So, this Writing Advice Wednesday segment is not advice at all, but is more of a blog entry. I wanted to do a segment on how to choose an editor, but
life situations and circumstances has driven me to write this blog first,
despite my trepidation on covering this topic. Writing this was stressful for me and even though I am still hesitant about it, I’m posting it anyway. I promise I’ll get back to the
solid advice segments next week!

 Now before you keep reading, I want you to understand this
disclaimer: these are my personal experiences and my personal perspective on
what it means to be a writer who is also a WOC. I am not trying to speak for
other POC or even non-POC writers or speak over them. This is my personal truth
and why I have the perspectives I do about my own writing. I don’t expect a gold star or anything special from this, but I needed to get this off of my own chest. With that out of the
way, I’m going to give you a little background on myself and my identity,
because I want you to have a context of where I am coming from. 

I come from an interesting family background. My father was
born in South Korea and was adopted at a young age by Americans. He was raised
in rural Kentucky, but his identity is purely American, despite his ancestry
being a mix of Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Ainu, and Mongolian. My mother also comes
from a mixed family, her mother’s side being Scottish and Welsh and her
father’s side was German and Melungeon. Here’s where I come in. I was raised
with the most exposure to my mom’s family growing up. I was aware of my Asian
heritage and have sported it proudly my whole life, as my parents always made sure
I was proud of my roots, but growing up, I had no connection to my Asian heritage in a cultural sense.

But where it gets tricky is that my great-grandmother
(my grandfather’s mother) had a huge impact on the formative years of my
childhood. She identified as Cherokee, as did her mother, and they both passed and were considered Native Americans by their communities. Until I was 11 or
12 years old (which was around the time that she passed away), I identified as
Native American. Even to this day, I still connect with Native American and
specifically Cherokee culture, because that was what I thought I was raised with as a
small child. It was only when I reached my late middle school and early high
school years did I start to feel more connected to my Asian cultural roots, and
also because my peers in school began to make it rather obvious that I was
Asian, so that’s what I began to identify as.

Now fast forward to me being in graduate school. I attended
graduate school in Hong Kong, where I had a bit of a ethnic awakening, if you
will. I realized that I had a unique identity as an Asian-American rather than
just Asian, because to the people of Asia, I was American, despite initial
confusion that I may have been a local at first glance. Also I was beginning to
get serious about genealogy, because being a history major, I found a love for
researching my own family lines and what our place in history was. What I found
was shocking to me. Remember how I said that I identified as Native American
until I was about 12? Well, my genealogy search and a DNA test on my parents
revealed that my great-grandmother was not in fact Native American as she had
claimed, but Melungeon.

Some of you may not know what Melungeon means, so let me
take a minute to explain. Melungeons are a distinct group of people from East
Tennessee, Western North Carolina, and southwest Virginia who are usually a mix
of Western European, West African, and Native American ancestry. My Melungeon
family or “mix” is Western European, West African, Romani, and Powhatan, the
vast majority of that mix being Western European and Romani. Some Melungeon
families are culturally identical to white families of these areas of the
South, while some have cultural tendencies that mirror their non-European roots
that they may have. My family was one of those families, which is why I thought
I was Native American for so long. But how did Powhatan turn to Cherokee? I have no idea, but I can only speculate that somehow Native American or Melungeon got mistaken for Cherokee down the line somewhere and it stuck. 

Why is this important? This discovery and the journey I went
on is what inspired me to write The
Moon-Eyed Ones. And it was after this discovery that I felt relieved and
completely free, because Melungeon was a term to describe me. My ethnicity
finally had a name to go with my Asian-American nationality, because until I
was in college, I had no cultural connections to being Asian, but The Four Gods was a story I created at
15 to reconnect with my Asian heritage and grasp the culture I so wanted to
belong to.

Here’s where I’m going to talk about my writing,
specifically The Moon-Eyed Ones and The Four Gods. As a writer who is a WOC,
I find it crucial that my casts of characters are mainly POC. The majority of
the characters in The Moon-Eyed Ones
were Melungeon and Cherokee, and the entirety of the cast of The Four Gods are Chinese (I use Chinese very loosely here, as some characters identify more
as Miao/Hmong, Tibetan, Mongolian, or other ethnicities in what is China today
rather than just Han Chinese, but TFG also focuses on fictional races like Long, Fenghuang, Qilin, etc.)

I consider these two works of mine part of the #ownvoices
movements because while I may not be fully Melungeon or fully Chinese, I do
identify as both Melungeon AND Asian-American. For those of you that don’t know, #ownvoices was a tag created for books that focus on characters that share traits with the author, for instance, the author and the protagonist could share a race, disability, sexuality, gender identity, etc. This movement was created to provide authors a platform to diversify fiction and create characters that represent those that may not be getting the representation they deserve.

And even though the protagonists for these two works are men, they are still stories about struggle, about finding oneself, and
about fighting for justice, their problems are ones that any
gender can at least somewhat relate to. In the big scheme of things, I wanted
there to be Melungeon and East Asian heroes that I so badly needed most of my
life to be out there, so maybe people could connect to them like I wanted to
connect with characters like me. 

These are two identities that I wear proudly
and that I have had to fight for. I have been told that I am “basically white”
and have no place in the POC community, that I’m not American or Asian enough.
Just last night I was told by a [white] person that I know and trusted before this that my
experiences as an Asian-American and Melungeon woman aren’t even valid because
certain POC suffer more than me. Writing characters like me gives me a voice,
because even still, I feel like I’ve not been allowed to join the conversation. Even though I’ve experienced racism so much that I’ve
become numb to the pain, I’ve been shunned because my identity and my experiences haven’t been the right kind. Being a WOC writer and writing these characters not only
gives me a voice, but to me, writing is my way of going out into the
world shouting, “You can’t ignore me anymore. I am here and I have a voice, and
I can stand up for what is right, even if you refuse to see me.”

 If you’ve read this far, thank you. Four Gods Friday will be back in a few days.