibly a little angry, I think, which is probably as strong an indictment of this book as any I can imagine. Luis was an instructor of mine for a poetry class in graduate school. He's as gentle a man as I've ever met. So if someone has made him upset, that person likely really did something wrong. Anyhow, Luis spoke mostly about his sense of violation, because his research had been lived research. "I buried that person," he said about a child in a scene that American Dirt most obviously "borrows" from. Urrea, however, also was the most overt in making it clear that the problem isn't that Cummins is white. "Lots of people have written great stuff about the border from an Anglo perspective," Urrea said. The problem was that the book was derivative and lazy.

My take: I love Luis.

Cummins herself: I totally get that the publishing industry is unfair to people of color. The frustration I'm hearing is totally fair. But I'm not responsible for all that. I wish people would talk about the book and not the industry.

My take: I read one chapter of her book. It wasn't good. Nothing is fair. Publishing is stupid. Publishers are idiots. I don't hate her for writing a bad book. I hate the game, not the player.

This all comes home for me

If you get away from Twitter, everyone seems to be saying the right things. The problem isn't that she's white. It's not who wrote it, but how she wrote it. But I can't help sympathizing with Cummins in one way. She says she wrote an earlier version of the book with a white narrator who was observing, rather than writing from the perspective of the immigrant herself. She later tore that version up and started over, because "who cares what I have to say, really?" In other words, she was more interested in the people she had researched than she was in her own role as researcher.

I can sympathize. I write my fair share of stories about white people in middle class situations, but I really love stories about people who are different from me. They're more interesting than I am. I like stories about Ethiopians and Eritreans and Koreans and Latino migrant workers and the kids from Baltimore Mrs. Heretic taught. Sometimes, when I write about them, I do it from the point of view of the white observer. I did that in this story, about a white father trying to figure things out when his family adopts a black girl. That was an easy way into the story for me, because I've really played that role in my life. That's actually the way I know the "character" I got that story from. But I don't always do that. When I told a story about an Eritrean woman at a refuge center in Italy who needs to decide whether to abort the child she was impregnated with by rape from a kidnapper during her flight from Eritrea, I didn't tell it from the perspective of the white nurse aid worker. I told it from the POV of the girl, Hiwet. Why? I don't know. In my mind, I saw her. A story from the POV of the nurse would have been about craft and technique and how to tell a story through learned details. The story I told was about the girl, what happened to her, and what she did about it. I didn't want a complicated story. I wanted to keep it simple. That felt more respectful to what she went through, and what so many real people like her went through.

I've told stories about Koreans and been told by white editors that they thought I was falling back on cliches. I don't believe they'd have told me that if my name was Pak Nam Won. I think they assume lack of authenticity on my part. Most white editors have no idea what authenticity in a Korean character would look like. One editor responded to a story by telling me he asked his brother who has been to Korea if he thought a Korean would act the way I made her act in a story, and the brother said no. How do I get anywhere with that kind of refusal to accept an ethos I've actually worked to earn?

The winning book

I'm now the lead fiction editor for the Washington Writers' Publishing House, the small press that published my own book a few years ago. We publish one poetry book and one fiction book a year. We recently picked this year's winning fiction book, The Rest of the World, by Adam Schwartz.

Like many presses, ours is always looking to try to bring some fairness to publishing by actively looking to publish writers of color. However, we also run a blind contest, meaning we don't know anything about the writers when we're reading their work. We have to pick based on what's on the page. When I was reading Adam's book, I was blown away by a few of the stories. Even though this year had the best crop of books since I started judging the contest three years ago, I knew his was the winner. Four of six judges agreed with me. The two who didn't still thought it was tied for first or in second.

The stories are largely about young people of color in Baltimore, most of whom are living in tough circumstances. I knew the stories rang true, as did the occasional use of dialect, because I've spent enough time with the kids Mrs. Heretic used to teach in Baltimore to have a decent sense of authenticity. I was really excited, because I thought we had a book by a person of color that was a stunner.

I was stunned myself when I realized, after picking the book, that it was written by a white guy. But that white guy came by his authenticity through hard work. He's been a teacher in Baltimore for twenty-two years. I had the chance to meet with Adam recently. His love for his kids is real, and that's what powered his fiction. He has an ear for the language his kids use because he loves them and he pays attention.

I had picked the book blind, so I knew I had to pick it even after I knew who Adam was. But I was worried. Would anyone criticize the press for an American Dirt kind of publication?

It wasn't an idle concern. Adam has recently faced something like that. He got a story (one of the stories that's in the book) accepted for publication in a pretty good journal. The editor said she loved it and he was all set to go. But then, she showed the story to a "sensitivity reader" who found problems on every page. The reader thought Adam was preying on negative stereotypes of poor, black kids. I've read the story. I don't understand how having a story with a young, black man in tough circumstances is the same as trafficking in negative stereotypes. And I don't believe a black writer would have to face these questions about authenticity.

Adam shouldn't have to, either. He's a teacher of young, black kids, many of whom have stories that would crush your heart to hear. That's not white imagination. It's black reality, a reality Adam lives in and does his part every day to try to turn around. Mrs. Heretic still has never recovered from teaching in Baltimore, because her poor, empathetic heart couldn't stop sharing in the trauma of her students, until it became her trauma, too. Adam's not an outsider to the communities he writes about. He's a vital part of those communities.

That incident with the journal wasn't the only time he's faced these kinds of accusations. At a writer's conference, he workshopped the same story. He told me about a fourth of the class was openly hostile to it, calling it "voyeuristic" and an example of the "white gaze." (If there's one thing that's worse for literary criticism than Twitter, it's mediocre intellects who only half understand the jargon of literary theory.) One person cornered him after the session to tell him he shouldn't write about people of color.

This was all for a story whose underlying main plot point came right from a student Adam had. This wasn't a white guy watching rap music videos about gangsters on his couch and letting his imagination run wild. In the words Luis Urrea used, Adam "buried that kid." Adam earned his stories by living within both physical and emotional hearing distance of their origins, then applying a caring and intelligent mind to shaping them.

All that matters is if the story is good

The most-read post I've ever written on this blog was about Danielle Evans's short story "Boys Go to Jupiter," about a white girl who wears a Confederate flag bikini. The third most-read post I've ever written was about Danielle Evans's "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain," about a couple of white, emotionally challenged women. Nobody questions whether she ought to be writing about white people as a black writer. Nobody questions whether she is exploiting negative white stereotypes.

The reason nobody questions Evans isn't some reverse racism. It's because Evans absolutely killed those two stories. Her authority to write about white women comes from writing them really well, nothing else.

I'd like the same authority for myself when I write about the people I do, including some people of color. I don't believe there's any kind of reverse racist code keeping me from it, but I do think that for people like me, trying to get our foot in the door, we face a lot of people who don't know the difference between fake authenticity and real, so they rely on the identity of the author to help them. They will make assumptions. There's a reason Michael Derrick Hudson couldn't get a poem published until he said his name was Yi-Fen Chou. Again, I don't think it's an affirmative action program as much as it's befuddled editors, looking for something they haven't seen before, swamped with work that largely seems of roughly equal quality, and looking for some kind of clue to help them out.

I don't want to be mistaken as saying I think the industry is stacked against white men. It obviously isn't. There are numbers to back that up. But getting into the industry is tough for a white guy writing particular kinds of work. I'm as disturbed as anyone when the wrong novel by a white writer writing about people of color gets support it doesn't deserve. It's bad for me. A novel like American Dirt getting unfairly praised, supported, and rewarded--and then lambasted--will only make the top of the industry less likely to pick works like this. The bottom of the industry is likely to follow suit, in a crude, robotic, and likely not very thoughtful way. (Adam Schwartz pitched a similar book to the one we're publishing to an editor before. She said she loved it, but "couldn't think of publishing it in this climate.")

This isn't a manifesto of white male grievance. It's not Matthew Binder's piece. I want to see publishing (if it survives at all) pushing more stories by people of color, not for abstract reasons, but because people of color are so often the right people to tell stories. I don't believe white men are in trouble, or unfairly pushed out of writing. This isn't about any of those things. It's about how gatekeepers pick crap, and how this affects people at the bottom. It's about how for every American Dirt, a book written by someone without the bona fides to tell it that gets unjustified support, there's an Adam Schwartz, being told he doesn't deserve to tell a story he clearly does. It's about how quickly a rational, nuanced discussion of the role of white writers in telling stories of people of color beomes "shut up, cracker," on social media, and how social media then becomes the only version of the discussion that exists.

At the bottom of all this is the quest for the hot take, the spicy take-down. Hot takes have been an unfortunate part of academic life for centuries, as critics writing about literature people have been reading and commenting on for hundreds of years try to find something new to say. Twitter is just a very condensed version of academic nonsense. But unlike academic work, which most people ignore, Twitter drives sales, which means that as vapid as the discourse on Twitter is, publishers can't afford to ignore it. We all have a part to play in not feeding into talk that's more for public consumption than serious talk about serious issues. When we feed that beast, we help contribute to the production of more bad literature from a shaky and uncertain industry. More importantly, we bring literature down to the level of pop culture, or worse, a cheap imitation of wannabe pop culture, every bit as pathetic as a church trying to look relevant by running commercials about how hip it is.