MikeLigalig.com

When White Poets Pretend to Be Asian

By Hua Hsu
September 9, 2015


When it comes to literary hoaxes, it seems somehow easier to fake Asia, a land still distant and inscrutable to many Americans.
Photograph by Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty

In 1991, literary magazines around the United States began receiving mysterious packages containing the poems of Araki Yasusada, a deceased and entirely unknown Japanese poet with a spectacular backstory: he was a lonesome Hiroshima survivor whose absorbingly spare lines about the bombing and his small life in its wake seemed to riff on Roland Barthes, Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Spicer, and other figures of the Western avant-garde. The poems were often accompanied by diary fragments, scraps of paper with translations and exercises or a sketch of his face. Prominent journals published and praised Yasusada’s work, which was unusually experimental given his seeming isolation; there was a book in the works.

But there was no Yasusada. When pressure was applied to the poet’s biography, it crumbled: his entire life was a fiction, supposedly crafted by an equally obscure Japanese translator named Tosa Motokiyu. But there was no Motokiyu, either. You get the idea. The Yasusada poems eventually pointed back to Kent Johnson, a middle-aged white poet who was then teaching in Illinois. (Full disclosure: I once met Johnson on a train, an encounter he later wrote a poem about.)

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What makes this current round of Orientalist profiteering different is that the Best American series went forward with Hudson’s inclusion in their anthology. In a statement published on Monday on the series’ blog, Alexie describes what happened. Overseeing an operation like the Best American series, he writes, involves an overwhelming amount of work, with nearly two thousand poems to be read, reread, or merely skimmed. “It’s possible that I read more poems last year than any other person on the planet,” he guesses—less a boast than a justification for human error. He had entered into this endeavor with a desire to tweak the canon, if slightly, by promoting works by women and people of color whenever possible. He acknowledges that he gave “The Bees” a closer read “because of the poet’s Chinese name.” Once the poem was accepted, Hudson admitted that there was no Chou, but by then it was too late. Alexie kept “The Bees” in the collection. His only justification for pulling it, he concludes, would have been to save himself from the public embarrassment that has now ensued.

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The more revealing aspect of Alexie’s response is his account of what attracted him to “The Bees” once Hudson’s calculated hunch had garnered the poem “a close read.” The poem wasn’t obviously “Chinese,” however you might interpret that, Alexie explains. Instead, it referenced “Adam and Eve, Poseidon, the Roman Coliseum, and Jesus.” It was, in other words, “inherently obsessed with European culture.” Alexie goes on, “When I first read it, I'd briefly wondered about the life story of a Chinese American poet who would be compelled to write a poem with such overt and affectionate European classical and Christian imagery, and I marveled at how interesting many of us are in our cross-cultural lives, and then I tossed the poem on the ‘maybe’ pile that eventually became a ‘yes’ pile.”

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Proper, canonical, “serious” literature is built upon this flexibility of perspective, but the privilege of such perspective is rarely extended to those on the margins, whose work is often perceived as ethnographic—and for whom there is typically only one way to be “authentic.” Maybe Hudson was right to believe that a Chinese name would distinguish his work in the world of American poetry journals, which are not generally filled with Chinese names. But, conservative paranoia of quotas aside, the marketplace spoils for someone named Yi-Fen Chou are fairly meagre. If a Chinese name were all it took, there would be far more authors with names like Yi-Fen Chou at the bookstore.

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When I first learned about the Yasusada hoax, years after it happened, I wasn’t sure what to think about it. First I had to sort through how I felt, which was confusing enough. I was mostly surprised that these kinds of things don’t happen more often. Hoaxes frequently help us test the boundaries of our assumptions and orthodoxies, codes of taste and propriety. We learn something about the world we’ve made each time this happens: the limits of empathy, the blurred line between love and theft, maybe the extent to which a white woman can convince herself that she feels black.

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Yasusada’s hoax caused a minor rift in the poetry community, and nobody came out of it looking particularly good. There were those who defended Johnson, in part because he had littered Yasusada’s Japanese biography with easily fact-checked clues that suggested it was all made up. There were also those who considered the poems acts of radical empathy—including some readers in Japan, who found the testimonies of an imagined Hiroshima survivor an apt tribute to a moment of national devastation. Ultimately, though, the accolades were rescinded, the book deal quashed.

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