What I meant to say, is that I feel it is important that artists of Asian descent be outwardly proud of their ethnicity so names like Hsu Gee and Racy Li are the norm and aren’t relegated to such categorization. And that encompasses walking a very fine line with respecting one’s ancenstry with, in this case, being able to properly articulate that in the mainstream. – judging by the quotes above, neither of the 2 authors were successful at it.

I hope that’s clear, sometimes my thoughts get ahead of my typing skills.

Christine, I think it depends on how you do it and what your target audience is. There’s nothing wrong in defining yourself as an Asian-American artist, with your ethnicity as your defining characteristic. But in doing so, you may alienate the mainstream majority who feel squeamish at anything to do with race.

Susan, I’m not saying that we should pretend that race doesn’t matter when it does, but from a pragmatic standpoint, when it comes to marketing, people are only going to remember one to two things about you, no matter what you’re doing whether it’s fiction or songwriting. You have to choose what you want them to remember very carefully. You can choose the obvious (like ethnicity, which people are probably going to remember anyway) or you can choose something else that awakens their interest and sticks in their mind about you as a person.

Christine, “because it is only by being proud of who the[y] are” that would cross a fine line of ‘what’ you are and ‘who’ you are. I would stick ethnicity into the ‘what’ criteria and the actual culture in to the ‘who’. Just saying, your comment didn’t make too much sense to me..

I’m not opposed to using pen names, just that particular author’s explanation was a very weak one.

Jenny, it’s great to hear from a 14 yr old reader! I’m in the midst of writing a YA-ish (young adult) novel with Asian American protagonists – I don’t want to hit readers over the head with it, but I also don’t pretend that they’re “generic” people.

In contrast, the number of Asian-Americans involved in the romance genre as writers (and doing pretty well writing under non-ethnic names I believe is quite high. (Of course this is anecdotally, and based on my own experience).

Of course, I’ve also noticed that the romance genre seems to have a particularly high number of Asian-Americans (and Asians) heavily involved in the industry, who from editors to writers, to well-respected independent reviewers.