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Asian American Writers Are Finally Breaking Out on Their Own Terms
These writers have always been doing the work. It’s the publishing industry that’s finally caught up with them.
In the summer of 2000, Alexander Chee, then a burgeoning writer struggling to get his first book published, boarded a train to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. On the ride, he pulled out the manuscript that would eventually become his debut novel, Edinburgh, and decided to make an unflinching assessment.
“I’m just going to read it, and if I really think I should stop trying to find a publisher, I will stop,” he says, recalling that day now, 20 years later. Chee, a gay Korean American writer, was being persistently rejected by publishers at a time when the very concept of diverse voices was largely superficial in the industry. “But I was reading it and I was like, I’m my favorite debut author.”
It was a moment of hubris that still makes Chee bowl over in laughter, but his conviction was a crucial matter of self-assertion. “I wrote a book I wanted to read,” he says. “I wrote a book that I wanted to see in the world.” Yet it was a book — a shattering novel about wading through the trauma of sexual abuse — that much of the industry failed to appreciate. “They couldn’t figure out if it was an Asian…
