Bonnie Chau reflects on being Asian-American, the ideas and motivations of representation and visibility, the Amanda Gorman translation debate, and translating out of whiteness.

I suppose in every discipline, the threat of artistic integrity being tainted by money is inescapable. I’ve been thinking about this alongside something…about how the imagination is not free, and there is no version of it that exists in a vacuum, untouched by the hierarchical structures of society.

“Memories that I had buried with graduate work were now being triggered by my return. A pit grew in my stomach over the next month, prohibiting me from enjoying the most basic things…”

Fiction has always been a laboratory to study the human condition but with the advancements of technology and science becoming more commonplace, fiction has become a simulation runner to experiment on the plausible consequences of these achievements.