APPROPRIATION AS RACIAL HOAX

Dear X:

In 2015, The Best American Poetry series anthology included a poem titled “The Bees, The Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve.” Perhaps you remember this poem, in particular the fact that it was authored by a White, male poet named Michael Derrick Hudson who published it under the name Yi-Fen Chou, the pseudonym Hudson used to get the poem taken by the literary magazine Prairie Schooner, which The Best American Poetry guest editor at the time, Sherman Alexie, then happened upon. Hudson confessed his true identity to Alexie after he learned of his poem’s anthology selection; he also confessed his use of the female Chinese pseudonym in the final published anthology’s biographical notes. Hudson wrote that he’d chosen the name only after the poem had been rejected forty times by different journals. The female Chinese name, Hudson’s note implied, made a previously unpublishable poem suddenly attractive.

You can imagine how Hudson’s appropriation of this name—one, it was later uncovered, that belonged to an actual former female high-school classmate of Hudson’s—caused outrage among Asian American writers, many who’ve seen themselves passed over by such prestigious publications as Best American Poetry. Their anger only increased when readers and critics argued in defense of Hudson that, as race itself was merely a social construct, it might be effectively explored through false personas, an argument that I think is a pretty obtuse diminishment of both Asian American writers and our lived experiences in the world.

I began these letters to you, X, with the working assumption that you, like most writers, are concerned about how and if to write about the lives of others through their fictionalized voices. I believe you’re concerned about the ethical risk in appropriative works the reader understands to be imaginative. I assume you are not planning the far more radical proposition of pretending to be another person through your work, even though literary history is filled with people who’ve created raced or minoritized personas for themselves, or who’ve passed their work off as genuine expressions of events and lives. Such hoaxes and fakes pop up with surprising regularity. There are fake slave narratives and bogus indigenous oral histories, there is Nasdijj and Grey Owl and The Education of Little Tree, there is James Frey’s fictitious imprisonment in A Million Little Pieces, there is the debunked Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, and, most recently, there is the Canadian writer Joseph Boyden, who falsely claimed to be Metis.

But though you may not be planning to take on such a false identity, X, I want to explain to you just why such racial fakes are painful. I came across my own first hoax in an Asian American Poetry class I taught fifteen years ago at my university. The fake was named Charles Yu, and his poems were included in our class-assigned anthology of Asian American poetry from the late nineteenth century up to the 1970s entitled Quiet Fire. According to the anthology’s biography, Charles Yu was a Chinese student living in Chicago in the late 1930s; after a random Internet search, however, I discovered through a rare bookseller’s site that Yu was actually the pseudonym for a Jewish American editor for G. P. Putnam’s Sons named William Targ: interestingly, the same editor who rose to national prominence for buying and editing the Godfather novels. In 1941, Black Archer Press brought out Targ’s Poems of a Chinese Student under Yu’s name after several poems were published in the Chicago Tribune.

The students in my class, to my chagrin, were ecstatic. All semester long I’d fielded questions from a small but vocal minority of students resistant to taking my class in order to fulfill the university’s diversity requirement. Over several weeks these students questioned my course’s relevance to English literature, increasing my own concerns about this subject which meant, personally, so much to me but which seemed to have so few dedicated Asian American poetry anthologies for the field. was the only historical overview of its kind I could find; frankly, I hated it. So many of the poems insulted my intelligence about racial politics in America, and they offered little opportunity for in-depth analysis for the students. I had chosen the anthology the way some of my students had chosen my course—based on market constraints and artificial requirements—and so each night before class, I’d sit at my desk, groaning as I tried to imagine how I would fake fresh enthusiasm for my detractors who sat at the back of class, glaring into their dog-eared books. For a while, I even toyed with the idea of pretending to be