Yellowface

Athena never personally experienced suffering. She just got rich from it. She wrote an award-winning short story based on what she saw at that exhibit, titled “Whispers along the Yalu.” And she wasn’t even Korean.

“I try to make sense of the chaos,” she told the New Yorker once. “I think the way we learn about history in classrooms is so antiseptic. It makes those struggles feel so far away, like they could never happen to us, like we would never make the same decisions that the people in those textbooks did. I want to bring those bloody histories to the fore. I want to make the reader confront how close to the present those histories still are.”

Athena had a magpie’s eye for suffering. This skill united all her best-received works. She could see through the grime and sludge of facts and details to the part of the story that bled. She collected true narratives like seashells, polished them off, and presented them, sharp and gleaming, to horrified and entranced readers.

Rule one: Do Not Read Reviews. Marnie does that weird thing older women do where she uses extra spaces and capitalizations, though I can never tell if they’re intentional or typos. If they had anything good to say, they would have written their own books. They are Petty Little People.

Let them scream in their own echo chambers, writes Jen. Performing outrage is a bonding activity for them. Gives them serotonin hits, literally, there’s research on this. Don’t let it get to you. They’re sheep.

But I treat myself this month. I buy a new laptop; finally, a MacBook Pro that doesn’t shriek and shut down whenever I try to open a Word file bigger than two hundred pages. I move to a nicer apartment—nothing quite as fancy as the Dupont place Athena had leased, but nice enough that anyone who visits will assume I have inherited wealth. I go to IKEA, order whatever I want without looking at the prices, and pay the extra fees to have it all delivered and assembled by two very handsome college seniors I solicited on TaskRabbit. I let them flirt with me. I tip well.

It takes me a minute to realize that the first person I would have called, the only person who would have understood this news for what it was, and wouldn’t have reacted with petty jealousy or feigned support, is Athena.

And then I see her.

Right there, in the front row, flesh and blood, casting her own shadow, so solid and present that I can’t be hallucinating. She’s dressed in an emerald-green shawl, one of her signature looks, looped over her slender frame in such a way that makes her shoulders look thin, vulnerable, and elegant all at once. She’s slouched gracefully against her plastic pull-out chair, pushing her shiny black locks back over her shoulders.

Athena.

They love me. They can’t look away from me. They’re here for me, they’re hanging on to my every word, the whole of their focus is consumed with me.

More important, it’s one of the scenes that was largely written by me. These are my sentences, my brilliance.

Bestsellers are chosen. Nothing you do matters. You just get to enjoy the perks along the way.