rainwaterspark | Random thoughts on publishing stuff (Reply)

I never entirely understood why some POC are so salty about white authors writing about POC and getting published until my manuscript with an Asian MC/love interest was turned down by a publisher, whose current catalogue includes very few Asian protagonists & writers (4 East/South/Southeast Asian leading characters* that I know of out of however many books they've published, all written by white authors), and a week later they announced a book written by a white author with an Asian love interest.

Yeah, I'm suddenly very salty.

*Of those books that I've read/skimmed/heard about, 1 had a white savior problem, 1 had Asian representation that I had problems with, and 1 had Asian representation that wasn't terrible but felt inauthentic.

And that's the problem. I don't believe that non-Asian authors are categorically not allowed to write about Asian characters, and I don't believe that all Asian characters have to be very much embedded in their culture or whatever, but if none of your Asian characters (though, let's be honest, it's a tiny pool to begin with) are written by Asian authors, I begin to wonder why you appear to value white authors' perspectives more than Asians' on Asians.