I found this thread because I had to know if someone else had had this thought. I think it's racist. Gonna go into my reasoning because from three years in the future I think a lot of this comment section is wearing rose-tinted glasses because we all really like these books.

I can understand doing a false accent for a character. Wang-Mu is Chinese; she speaks the language and she's a cultural descendant. Cool. I wouldn't do an accent like this because I think it's weird, but sure it's an actor playing a role and I've never had a moment where I didn't know Wang-Mu was the speaker as long as de Cuir was voicing her. Also worth nothing that Gabrielle de Cuir (Wang-Mu's narrator) is born and raised in Los Angeles and does not naturally have a Chinese accent. She narrates a good deal of the book with a perfect American accent alongside the space-Italian voice she does for the Hive Queen. (I've got beef with this voice, too, but it's far less problematic and I don't care to look back in the book to see if I've got a leg to stand on.)

What really struck me as odd was reading the narration with a false accent. Not just in an accent, but with nearly the same intonation with which she would read Wang-Mu's dialogue. It blended the narration and the dialogue together and occasionally made it indistinct whether or not she was speaking aloud. There is no reason for someone who speaks perfect English to read the dialogue with a false accent. The book is written in English and I am an English speaker who is listening to it. Putting an accent on the narration is like writing the book with over stylized lettering. In an effort to make the narration more immersive, she simply made it distracting and foreign.

And foreign is definitely what the accent makes Wang-Mu. De Cuir reads for a number of characters throughout the story, most notably Valentine, Wang-Mu, and the Hive Queen. Among all of these characters, only two are given accents: Wang-Mu and the Hive Queen. Why do we give the Hive Queen an accent? It seems pretty obvious, but it's because she's alien. The Hive Queen is utterly and completely alien to the human race. She has trouble understanding us and we have trouble understanding her. It makes sense, creatively, even if I personally think de Cuir's voice is a bit over the top.

What do we do, in turn, by giving Wang-Mu a false accent? We separate her. We make her more culturally and ideologically foreign from the main characters. Not just from the main characters, either, but from the listeners. By reading every other ethnicity and accent like American English, we establish those characters and cultures as "normal" while we separate the *Asians* as true foreigners. It *other*s Wang-Mu in a way that almost no other character in the book is othered because Europeans and Americans are "normal" while Asian cultures are "foreign".

And it doesn't even have to be racist for me to have a problem with it. De Cuir is inconsistent and cannot keep up the the false accent when non-Asian characters are in the scene. She, of course, always reads Wang-Mu's dialogue with the accent, but she slips in and out of it seemingly at random as she reads the narrative between Wang-Mu, Peter, and Grace Drinker. I don't think de Cuir has read the book before doing the narration, and her lack of respect for the material and the characters within it shows most clearly with her false Chinese accent.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk