![]() To his surprise, he found himself running up against the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924, which defined “Orientals as all people with 50% or more of ‘Oriental blood’ and forbidding them admittance.” Ruefully, he also noted that he couldn’t fill out the U.S. In the 1930s, Charteris was working as a war correspondent and a screenwriter for Paramount Pictures, so he applied to immigrate to the United States, since he was spending all of his time in this country. How come nobody complains that the half-Chinese Bowyer-Yin took a British pseudonym? Didn’t “Yi-Fen Chou” just do the same thing in reverse? There have been umpteen essays explaining why "reverse racism" is not a thing, but a letter written by Charteris in 1946 puts the flow of power in relationship to race into historical perspective. ![]() His given name was Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin. Not only was Leslie a man, he was Hapa: half Singapore Chinese, half British English. Adding a racial component is something different, especially when the pseudonym is an explicit signifier of minority status and claims the marginalized position of the female poet of color (“Yi-Fen” is a woman’s name).įar more common is the reverse, as seen in the example of 20th-century author Leslie Charteris, who wrote the bestselling Simon Templar/The Saint mysteries, which later became the impetus for a hugely popular television series in the 1960s. George Sand, George Orwell, and George Eliot were all nom de plumes, and two of these Georges were female. ![]() There is no precise term for Hudson’s ruse, which goes beyond the time-honored literary practice of adopting a pseudonym, which frequently included the subterfuge of changing one’s literary gender. Is "reverse racism" alive and well and living in Poetryville? Among them was “a strange and funny and rueful poem written by Yi-Fen Chou,” Alexie related, which turned out to be “a Chinese pseudonym used by a white male poet named Michael Derrick Hudson as a means of subverting what he believes to be a politically correct poetry business.” After evaluating at least a thousand poems, Alexie ended up with 75 deemed worthy for the anthology. ![]() When Sherman Alexie, bestselling author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, agreed to guest-edit this year’s edition of Best American Poetry, he could hardly have predicted he’d be in the center of a literary scandal. ![]()
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