On Reading and Not Reading Rucy Cui

Rucy Cui, “Hatchling” (The Georgia Review, 2026)

This story is probably the most discussed piece of short fiction so far this year, albeit for mostly the wrong reasons. Reactions to it garnered a lot of attention on X, Substack, and Reddit. This is strange for a short story, even stranger for one by a young, book-less author in The Georgia Review, which is a very good literary fiction publication but pretty low-circulation. So what gives?

As is typical of even the niches of the Internet that ostensibly care about literature, most of the uproar about the story seems to be from people who did not read beyond the screenshotted first two paragraphs. I will reproduce them here:

My white boyfriend and I are newly returned from holiday travels, tanned and aching at the joint-seams, stuck with over ten dollars in foreign currency. I was due to start my period last week. He locks the front door. In our entryway, suitcases are strewn all around.

It was a difficult trip, one in which shopkeepers ignored me and he happened to speak up for me. This evolutionary adaptation came easily to both of us, yet troubled only me. We argued about whether it was safe to drink the tap water or if there were pickpockets on public transportation. We fucked on every flat surface available to us, including the vertical ones—bathed in equatorial sweat and pheromones, slick as babies. It was our anniversary. Still I worried I was earmarking myself for extinction. Our final evening, we broke a wicker lawn chair and threw it in the hotel pool. Despite his indifference, I never stopped brushing my teeth with bottled water.

What people have taken exception to about these paragraphs is quite diffuse. “My white boyfriend” is an immediate trigger. As John Gu, perhaps the most zealous critic of identitarian literary cliches, has suggested, Cui is immediately drawing on a recently worn trope:

I’ve only read one of the “microaggressionsromans” he cites (Severance), but I am reminded also of Weike Wang’s “Omakase” and a Nicole Chung essay. Of course, such literary objections are often diluted with some of the incel-tinged animus Gu hints at, particularly among Asian Americans who fume at WMAF¹ relationships in real life.² Chris Jesu Lee just published an interesting essay that somewhat splits the difference; he frankly seems more sympathetic to the incel resentment than I’m comfortable with³, but also notes that the response to Cui seems curiously out of proportion with the sin. Ultimately, when it comes to content, freshness is all—any material, no matter how worn, can make for a good story in sufficiently inventive hands. This is, I think, a trap Lee and others risk falling into—as much as they harangue against Asian American artists’ overinvestment in identity, they evaluate the works they dislike primarily in terms of content, of the persuasiveness and diversity of identitarian representation. Is there any room for an Asian American literary criticism that is as concerned with the quality of the rendering as with what is being rendered? I’m not arguing for hardcore aestheticism, here, but it’s noticeable how matters of art tend to take the backseat in many of these discussions, as though it were unimportant whether Weike Wang or Rachel Khong or Rucy Cui are good writers.

This brings us to the prose style of this first page of “Hatchling.” It is, I agree, somewhat irritatingly glib. “Joint-seams” feels superfluous. The rhythm is rote: the first sentence of the first paragraph and the fourth of the second paragraph have nearly identical syntax, and are both immediately followed by short declarative sentences. That said, it’s not anomalously bad, and the criticism of the language seems, for many commenters, to be inextricably tied to criticism of the content.⁴

In general I think it is unfair to pile on a writer, especially an unestablished one, on the basis of a very brief excerpt.⁵ So I read it, and while the story is in fact not worth defending, the practice of attentive and thoughtful reading is.

Not long ago, people lost their shit in response to a screenshot of the first page of Honor Levy’s “Love Story,” which is written in a maximalist, terminally-online Gen Z register. Most of the dogpiling came from people who did not read the entire story, probably had not read a new work of short fiction since Jesus’ Son, and seemed to take for granted that the author had unreflectively internalized this idiom and found it obviously superior to conventional prose. Whether or not the story is good (I think it is), it is patently more intelligent than any criticism one could make based on its first page alone. It’s not difficult to imagine, if technology had permitted, someone opening up to the middle of Percival Everett’s Erasure in a bookstore and posting a picture of a page from the Juanita Mae Jenkins novel-within-a-novel, lambasting Everett’s prose and what it suggests about modern literary culture. Almost every week an author or book becomes the main subject of the literary Internet for the moment, and almost unfailingly, most of the criticisms come from people who have not actually read the text under scrutiny, most of the disparagement is divorced from any textual evidence from the literary work. Substack and the larger literary Internet are full of people who believe they know what is wrong with contemporary literary culture, and there is a pretty diverse array of diagnoses. Ultimately, whether you’re pro- or anti-MFA, a cultural libertarian or institutionalist lackey, a disciple of Harold Bloom or a Cattenachian Renassiancist, if you are unable or unwilling to read literary writing carefully, to produce evidence and lines of reasoning for your aesthetic and sociopolitical judgments, you’re a part of the problem.

“Hatchling” is, in fact, more reflexive than the knee-jerk commenters (and perhaps many of the actual readers) recognize. This is the most obvious reason why it is stupid to dismiss a story on the basis of its first two paragraphs — there is simply not sufficient context to understand how they should be read. I would like to think when people read a story and see that the first words are “My white boyfriend,” they might have the goodwill to suspect that there is a degree of self-awareness. (Then again, I posted a note with the sentence “imagine if writers from nyc only talked about nyc,” a bit of irony I naively believed was obvious, and 20+ users commented that actually they do only talk about New York, moron!) And in fact the story complicates the conventions and political simplicity of the genre. The narrator is not particularly reliable, is given to imagining or magnifying microaggressions. Referring to an earlier anecdote in which her white boyfriend expounded on a theory of relative beauty between races, the narrator abruptly announces, “Did I lie? I can’t remember. It may have been a Chinese guy I dated who said that thing about Asian girls and white women.” Later, the boyfriend’s mother makes a racist comment that strains credulity; we are then informed, “The truth, of course, is always more complicated. Mine is only another version of it. What she asked was: Is it my blessing you want? Well, is it?” Truthfully, I’m not entirely sure what Cui is doing here. Is she suggesting that the latter, “actual” question is ultimately interchangeable with the fictional one (an insult about eating elephant feet)? Is she trying to represent racial/gendered prejudices as free-floating, detached from individual actors, real but also imagined, external as well as internal? I think it’s a failing of the story that this doesn’t feel entirely processed, but it’s also stranger, more idiosyncratic than the first page would suggest. I would love to see people wrestling with these elements of the story, which, if the critics were to find themselves justified, would at least lead to a more developed theory of the limitations of the genre.

To toggle back to the writing: yeah, it doesn’t really get better. There are some painful puns and symbols relating to the story’s fantastical conceit (narrator gives birth to a white, bird-like egg): “eggstension,” a stuffed toucan in a claw machine. Cui partakes in the annoyingly coy tendency of indirectly referring to proper nouns (a Chinese fast-food restaurant with an “infamously cute black-and-white mascot”; a “past job at a social media app linked to the destruction of democracy”). There is an abundance of uninspired figurative language (“They are the smartphone; I am the microwave testing.”; “I picture myself, a code monkey: with big-warm-fuzzy-secret heart.”). The egg metaphor feels particularly lifeless, perhaps, because of Kim Samek’s earlier and much better “Egg Mother.” And, yes, there are a lot of threads you’d expect from a story of this kind (reference to ancient Chinese culture, workplace racial politics⁶, immigrant reverence for Americana), which are no fresher for being blended non-linearly. The writing is generally zany, and while it’s reflective of its narrator’s fractured psyche, it’s grating when not handled adeptly.

One of the deleterious effects of social media, including Substack Notes, is that it incites users to form an immediate, often polar response (like, dislike, etc.) to a tiny bite of information. This is entirely incompatible with literature, which requires a duration of attention and thought in order to form a valuable response. I offer a precept that would lead to both better and fewer responses to “Hatchling” and other viral excerpts: that which is worth responding to is worth reading; that which is not worth reading is not worth responding to. D

Index to all of the stories I’ve rated and reviewed.

1. If you’re a healthy person who spends less time online than I do, I should clarify that this means White Male / Asian Female. Chris Jesu Lee argues that “Some…try to blame the term’s popularity on bitter Asian American male losers, as if they have the clout to start trends like this.” As an outsider, I’ll just note that I’ve really only ever come across this term on subreddits with names like r/aznidentity and r/AsianMasculinity, which are also the most popular results when you google the acronym. Any group certainly has the clout to start a trend that circulates primarily among that group!

2. Lillian Wang Selonick summarizes my feelings nicely.

3. E.g.: “Some try to duck the issue by saying that the underlying study that the Oxford Study is named after doesn’t actually exist.” The existence of the evidence cited by one side doesn’t seem a trivial matter!

4. Additionally, many commenters seem repelled by the highly sensory sentence about fucking not because the writing is poor but because it is so bawdy. That kind of priggish response to literature seems beneath consideration.

5. To be clear, this doesn’t include Lee or the Substack user I first saw share it (Michael Patrick Brady).

6. To be fair, my favorite line does come out of this: “There is one Black woman upstairs in marketing. A rock star, corporate agrees…” (The next clause, about putting her on the recruiting materials, lapses back into cliché.)