R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface is something of a mash up. Dark comedy meets thriller in a tale which also seeks to ride the topical wave of truth and authenticity in the publishing industry.
It begins with two young novelists in Washington DC.
Chinese-American Athena Liu, is the toast of the publishing world, an award-winning author who enjoys both critical acclaim and commercial success. Her friend/jealous rival is white American June Hayward. Her career has stalled. No-one remembers her debut novel, sales of which were so poor that her publishers have pulled back from releasing a paperback version.
The pair join up for a night on the town to toast Athena’s latest success — a deal with Netflix. A late-night snack at Athena’s swish apartment takes a dramatic turn when Athena chokes to death on a pancake.
In the blur of subsequent events, June somehow leaves the apartment with Athena’s latest manuscript: The Last Front, an epic novel about the Chinese workers recruited by the British army in World War 1. June edits the script and becomes the subject of a publishing bidding war.
Re-branded as Juniper Song, the reaction to the book is everything June Hayward dreamed of achieving. With a mega advance; a place on the New York Times best seller list and talk of a literary award, she’s on the path to the same level of success as her dead friend.
June Hayward gets away with it because Athena had kept her project secret with neither her agent nor publishers aware of what she was writing. It also helped that there was only one type-written copy of her draft.
All it takes to burst June’s bubble is a series of tweets, accusing her of masquerading as Asian and appropriating another culture for commercial gain. Some of those posts appear to have been written by Athena Liu. What follows is a social media storm, a spiral of self-justification and a dangerous late-night encounter.
Yellowface is a novel that rides the waves of several topical issues.
Cancel Culture
Cancel culture raises its head when suspicions begin to circulate about Juniper Song’s authenticity. She becomes the target of online outrage, receiving a torrent of accusations, death threats, and invasive scrutiny. The lawyers advise June not to respond but it’s so hard to stay silent when you’re under attack.
Kuang shows how digital shaming can blur truth and rumour, creating a spectacle where the individual’s guilt or innocence is almost beside the point. At the same time, the novel doesn’t let June off the hook — her fear of being “cancelled” stems largely from her unwillingness to admit wrongdoing.
She repeatedly justifies her actions to herself. The book wouldn’t have even seen the light of day without her, she argues. It’s as much her original work as Athena’s because after all, she had to do extensive research to fill in gaps in that first draft.
It’s not like I took a painting and passed it off as my own. I inherited a sketch, with colors added only in uneven patches, and finished it… Imagine if Michelangelo left huge chunks of the Sistine Chapel unfinished. Imagine if Raphael had to step in and do the rest. This whole project is beautiful… So what if it was stolen?
Cultural Appropriation
June’s theft isn’t just of a literary work. She stands accused of appropriating a culture, using an Asian-sounding name to which she has no claim and writing about a history that is not her own.
She’s using the pen name to pretend to be Chinese American. She’s taken new author photos to look more tan and ethnic, but she’s as white as they come. June Hayward, you are a thief and a liar. You’ve stolen my legacy, and now you spit on my grave.
June’s response? More self justifications. and an attempt to put distance between herself and the real cultural appropriators:
I don’t have yellow fever. I’m not one of those creepy dudes who write exclusively about Japanese folklore and wear kimonos and pronounce every loan word from Asian languages with a deliberate, constructed accent. Matcha. Otaku. I’m not obsessed with stealing Asian culture—I mean, before The Last Front, I had no interest in modern Chinese history whatsoever.
Trust in the Publishing Industry
Yellowface is very much a novel about the book trade and the extent to which it’s complicit in the misfortunes that befall June Hayward.
The author name came at the instigation of June’s editor; so too was the idea to use publicity photographs designed to make her look “more Asian.” A Chinese-American editorial assistant is the only staff member to raise questions about cultural sensitivity. The result — she’s moved to another project and later dismissed. The message is clear, this publishing company isn’t interested, doesn’t care and is no way going to let any questions about accuracy, authenticity get in the way of a potential blockbuster.
In case we don’t get the message, one of the characters spells it out for us:
“This industry is built on silencing us, stomping us into the ground, and hurling money at white people to produce racist stereotypes of us.”
Final Thoughts
Yellowface packs a lot of issues and ideas into 300 pages but it isn’t weighed down by them. The questions about ethnicity, culture, plagiarism make it thought-provoking but it’s also a very entertaining novel.
There are nice touches of humour to lighten the mood a little — Kuang really nails the atmosphere of book launches and author events where the author is trying desperately to say something original in response to questions they’ve heard a zillion times before.
The only aspect that didn’t work for me was June’s fear she is being stalked by a ghost. Yes I get the irony of a “ghost writer” stalker but spectral entities in fiction always leave me cold. It’s a minor point though and didn’t detract from my overall enjoyment.
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