To fellow writers, editors, publishing professionals, and other folks in the Canadian literary community,
In 2018, I wrote the blogpost “Racism in #CanLit: Barriers in Publishing & The Need for Safe Spaces.” The blogpost shared my experience witnessing racism and slurs uttered by a bookseller and publishing professional in criticism of a Chinese poet reading in Mandarin, my call for the need for safe(r) spaces, and my resignation from my position as the Poetry Editor at Ricepaper Magazine after facing a strong lack of support from the publication and its parent and affiliated organizations, Asian Canadian Writers Workshop and Literasian. It is with a very heavy heart that I now write this follow up letter and new statement, which has unfortunately become necessary.
I cannot speak for the experience of others from or outside my own community, but I express strong solidarity toward others facing challenging situations in CanLit and beyond. When it comes to the issue of racism, I stand especially in solidarity with Black and Indigenous writers and peoples for all their long history of activism and ongoing work. As a light-skinned Han Chinese woman, I also want to acknowledge the problems of anti-Blackness and colorism within Asian communities, and the ongoing colonial violence happening against Indigenous peoples on the land known colonially as Canada and on lands elsewhere. I have a lot of learning and (un)learning to do as well, and we all have much work to do still.
This letter will primarily be about my own personal experience, but I share it because I think it has had far reaching ripples beyond my own life, as it has affected many of my friends, peers, and folks I have worked with. It has fractured communities I’m a part of as well. My experience is not an individual case, but a pattern that I see, in CanLit and many other creative and academic communities.
A Brief Summary of the Original Incidents in 2018
For those of you who are not familiar with the situation, in 2018, two Asian men, Allan Cho and Todd Wong, who are the leaders of Ricepaper and ACWW, wrote me a threatening letter while I was Poetry Editor at Ricepaper. The letter was approved by entire board at Asian Canadian Writers Workshop and I do not know the names of all the board members. They threatened me legal consequences because I was speaking out against #racismincanlit, criticizing a racist letter to the editor directed at me from a white male donor and the strong workplace bullying that I felt I faced at Ricepaper. Allan and Todd tried to silence me. I refuse to be silenced by those threats and bullying, and it’s why I continue to write about this to this day.
I was also traveling for research abroad in a different country at the time most of these events happened, so I had to navigate the emotional challenge of spending three months feeling constantly threatened while on the road. I began and ended my days by stressing over legal threats, checking social media constantly, and writing long endless letters to a lawyer in Canada, who I could only afford with the help of donations. The lawyer reassured me that I had a strong case to defend myself. No lawsuit happened in the end. You can read more about what I have written about the details of these incidents in this article on carte blanche.
However, after my lawyer helped me draft my final letter to Ricepaper and after three months of feeling threatened everyday, Allan and Todd gaslit me by saying it was all simply a misunderstanding rather a threat. Ricepaper even published a social media post that was very double-faced, claiming to support me. I do not believe those lies, even as I am concerned that others who are not close to the situation might be fooled by these external displays of false solidarity.
What happened since then in the past two years?
Two years have passed since those events. No one at Ricepaper or ACWW has apologized. I do not wish to hear from Allan Cho or Todd Wong, and I will not speak with them, but none of them have ever been accountable for their actions as folks who hold multiple leadership and gatekeeping positions at organizations in CanLit and Asian Canadian communities. I have seen no change whatsoever and very few people speak against them publicly about original racism incident and the events at Ricepaper that drove 3 members, including me, to resign.
I want to express really strong thanks to those folks around me who have been supportive. Thank you to the older writers and mentors who never turned their back on me. There are so few of you looking out for young women of color and emerging writers, and I don’t know where I would be without you as role models. Thank you to my dearest friends who have shown so much integrity, kindness, and care in the ways they have listened to me and tried to help me while I was dealing with so much trauma and lost trust in the greater community at large. Thank you to the authors, editors, and publishing professionals who I don’t know well but who reached out anyway to express support in small or big ways. I hold my hands up to you. You are one of the main reasons that I continue to do the work I do and that I can keep going.
However, so much has also happened behind-the-scenes that has been really traumatic, and continues to be ongoing and neverending, which is why I write this letter. It’s hard and scary even for me to write this letter to speak out about these issues. Throughout the two years, while isolated from my own community and after resigning from my main editorial position as one of the few Asian Canadian poetry editors, I have had to decline or lost job opportunities, writing residency opportunities, and event invitations due to safety concerns. I have been in multiple situations where I had to choose between losing paid work or possibly working with someone who threatened me. I really feel like that I have lost so much of my community and so many doors have closed to me because of my work in speaking up. I feel betrayed and driven out, even though I refuse to be silenced.
I tried to start a collective that fell apart; someone in the new community we created, which I placed so much trust in and included members who resigned from Ricepaper, decided to betray our trust and work with problematic organizations for their own benefit while not acknowledging the harm done to me and others in the collective. Other people threw me under the bus by going behind my back to work with problematic organizations while telling me to my face they support me and asking for my labor and advice as a writer and editor. Some of these people are now being celebrated publicly for “supporting” BIPOC writers.
I have had multiple established authors in the community gaslight me or brush my experiences aside at the briefest mention of it. When I had to turn opportunities because of safety, they told me that I was overreacting or they didn’t think I should take it so personally. I have had a former friend in the community who I had helped many times over the years tell me that they do not know anything about legal issues and blamed me for lack of professionalism, then go on to be published by Ricepaper. These incidents mean I’m very uncomfortable speaking one-on-one to individuals who I do not know well about my experience and they hinder my ability to speak up for myself.
Some folks also wanted me to reconcile with Allan Cho, Todd Wong, or Ricepaper/Literasian/ACWW, repeatedly breaching my boundaries and acting without my consent. I have had an established poet repeatedly spam tag me on Twitter with the organization that threatened me, alongside articles about how we should face racism together. They ignored my request for them to stop, to the point I had to block them. They also ignored a friend who reached out to them on my behalf. Then they continued sending me unsolicited letters that were triggering, which I have had to mark as spam because I cannot stop their emails.
Going Forward
Over the past two years, I have continued to remain as strong as I could and be active in the writing communities because I love writing and refuse to give that up. However, at this point, I simply cannot continue participating in this community and working closely with folks who refuse to acknowledge what happened or brush it aside.
In the coming weeks, I will be re-evaluating all my involvements in CanLit and the wider writing community to think about where my energy is best spent and whose work I should be supporting, as well as which involvements and communities I should let go of. I’ll be prioritizing personal boundaries and creative work from now on, with folks who I trust and want to support, and who see me in the same light. Thank you for your understanding.
To my friends, acquaintances, and folks I have worked with or interacted with in the community, I ask for your support, care, and sensitivity. I am not looking for advice or tips. I do not want to go into details explaining everything that happened, and I will not tolerate any harmful actions like the ones I mentioned above. Instead, I ask my friends and acquaintances to try to acknowledge what happened if you feel comfortable doing so, to not look away when these incidents happen to me, and to not cause more harm by taking actions that make me feel gaslit.
I would like to urge folks around me to think about the harm that can be perpetuated in continuing to work with and supporting problematic organizations that refuse to take accountability and aren’t being held accountable, and how that harm can grow and escalate across months and years and decades. What message do you want to send to young women of color and emerging writers? What kind of community do you want to build towards? How can women of color writers and editors feel safe in a community where they risk legal threats, career loss, and repeated gaslighting just for speaking out?
Call to Action
In addition to the above personal thoughts, I have a call to the community at large. I urge you to work towards advocating the specific actions that I laid out in my original statement written two years ago, which I have updated here:
1. I urge all events, spaces, organizations, and publications to create an explicit no-tolerance policy for discrimination and harassment for all events, spaces, literary organizations, and publications. Not only this, but create protocols and strategies for how this is implemented. Make well-designed anti-harassment and diversity training mandatory. This is even more important now in the era of online events and social distancing, where incidents of racism seem to have increased.
2. Learn about how to be a good anti-racist bystander, in real life and online. Make sure event planners, publications, and literary organizations are prepared to handle incidents of racism and have a plan for how to intervene when things go wrong.
3. Hold organizations that mistreat writers and editors of color accountable. Write emails and social media posts. Demand public apologies, systemic change, and actions to redress the harm done. Find ways to support writers and editors of color so they do not suffer such a huge personal and professional cost for speaking up against racism.
4. I urge writers, editors, and publishing professionals in Canada and beyond to think about how they support the work of writers and translators who are heritage speakers working with non-European languages, by supporting their writing or translations, publishing their work, and pushing for more inclusivity at organizations, publications, events, and grant-funding bodies. It has been common knowledge for a while in the translation community that translations only make up roughly 3% of all published work, and there is even more underrepresentation when it comes to BIPOC heritage speakers, women, and people from marginalized backgrounds.
5. Finally, gatekeepers and members of the Canadian literary community, please don’t only watch out for racism in public, but also behind closed doors. It scares me to think what kind of racist comments might be uttered behind closed doors after witnessing it at a book sale. Systemic changes are needed at every level.
Thank you very much for your time in reading this open letter.
Sincerely,
Yilin Wang
