I've been refining my take after reading some interpretation and explanations and this is final take:

Not every book will or should be for a white audience. It should cater to whoever they want. But the tweet also also seems to assume that every non white person has sufficient knowledge of their own culture to understand everything being written. Of course maybe that kind of person is not the intended audience which is also fine, but it's a bit alienating to be told that you're not entitled to learn about your own culture just because some random :lmayo: might benefit from a free translation

And no, this is not written by some mad white guy who doesn't understand what shawarma means. It's coming from an Asian immigrant who's far removed from his culture with little resources in English to learn about it.

      • thekid [none/use name]
        ·
        2 years ago

        within the context of fiction, yeah it doesn't matter at all. there's an entire genre of literature with authors using fake words and random symbols and stuff in their writing, stuff doesn't have to be translated there. the only thing I found funny was the implication that nonwhite people are somehow more entitled to footnotes than white people are.

    • mittens [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      It's perfectly fine to wish to display the immigrant experience by liberally using Mandarin even if you don't speak it fluently, what I don't get is who the fuck is she talking to.

    • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Lol, tbh not knowing your native language fully, but speaking some weird hybrid where you toss in random words from your native language and force them into an English grammar is the immigrant experience. It's actually probably one of the most universal immigrant experiences in the Anglo world (I imagine beyond as well).

        • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Yeah, I agree, obviously it's not good communication. Probably some exceptions to this though, you couldn't write a good story about an immigrant community without incorporating this habit (imo Mafia movies and other media are a good example of this). But I do find it weird that the author is so allergic to footnotes. They're pretty non-intrusive, iirc The Three-Body Problem trilogy had a ton of footnotes providing historical and cultural context for what's occurring.

          Also, agree with an allergy to "just google it", I know that the way certain words get used differ in the region of my country I'm from from the dictionary definition, and similarly the migrant community uses some words differently. Googling can be surprisingly useless when you're thrown in a foreign context.