“Athena, the dead muse. And I, the grieving friend, haunted by her spirit, unable to write without invoking her voice. See, who ever said I wasn’t a good storyteller?” -June Hayward, page 48

this was absolutely fascinating to read. barring the gut reactions of june is god-fucking-awful and wow, this is a well-crafted narrative about authorship and the publishing industry, kuang touches—expands, falls into, morphs—one of the main factors of asian-americanness that i’ve been so curious about . . .

have you ever noticed that there are a lot of asian-american ghosts?

in anne anlin cheng’s the melancholy of race: psychoanalysis, assimilation, and hidden grief, cheng writes that asian-americans “suffer a ‘phantom illness’: because they occupy an unstable position in the ethnic-racial spectrum, their projected place in America is ghostly.” athena’s ghostliness transcends the by-the-text mentions of her legacy haunting june, but the discussion of what it means to be a marginalised voice—specifically an asian-american one—in this industry is marred by that same phantomness. she’s hated, she’s lauded, she’s a corpse fucked by the living over and over again. she can never rest. and all of that could be said while she was still alive. 

anyway. phew. that was a weird side tangent. this was a really horrific insight into the minds of all those racist white woman authors who posit themselves as liberal enough to excuse their own faults. the emotional beats were essentially the same and felt a tad bit repetitive, but no matter. it’s a punchy read for sure!