Furious at white American author's use of Chinese pen name to gain fame, Asian American writers battle Yi-Fen Chou via Twitter

Readers are being urged to seek out the work of “actual Asian poets” in the wake of the revelation that white writer Michael Derrick Hudson assumed a Chinese pseudonym to make it into The Best American Poetry anthology .

The hashtag  #ActualAsianPoets has swept Twitter after publication of the anthology last week, in which Hudson, a white American from the state of Indiana, admits in his biographical notes that his poem The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve was turned down 40 times when he submitted it under his own name, but when he submitted it as  Yi-Fen Chou, he received just nine rejections before being accepted.

In response, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop began tweeting the names and work of “Real Asian poets to know” under the hashtag #ActualAsianPoets, with a host of others joining in to name authors from Jane Wong and Monica Youn, whose poems Thaw and March of the Hanged Men made it into The Best American Poetry  alongside Hudson’s, to Kevin Minh Allen (“But, here I am, back from the deep well they tried to drown me in”), R.A. Villanueva (“We are a hive of nerves-yes, a / flotilla raided by the dark”) and Monica Sok (“Tell me time is a strangling fog. / Tell me the day is an elk drinking carefully”). It also set up the satirical  #WhitePenName generator.

Author  Jenny Zhang, in a lengthy and impassioned piece for Buzzfeed, called on readers to “seek out the work of Asian American poets who weren’t included in the anthology, but whose poetry we ought to remember long after we forget this white guy in yellowname”, naming     Cathy Hong Park, Ken Chen, Tan Lin and Hoa Nguyen, among many others.  

Zhang revealed that when she was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for fiction writing, her white classmates “never failed to remind me that I was more fortunate than they were at this particular juncture in American literature”, saying that “they were shameless about their envy, not shy or coy at all about their certainty that my race and gender were an undeniable asset, which, in turn, implied that I could be as mediocre and sh**ty as I wanted and still succeed”.

Hudson, she wrote, wanted “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, tokenisation, self-devaluation, and the constant requests for free intellectual labour”.