I'm going to say some uncomfortable things about race.

thoughts on American Fiction

I saw the movie American Fiction (which is based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett) its opening weekend and very much enjoyed it. I won’t give spoilers but I will say that the trailer focuses on one particular sexy aspect of the story. The sexy aspect: a Black writer whose novels aren’t selling particularly well is frustrated when his literary agent tells him the publishers want something “Black” from him so he facetiously writes an atrociously over-the-top, teeming with stereotypes novel, My Pafology—except the publishers go wild for it. In reality, the movie focuses on a variety of different aspects of the writer’s (Monk) life: his complicated family, a new romance, his thoughts about the literary scene in general. (I was quite touched by a nuanced portrayal of family). But there were definitely parts of the movie where I felt like Percival Everett and Jeffrey Wright (the actor playing Monk) were channeling things I’ve thought, only some of which I think I can cogently articulate, and probably only in some way that might offend some people (though honestly, not sure who, but pretty sure it will.)

I am a brown writer living in America, a country where the publishing industry continues to be dominated by white employees. I’m a second generation immigrant. My native language is English, and the only other languages I learned were ones I learned in school, none of which were my parents’. Like many Asian Americans (*NB: I actually hate saying “Asian American” because it implies that a “regular” American is white, but don’t know how to get around this right now), I grew up with a foot in different cultures. This meant being in spaces that were 80-99% white, watching TV in the eighties that was maybe 95% white and 5% Black. Much of what I know about India—about Partition , modern day politics, and Vedic religious philosophy—comes not from my family, but from things I read on my own or studied in school based on my interests. I then went on to study race relations and American electoral politics in graduate school. So that’s a bit of context, of who I am. I’m a person who probably knows more about the science of racism than the average joe. I’m also someone who constantly consumes international politics, so intergroup conflict is something I think about all the time. But I’ve never necessarily felt like I wanted my fiction to also be heavily focused on the same content.

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In American Fiction, it is Monk’s agent Arthur (who is Latinx) who tells him that his cerebral books based philosophy and Greek mythology aren’t selling well, and what the publishers would like to see from him is “a Black book.” We know that both Arthur and Monk know what he means. But Monk gets angry and says, “What’s a Black book? Any book I write is Black because I’m Black.” Later, he goes to a bookstore and is frustrated to find that his books are on the “African American” shelf, and not the “Literature” shelf. In his frustration, Monk sets out to write a “Black book.” He’s angry at the success of another “Black book” We's Lives In Da Ghetto (which pretty much feels like the author is referencing Sapphire’s Push, which came out a few years before Erasure). A “Black book” means a book about Black suffering, the ghetto, criminals, guns, the inner city, etc etc. And of course.. it takes off, which is commentary about the publishing world. (The publishers later feel like they can’t protest when he wants to change the title to simply Fuck). But American Fiction isn’t just a satire of the publishing world, because there is underlying content that highlights something minority writers are struggling with. If Monk writes a book that isn’t “Black enough” it’s just a regular book but it still gets shelved separately, away from the Literature section—he can’t win. And who determines if something is Black enough—? The white people in publishing? Black readers? Which ones? If he writes about characters other than Blacks, is the book Black? If he writes about Blacks but they are not “Black enough,” is the book Black? If he centralizes anything other than “Blackness”—by some narrow, amorphous definition—is he doing something morally wrong or artistically undesirable?

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When my first book Never Saw Me Coming was coming closer to coming out, I got a preview of the cover and was really excited about it. (It’s a banger of a cover!) One of my (white) friends looked at it, paused, and [bless her heart] said, “Why is there a white girl on the cover?” She meant no harm, but…. who were you expecting to be on the cover… me? Writers off all races (and, I would argue, women and people who write in first person) are often presumed to be writing about themselves, but I think this is especially the case for minority writers. I’ve heard many POC talk about how, during the PR phase of their book and in interviews, they are asked to talk about how they (the author) experienced such and such event which happened in the book. A fictional book!

To what extent am I reflected in my own fiction? You might be surprised. Readers often assume that they know who an author is based on reading their fiction. It’s not even just an issue of assuming that authors are their first person POV narrators. But it’s also assuming that the third person / third person omniscient narrator I’m using in books is me rather than a narrative choice that’s carefully crafted. You can read all my novels and not know who I am. You might get a sense of my sense of humor, or the types of things that interest me, but not really who I am. Fiction writers are tricksters, remember—we make our living (or try to) by making shit up. We construct reality in an entirely different way than nonfiction writers. I remember one time in high school, we had to give persuasive speeches about any topic we wanted—mine was on why you should be a vegetarian. After my speech, some boy asked me how long I had been a vegetarian. I wasn’t a vegetarian. (but am 100% troll!) My purpose is to tell you a story, a fictional story, so it strikes me as pretty wild when people assume the fictional story is true and also about me. Recently one of my very good friends read my second novel, A Step Past Darkness, which has six main characters and six associated POVs. He offered me a cogent and very intelligent analysis about how Jia is actually a proxy for me—and he was dead wrong. She’s actually the character I felt the most distanced from (she was the hardest for me to understand and the one I had to work on the most).

I have been Monked before: someone asking me if my first book was Asian, with the context being that none of the main characters are Asian. That book has three MCs: two white and one black, and two minor POV characters (one Latinx and one white). When I was writing this book, I was not thinking about “let me think about how to represent myself.” Nor was I thinking about “let me think about how to represent the world.” The characters kind of come to me somewhat whole, and that includes knowing what race they are. I wanted to set a book in DC because many people don’t see the apolitical side of DC where normal people live and breathe. Some depictions of DC don’t even touch on the fact that it is a very Black city. So I knew the touchpoint character (Andre) would be Black. Chloe is white because I always saw her as white, but something some readers don’t pick up on is that part of how she operates is by using white privilege to do interesting things—she doesn’t call it that, but that’s what it is—she just knows that it works. (Most people root for Chloe because what she is trying to do is kill a shitty frat boy. White privilege can be used for good, after all.) I’ve had a few interesting experiences where minority readers (who I think must have been reading electronic copies of the book, or who do not realize the last name Kurian is Indian) later told me that they had the experience of reading the book and suddenly realizing that the author is a minority. I have not had any white readers relate this experience to me. I don’t like to be “hit you over the head” about racial things (ie, me lecturing the reader), but there is subtle commentary about race in the book. This actually is a reflection of me, because it’s not possible for me to write a book about America and not have it reflect the observations of being a POC.

Here’s something annoying. In A Step Past Darkness, two of the main characters are Asian—one Korean, one Indian—with the context being that they live in this almost exclusively white town and people ostracize them. I will bet you that a significant proportion of readers (maybe even professional reviewers) will assume the Indian character is an author insert. She isn’t. I don’t do autofiction.* There IS stuff about race in that book—specifically about how racism looked differently in the 90s, back when I was in high school. It happened, but I didn’t realize that that was why people were mean to me until years later. I didn’t see social structure like that until college or grad school. This means in my book that takes place in the 90s, the two Asian characters are not standing up to white bullies and using modern day parlance to call out white supremacy. They know something is there, they know they are different, they can articulate this a little, but don’t have a full vocabulary. (*this does not mean I won’t be taken to task in reviews for the self insert that never actually happened. Obviously if I wrote about how smart Padma is at school, this is the author showing off how smart she was. [I was actually dumb in school.] Might also get criticism for both her parents being doctors because someone thinks this is a stereotype. [Not a stereotype at all, but a result of a consistent problem of American not producing enough doctors and having to import them via visa programs—a large wave came in the 70s, which is exactly timed for the novel.])

By the way, is A Step Past Darkness more Asian than Never Saw Me Coming because of the inclusion of 2 Asian POVs? 200% more Asian? Does this make it an Asian American novel? Alas, there are not a lot of dumplings or samosas,* but there is quite a bit of discussion of the insidious effects of prosperity gospel on American Evangelical megachurches, the small-mindedness of American suburbia, social stratification that goes beyond race to things like class, sexual orientation, or just looking different.

*there is an appearance of onion bhaji tho

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When minority writers talk about the whiteness of the publishing world and about how they want more equity, this tends to focus on representation. Representation is important. Brown kids want to see kids books with characters like them—much like how LGBT kids will, kids with disabilities, etc. When I was a kid, there literally were no Indians on TV—though sometimes there were white actors in brownface doing terrible Indian accents. Now there are more minorities in published books, though not in numbers that are proportionate to their actual existence. So to be clear, 100% representation matters. We need to see all kinds of characters in books.

But sometimes minority writers don’t articulate the other thing we want. Not just representation but parity. Not just “I get to see myself” (representation) but also “I want to be treated the same.” We don’t want to have to do things white writers don’t have to. A white person is not expected to represent all white people when they write a book. Nor are they expected to write about whiteness, or how whiteness has caused them suffering. No one is saying to the white version of Monk—who has been writing fictional retellings of Oedipus or something—but when are you going to write about whiteness? When are you really going to mine yourself and your collective cultural suffering for us? If a white person writes a book about a family struggling after the 2008 financial crisis, it’s not really thought of as a a book about a white family struggling after the 2008 financial crisis. “family”= regular family, which means white family.

But…to be fair, when you add nonwhite characters you are adding additional layers whether you want to or not. For example many people loved the fantasy of Bridgerton. Yes, it is very important to see POC depicted as romantically desirable. Many loved the idea of color blind casting. But because of the era the show takes place, and even if I didn’t want to, I couldn’t turn off that part of my brain that was like, “so this Black guy is friends with and potentially dating white people whose wealth comes from slavery?” Same thing for the Southeast Asians in the show— just chillin’ in England with the people who have colonized their home countries… But the whole point of a Shonda Rhimes fantasy is that maybe sometimes brown people don’t want to think about painful things and just want to watch hot people in Regency costumes. So if we acknowledge racism, or focus on it, we’re dancing the dance people want us to dance but maybe sometimes we don’t feel like dancing, but if we don’t, it feels like we’re white washing over something. So damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I don’t have good answers to these questions. I don’t want to write a Bridgerton. I also don’t want to write something didactic for a presumed white eye that wants to learn about being Asian. I just want to pull my characters out of my brain with some reference to the world they live in being what it is.

What stories do brown people owe the world? Do we owe white people one particular story—stories about immigrants growing up in America, or minority suffering, or a multigenerational saga where there are saris and spices? (And to be clear, sometimes I love books like these.) What do we owe brown people? If I portray us in any way negative I can be called out—like Asians did to Ocean Wong for writing about physical abuse in his family—basically for not keeping up appearances in front of the white folk. Think about parity for a second: imagine if Lolita had never been written, and a POC author published the same exact book today except with POC characters—can you imagine the fucking shit show of accusations—of what are you saying about [insert whatever race] people? But what if that author wasn’t saying anything about race at all? Nabokov only had to deal with people assuming that he holds the same feelings that Humbert Humbert does, but I don’t think any people said, what are you saying about white people? Are you saying they are perverts?

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Remember during the George Floyd protests when everyone was like, support Black businesses? But were you picturing going to soul food restaurants or maybe a bookstore that specializes in minority authors, and not say, hiring a Black plumber or flute teacher?

The other day—and I am not knocking them—I saw a social media post promoting books by minorities. Specifically, it was promoting books that were the cross section of having been written by a particular minority and featuring characters of that minority. So this promotes minority writers but only with respect to representation, but not parity. (ie, if I wanted to support Appalachian writers and made a book list that featured Appalachian writers but only if their characters were Appalachian or the content was somehow Appalachian, which sort of says something along the lines of, isn’t this what you’re supposed to be writing, dear Appalachian?) What if I wrote a kids book about rabbits? Is it Asian?? No? Is it Indian if the books are named Priya and Ajay instead of Flopsy and Mopsy? By the way, were you assuming the rabbits in Peter Rabbit were white rabbits? (racially, not their fur, which I’m pretty sure was brown.) I also write space opera (scifi) and while the characters are referenced as if they are humans (two arms, two legs), I never say they are or imply that they ultimately came from the planet earth. Effectively, they are aliens. Is the space opera not Asian then? But it is if I say it’s inspired by the Bhagavad Gita…?

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I remember back when Game of Thrones was a cultural phenomenon, a pop culture writer—I think at Slate—who was POC was talking about how she was frustrated because when people were pitching GoT articles or think pieces, they only wanted to assign ones to her that were about race. She probably does have interesting things to say about race, she’s a culture writer, after all, but might she have interesting things to say that weren’t about race? But again—parity. White people are not only called upon to talk about their race. They’re called upon to talk about their ideas. Is it presumed that the POC writer didn’t have as intelligent things to say about nonracial things than the white writers did? Why?

Here’s something interesting: I think fiction writers are clearly more pressured to write about or perform their race in a way that nonfiction authors aren’t because nonfiction is inherently driven by expertise and not a presumed or expected point of view.  The Emperor of All Maladies is a nonfiction book by MD PhD Siddhartha Mukherjee—it is a detailed biography of sorts of cancer and its treatments. He’s Indian—is The Emperor of all Maladies an Indian book? I think we can all agree that Between the World and Me is a “Black book.” Is Michio Kaku’s The God Equation Japanese? If he writes about theoretical physics, the thing he is a world renowned expert on, has he somehow disappointed the Japanese American community? Does he have things to say on race that are more important or interesting than what he has to say about theoretical physics? I mean, maybe, but maybe not—what is the probability of being one of the greatest thinkers in physics AND being one of the greatest thinkers on race relations?

I don’t have a good conclusion here. Before I got a book published, the only conversations I had about race were with very good friends and colleagues where you can be pretty frank and nuanced—which there is little room for in public spheres. Strangers and their commentary—particularly because it leans towards making explicit or implicit assumptions about an author based on the text of their fictional work—sometimes gives me pause during the creation of stories to think about “well what are people going to think/ say about me if they read this?” which is not a good creative space to be in. An important skill I am trying to be better about is quieting those voices and just writing whatever I want. I welcome your thoughts, including about the movie, if you have any.