When White Poets Pretend To Be Asian

Hua Hsu on the Yi-Fen Chou/Best American Poetry affair (which he calls “Orientalist profiteering”): “It makes a mockery of whatever ‘life story of a Chinese American poet’ the name Chou might have stood in for. It ridicules the ambient self-doubt that trails most people from the margins who enter into spaces where they were never encouraged to belong. As though it were all just a game, meant to be gamed.”