“Unveiling Identity: How Names Bind Us in Kate Lu Sedor’s Captivating Exploration”
I am grateful to them — I have to be. They are the ones who broke publishing barriers so I could even dream of writing in this language so foreign to my DNA, of seeing my work in print in this country. They are the ones whose names are hallowed simply by their being allowed into the American canon. And yet their umbrae, too, are a trap, a way for people, Chinese and non-Chinese alike, to confuse me for someone I am not.
When I was younger, I tried to write my way into whiteness. Subconsciously, I could create no other characters, because I had so rarely seen ones who looked like me. Every single one of those first attempts fell left flat on the page, no spark of life to round them out, not when I had nothing within me to give them, nothing that could connect myself to their privileged, albeit fictional, experience.
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