Yellowface

I know,” says Mrs. Liu, and now there’s a hard edge in her voice. “I know, June. Athena never would have written something like that.”

Before I can ask her what she means, she hangs up.

I know how to lie without lying.

Reading her work wasn’t like knowing her thoughts, but it was at least a part of her she’d decided to let me see.”

knows you’ve still got it. Just maybe something that isn’t about a Chinese girl, okay?”

In March 2020, literary critic Adele Sparks-Sato published an essay alleging that the first paragraph of Hayward’s novella, Mother Witch, is a word-for-word copy of the first paragraph of Her, an unpublished story by late novelist Athena Liu.

There’s something unsettling about all this calm. Things are too quiet, suffocatingly so, like the air before a thunderstorm.

I’ve tried to block her out and push through, to write in spite of and to spite her.

It’s hard to reach such a pinnacle of literary prominence that you remain a household name for years, decades past your latest release.

But, my God, I want to be back in the spotlight.

She was mortal after all, they’re thinking. She was just like us. And in destroying her, we create an audience; we create moral authority for ourselves.