Yellowface Quotes
"Publishing picks a winner—someone attractive enough, someone cool and young and, oh, we’re all thinking it, let’s just say it, 'diverse' enough—and lavishes all its money and resources on them."
"Jealousy is constantly comparing myself to her and coming up short; is panicking that I’m not writing well enough or fast enough, that I am not, and never will be, enough."
"Life is so short. Why do we build up these walls?"
"I could have saved her. I could have kept my head on, taught myself how to do it properly, put my fists correctly over her navel, cleared the obstruction, and let Athena breathe again."
"It’s a love story disguised as a war story, and the details are so shockingly vivid, so particular, it’s hard to believe it’s not a memoir, that she didn’t simply transcribe the words of ghosts speaking in her ear."
"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."
"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."
"Cue the mythmaking in real time, the constructed persona deemed maximally marketable."
"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."
"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."
"WHO HAS THE RIGHT TO WRITE ABOUT SUFFERING?"
"Athena had a magpie’s eye for suffering. This skill united all her best-received works. She could see through the grime and sludge of facts and details to the part of the story that bled."
"She probably didn’t even think of it as theft. The way she described it, this process wasn’t exploitative, but something mythical and profound."
Athena never personally experienced suffering. She just got rich from it. She wrote an award-winning short story based on what she saw at that exhibit, titled "Whispers along the Yalu." And she wasn’t even Korean.
"I’ve drawn a larger crowd than I expected; there are forty, maybe fifty people here. I thought this was just a club, not a whole congregation. A lot of them are carrying signed copies of my book."
"Awards in this industry are very silly and arbitrary... But I shouldn’t have worried. The nominations trickle in one by one: Goodreads Choice Awards, check; the Indies Choice Book Awards, check."
"I guess Hollywood isn’t too keen on taking a risk on films about Asian people."
"We’re not here to mangle your work, or whitewash it or Hollywood-ify it, or whatever. We’re all about the story’s integrity."
"The proof is in black and white. Read my previous novels. Compare them to the prose in The Last Front. Read June’s debut novel, and ask yourself: is The Last Front a novel a white woman could have written?"
"An online raking over the coals feels like a rite of passage every notable author must now undergo."
"Twitter is not real life; it’s realer than real life, because that is the realm that the social economy of publishing exists on, because the industry has no alternative."
"Reputations in publishing are built and destroyed, constantly, online."
"Twitter makes unqualified yet eager judges of us all. Depending on who you talk to, Geoff is either a manipulative, abusive, gaslighting, insecure leech, or a victim himself."
"When you’re in the zone, drafting doesn’t feel like an effortful artifice. It feels like remembering, like putting down in written form something that has been locked inside you all along."
"Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic."
"Writing has formed the core of my identity since I was a child. After Dad died, after Mom withdrew into herself, and after Rory decided to forge a life without me, writing gave me a reason to stay alive."
"Stop looking through the white gaze, I caution myself. I can’t make up stories about these people without knowing a thing about them."
"It’s not about the money for Brett. His reputation is on the line, too; he doesn’t want to burn bridges with the Eden editorial team by bringing them their most embarrassing client by far."
"The one-child policy meets The Handmaid’s Tale? They’re not worried we’re going to offend, like, all of China?"
"A well-phrased barb right now could irreparably destroy their confidence. But the right words of encouragement could help them fly."
"Maybe my gears aren’t irreparably jammed. Maybe I only needed to remember how good it feels to create."
"It has been so long since I thought of writing as a communal activity. All the published writers I know are so cagey about their writing schedules, their advances, and their sales numbers."
"And once you’re writing for the market, it doesn’t matter what stories are burning inside you."
"Stopping isn’t an option. I need to create."
"I want my words to last forever. I want to be eternal, permanent."
"Most nights I end up curled up in bed, phone clutched inches away from my face, browsing the web for mentions of myself and my books just to feel an echo of that thrill from the time I was a literary darling."
"I FALL IN LOVE WITH WRITING AGAIN. I START TO DREAM AGAIN."
"Falling right into this manuscript... when you’re a writer, all that matters is the story within."
"She always thought that what she did was a gift... once the personal became spectacle, the pain was still there."
"Go work on something else. Don’t—I mean, just get out of her shadow. Leave this all behind."
"Social media is such a tiny, insular space. Once you close your screen, no one gives a fuck."
"I will take my fugue state of delirious panic and compost it into a fertile bed of creativity."
"Tell me, do I truly deserve that? Does anyone?"
"What would you say is your greatest inspiration? It’s you. You know that. It’s obviously you."