I’m not surprised Hudson chose a Chinese name instead of a name that might read as Latino or black. It’s been well documented in studies that a resume with a white-sounding name is 50% more likely to receive a callback for an interview than an identical resume with a black-sounding name. A white name like Emily “yields as many more callbacks as an additional eight years of experience” for the same resume with a name like Lakisha. Names do a lot, and Hudson did what any white man who could not bear the thought that his whiteness might keep him from success would do: take on the name of the ultimate model minority! Put another way: Everything people of color must endure, our sensational pain and our sensational brilliance, must be accessible to white people; they must have it in their quest to be rewarded. Put one more way: white people don’t like it when we don’t do well and they don’t like it when we do. But most of all, they don’t like it when they don’t do well.

My first year at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, there was one poet of color in the poetry program. Out of 50. Someone like Hudson would have likely seen that and thought, Lucky her, she’ll probably get special treatment and I won’t. But I looked at it and thought, Why the fuck is everyone here white, relatively wealthy, and college educated? That can’t possibly be the only type of person who can write good poetry. And it’s not. But anyone with even a shred of sense can see why that is precisely the kind of person who pursues poetry, a profession that almost all but guarantees a lifetime of not being paid for writing poetry no matter how “good” one gets. Anyone willing to put some effort into it can see why those are the kinds of people who apply to poetry MFA programs, who even know about poetry MFA programs, who can even imagine a future as a poet.

My white cohorts at Iowa who blatantly coveted my Otherness went on to sign with agents and publish their books. None of them have followed up with me and my “luck.” None of them speak about the reality of what the literary publishing world looks like for writers of color (short answer: very shitty.) And for all his (40!) rejections as Michael Derrick Hudson, being a white guy didn’t seem to stop him from publishing widely under his real name before he became Yi-Fen Chou.

I don’t think Hudson wants to be a chink though. (I don’t know any white person who does, but if you find me one, I’m happy to try to trade privileges.) I don’t think Hudson ever wanted the things a chink poet like me gets to have because what I get to have is certainly not money, and certainly not the kind of glory he’s after. I don’t know if he’s interested in interrogating how whiteness has helped his poetry career because so far he hasn’t made a public statement, but I’m happy to speak on how my Chinese American name and writing about my Chinese American identity has helped me in the literary world. For one, I get asked frequently to donate my intellectual emotional and psychic labor to educate white audiences and comment on issues of race because I am often the only or one of few people of color that many white writers/poets/editors/organizers of panels and readings know. I have been published many times without any compensation for my work in publications that frequently have few to zero other writers of color other than me. I am often put in the position of having to occupy higher moral ground when publications I am in are called out for being racist/misogynist/transphobic or whatever injustice they may have openly committed, and have felt pressure to pull my piece, even though as a woman of color who occupies many identities, I really would not have very many places to publish and share my work if I am to only publish in places that have never violated any aspect of my identity. It means publications run by mostly white editors specifically reach out to me when something horrific happens in the news to black or Muslim people, even though I am not black or of Muslim faith and the experience of being an Asian person of color is so very different from being a black person of color or a person of color who is Muslim (which, even though it is a religion rather than an ethnicity, is very often racialized to mean any brown-skinned Middle Eastern, North African, or South Asian person), and yet I am often solicited to write something nuanced and educated on any news item affecting people of color because when these publications don’t have any black or Muslim writers on staff, I suppose I’m the next best thing, which I could take as a compliment, but more often it feels like a burden.

What I want is to get paid for my labor and be credited for my excellence. What I want is to not have to be made aware that because most publications only ever make room for one or two writers of color when those publications publish me it means another excellent writer of color does not get to have that spot, and yes, we internalize that scarcity and it makes us act wild and violent toward each other sometimes instead of kind.

What I usually get is a white editor soliciting me because they have failed to broaden their social circles and reading tastes to include more writers of color. What I get is publications that mostly publish white writers using me to prove that they are “trying” and “improving.” What I get is people criticizing these publications and erasing my work or dismissing me as just another co-opted writer of color. No wonder a white writer who doesn’t have to take ANY of this on could succeed using an Asian American pseudonym. Because that’s what my cohorts at Iowa wanted too, to have the right to a name that gave them an “edge” without having to endure racism, erasure, tokenization, self-devaluation, and the constant requests for free intellectual labor.