Human Slop: How This Fellowship-Winning ‘Satire’ Shows the Literature World’s Low Bar

Hey, sorry this needs a content warning. I’m about to review an unpalatable vulgar fictional story by a writer who has won a $75k/yr fellowship prize for this gem. A full 2-year creative writing fellowship at Stanford, nonetheless.

The opening paragraph reads like this:

My white boyfriend and I are newly returned from holiday travels… We fucked on every flat surface available to us, including the vertical ones—bathed in equatorial sweat and pheromones, slick as babies.

Please someone, shoot me.

The hook about the white boyfriend and immigrant parent scenes all throughout sound more like a tired cliché than a novel idea. We’re not in the mid-1900s when people were risking their lives for being together in love. If anything her writing perpetuates the stereotypes of already available stories of Asian Americans dealing with closed off immigrant parents and their boyfriends, who do not understand their culture.

Look at this nightmare for example.

He isn’t joking. It’s the same old animus carried in my chest, congenital. He’s not a bad person, and I’m not stupid. What slaughters me is my own inertia. Before he and I lived together, I once sat in the self-same indentation of my couch for three days straight, just to give it a try. The pressure sores could’ve been mistaken for syphilis—and this, I knew, too, with intimacy. A rushed timeline is typical for couples in this city. Such an expensive city indeed. Yet he’s the only boyfriend with whom I’ve ever cohabitated, simply because I wanted a witness. I wanted to be, unlike the last time I shared a roof with those who loved me—my parents—beheld rather than beholden. To exist and to owe nothing, except to myself.

See, I’ve been guilty as charged, there’s an Indian American section on my website, where some of my writings might feel like identity trauma dumping. But my point is your “best work” cannot be a victim narrative.

Starting from the first paragraph, this story is extremely distasteful. Even though one of my friends recently suggested I try my hand at writing adult content, this is exactly the kind of smut I don’t want my work to be categorized as. And let me tell you, yes, I’ve written work you wouldn’t read in polite company, here.

Anyway, online defenders are saying that the whole absurd egg trope was the whole point of this “genius satire”. Apparently, the whole point of the over-the-top immigrant-parent abuse, white-boyfriend rejection, interracial cultural clashes, and graphic opening sex scene were to exaggerate and poke fun of the stereotypes.

The egg laying was a metaphor for fertility pressures, etc etc. Like, what?

After an hour of agony, I lay the egg—yes, egg. It slides out of me and knocks against the bottom of the tub without cracking. I touch it wonderingly, bathwater cooling around my shoulders. Here is something that is mine and mine alone, to shape into my dear shadow if I so choose. I will never leave it.

Maybe, I’m not as smart as the people who loved the story? My point is that I don’t want to have to think too deep about a story I’m reading for fun. Don’t get me wrong, I love word play and clever endings. But, if a short story requires a defending club, then it’s probably just a terribly written piece of writing. Don’t give me dark humor I have to use a 100% of my brain for, just give me a good old-fashioned heart-warming story.

And if it’s bad writing, let’s be able to say so.

My egg is the size of an ostrich egg and very, very white. In this new world order, I who have only ever come up short feel a silky, hormonal satisfaction at a job well done. The human body is incredible, and the precarity of motherhood, surmountable. Resting there on the couch, I can’t fathom having produced something so perfect. So profound. The mere act of draining the bathtub, of watching the blood and scum swirl, its own baptismal reckoning.

This is absolute human slop my guy.

All around me, there’s slop in creativity with identity struggles, insecurity, absurd conflicts, smut and trauma dumping. Not to mention AI is writing some of our society’s most read novels – jeez, no wonder Amazon has a 3 book limit per day you can upload.

Well, the best thing that has come out of this is that I have so much hope for my prospects as a writer, that I will win the Nobel rather sooner than 2044, because my standards are still pretty high for myself.

All in all, I am terrified about Cui’s next move. Per her bio, “she is currently at work on a novel.”

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I’ll keep on eye on them so you don’t have to.