“Where have you been?” she cried. “Damn you, where have you been?” She took a few steps toward Schmendrick, but she was looking beyond him, at the unicorn.
When she tried to get by, the magician stood in her way. “You don’t talk like that,” he told her, still uncertain that Molly had recognized the unicorn. “Don’t you know how to behave, woman? You don’t curtsy, either.”
But Molly pushed him aside and went up to the unicorn, scolding her as though she were a strayed milk cow. “Where have you been?” Before the whiteness and the shining horn, Molly shrank to a shrilling beetle, but this time it was the unicorn’s old dark eyes that looked down.
“I am here now,” she said at last.
Molly laughed with her lips flat. “And what good is it to me that you’re here now? Where where you twenty years ago, ten years ago? How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am this?”
When people talk these days about how great it must be that diverse fiction is catching on, that they wish they were a PoC, that they want to write about other cultures because it’s the in thing and theirs is so boring, I remember this part of The Last Unicorn, where Molly Grue sees a unicorn for the first time.
It’s really hard to explain in a conversation the years of struggle, of hating yourself for being the kind of person who has to be a writer—not because you’ve got this bloated sense of ego or obsession that it’s the only thing you can ever be, but because you’re pretty much no good at anything else. Looking back at the struggle now that I’ve finally—finally broken through the door feels bittersweet.
But really, it’s not even about publishing sometimes. Sometimes it’s about everything. It was only 14 years ago that I couldn’t even talk about my culture without someone rolling their eyes. “Why do you talk about it so much? Why do you love it so much?” That the very act of telling someone who you are (after a quick minute of playing ‘Let me guess what kind of Asian are you’) could be met with disdain, because suddenly they remember that Filipinos eat dogs, and now you have to have this lengthy conversation about how you don’t, no, but culturally…
You don’t see PoC struggles with the naked eye. You don’t see the scars. You can only guess at the extent. Hell, for the longest time I didn’t see them; I believed in the model minority myth. It’s only these last few years that I’ve been able to find the words to describe any of the feelings I’ve kept in the decades before that. I used to chalk it up to being deficient, somehow. It’s me. It was always me.
I had that view with my writing, too. My books back then were flawed, but when I started querying I felt they were at the level of quality of many books I’ve seen in print. (Of course I could be biased. Of course. But I think I can say that with a level of confidence, since a book I wrote and self-edited within a span of 4 months, and then self-published, managed to nab a Publishers’ Weekly Starred Review). So yes, with that perspective, the books I were writing in the past were serviceable. I still use paragraphs I’ve written then in my writing today—my voice was already set, there was a lot that could be better but editing could’ve taken care of that…they weren’t total trainwrecks.
This is where I now admit that in those days, my partial to full request can be described as absolutely nil. I’ve gotten a rejection from Tor with a handwritten note saying “Try us again,” (which was in fact my first rejection) but afterwards, there was nothing encouraging. I’ve gotten snarky responses from agents, and the only partial request I’ve ever gotten was so unenthusiastic I just put the letter away, and the manuscript, and tried again, the despair increasing with every iteration. Many writers have to do this, too, but you see, there was absolutely nothing telling me I had anything worth telling. There were no signs. Not in the dead responses, not in the environment at the time (have I ever seen an Asian writer get deals? If they did, no one was talking about it), not in the conversations (all they said was that publishers didn’t want Asian fantasy from someone like me).
Almost every writer has to deal with this struggle, but marginalized writers deal with more. A lack of guidance, more frustration, the extra challenges the marginalized face (particularly when your worldview doesn’t match the “default,” so you have to do some extra mental gymnastics on top of everything else you have to learn as a writer), and more often than not, a healthy dose of self-loathing. Not simply low self-esteem; you hate that you’re limited by what you write, by how you see things, by what you care for. You hate that you have to take all those extra steps to make the world care.
Things are starting to change, for the most part. Maybe. We’re at least “allowed” to talk about these things now (you’re still fending off snarky responses, but it’s not as awful as it was a decade and a half ago). But there are many, many conversations happening right now in Twitter and in private spaces that make me bristle at how so many still don’t get it. The subject of appropriation alone is now wearing me out. People come to these spaces for assurance, or talk about how they’re doing it respectfully so it’s okay but…
The thing is, the focus is completely out of whack. Many of these conversations are often the marginalized talking to each other (Yes, we’re people, too!), trying to figure out their feelings, many of us veterans of these trenches looking back to try to help the younger ones. I mean, it’s so, so lovely that we have more and more young writers of colour get deals, because my God, how far we’ve come from when I was their age. But publishing still has a long way to go. We’re not at the stage yet where we can relax and claim victory. For many of us, the battle is just starting.
Someday, the needle will swing towards balance, and we can maybe talk about people borrowing cultures not their own “for fun” because we no longer remember how much it hurt to be an outsider in this industry. Maybe we can laugh about how well someone did another’s culture because there is so, so much of it out there that it doesn’t matter anymore, people know it’s a shallow parody or that you’re not supposed to take it seriously, people won’t use whatever’s wrong in there to hurt you and your children and the people you care for. Someday people won’t pretend to care; they already do. Someday.
With a flap of her hand she summed herself up: barren face, desert eyes, and yellowing heart. “I wish you had never come. Why did you come now?” The tears began to slide down the sides of her nose.
The unicorn made no reply, and Schmendrick said, “She is the last. She is the last unicorn in the world.”
“She would be.” Molly sniffed. “It would be the last unicorn in the world to come to Molly Grue.” She reached up then to lay her hand on the unicorn’s cheek; but both of them flinched a little, and the touch came to rest on on the swift, shivering place under the jaw. Molly said, “It’s all right. I forgive you.”
