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Listening to Sang by Elina Pitkäkangas and getting increasingly annoyed. This is something I wrote down on my book log notes:
"I cannot shake the question of why a white Finnish woman felt the need to write this. Sure, her parents lived in China when she was plotting this. Sure, her master’s thesis was related to this, she studied Chinese, traveled to China to research locations. Sure, she had a Chinese friend to help out as the sounding board. But she’s still white, Western, and not in any way part of the Chinese diaspora. In interviews, she’s said that YA fantasy books have typically been white, Eurocentric, and heteronormative and that she wanted to write more variedly but also more responsibly about foreign cultures, minorities, genders, and sexualities because as an author, she felt being party responsible for the diversity.
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But that doesn’t answer why she felt the burning need to write what’s basically danmei. Despite the story, despite being intrigued and invested, despite trying to listen to this with an open mind, I can’t help but cringe. Because there’s a LOT of non-eurocentric, non-heteronormative, non-white YA literature, it just has to be translated. Representation exists, written by the people who actually represent the people they write about. The answer to the lack of representation isn’t young white Western women writing the representative books, it’s to translate the already written books.
This whole thing made me think a LOT about Yellowface (by R.F. Kuang). And that’s not a nice association."
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This was an uncomfortable experience.
