White Indiana Dude is Published under Chinese Pseudonym

[inmunitas]

The wonderful world of public radio brought this interesting situation to my attention today

http://kosu.org/post/how-white-indiana-poet-used-chinese-pseudonym-get-published#stream/0

Basically, Michael Hudson was included in the The Best American Poetry under the pseudonym Yi-Fen Chou. He specifically went by that name in hopes to get published more. In this case it seemed to work. The guy who chose his poem admitted he was more "amenable" to the poem because he thought the guy was Chinese American.

Well that's the publisher being kinda racist, just because someone has a Chinese name doesn't mean they are of Chinese decent, a name is just a name.

While I don't agree with Victoria Chang that what he did was unethical, I do think that Hudson did trivialize the difficulties non-white people face in American Poetry. It's a yucky case where someone truly Chinese American or otherwise didn't get their work published to show they are just as good as the louder voices in the poetry world.

Even with the publisher making the assumption that the author was a minority based solely off their name, the work was still published with relative ease. So what difficulties are you referring to, when given in this case their wasn't any? Maybe there just isn't many Chinese-American's interested in writing English literature, or the ones that are just aren't very good.

 

[Frankster]

Does the author of a piece of literature matter more than said piece of literature?

It's starting to be that way I feel. The recent sad puppies debacle has all but convinced me of it in fact.

Then again I guess this has always been true to one degree or another, didn't Jane Austen and a bunch of female authors back in the day publish under male names to hide their gender and be judged on equal terms as guys?
Heck some of the links here show this is still the case today.

TLDR The day I realized the world of literature has NEVER been impartial.