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Yellowface: A Reese's Book Club Pick Hardcover – 16 May 2023
by R F Kuang (Author)
3.8 out of 5 stars 32,085
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK
"Hard to put down, harder to forget." -- Stephen King, #1 New York Times bestselling author
White lies. Dark humor. Deadly consequences... Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn't write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American--in this chilling and hilariously cutting novel from R.F. Kuang, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel.
Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena's a literary darling. June Hayward is literally nobody. Who wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks.
So when June witnesses Athena's death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena's just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I.
So what if June edits Athena's novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song--complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn't this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That's what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree.
But June can't get away from Athena's shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June's (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.
With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface grapples with questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation, as well as the terrifying alienation of social media. R.F. Kuang's novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.
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336 pages
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Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic. Writing is creating something out of nothing, is opening doors to other lands. Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much.
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But now, I see, author efforts have nothing to do with a book’s success. Bestsellers are chosen. Nothing you do matters. You just get to enjoy the perks along the way.
Highlighted by 2,338 Kindle readers
The original draft made you feel dumb, alienated at times, and frustrated with the self-righteousness of it all. It stank of all the most annoying things about Athena. The new version is a universally relatable story, a story that anyone can see themselves in.
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Review
"This is a great read. Crime, satire, horror, paranoia, questions of cultural appropriation. Plenty of nasty social media pile-ons, too. But, basically, just a great story. Hard to put down, harder to forget." -- Stephen King
"Viciously satisfying...addictive." -- New York Times Book Review
"Well-executed, gripping, fast-paced novel." -- NPR
"Reading Yellowface felt like being inside a wild, brutal, psychological knife fight with a deranged clown. A merciless satire that left me screaming inside... from both its horror and humor." -- Constance Wu, star of Crazy Rich Asians and author of Making a Scene
"At once a brilliant satire that mixes horror and humor; a nuanced exploration of race, heritage, identity, and diversity in publishing; and an honest look at the hell that is social media, this might just be Kuang's best." -- Boston Globe
"Yellowface is one of the most transfixing novels I've read in ages... Kuang boldly interrogates literary hot-button issues like privilege, appropriation, and authenticity, leaving it open for readers themselves to decide where to draw the line." -- Zakiya Dalila Harris, New York Times bestselling author of The Other Black Girl
"It's addictive, shocking, compelling, ridiculous, and extremely fun to read by turns." -- Paste Magazine
"Yellowface is a brittle, eviscerating read that affected me bodily. Kuang's oeuvre consistently finds new ways to expose and interrogate systems of power, in this case tackling the commodification and consumption of art with both swagger and sophistication. Yellowface really is THAT bitch." -- Olivie Blake, New York Times Bestselling author of The Atlas Six
"A spiky, snarky, shady, smart, sinister take on white privilege." -- Nikki May, author of Wahala
"Yellowface is brilliant satire--thought provoking, thrilling, and hitting a little too close to home. A must read commentary on the line between representation and exploitation and those who are willing to cross it for fame. Everyone in publishing's wide orbit should read this, and take a long look in the mirror." -- Vaishnavi Patel, New York Times Bestselling Author of Kaikeyi
"Yellowface is a spicy, satirical page-turner that skewers the racism and tokenization in the publishing and entertainment industries, the vanity of social media, and the lengths at which people will go to remain in the glaring spotlight." -- Tracey Lien, author of All That's Left Unsaid
"They say you should write the book that only you can write. Well, no one else but R.F. Kuang could have written Yellowface. A brilliant and unflinching take on white performativity and publishing. I'm not exaggerating when I say that Kuang is one of the most important voices in publishing today." -- Jesse Q. Sutanto, author of Dial A for Aunties
"A darkly satirical thriller about greed, truth, identity, and art--and who a story really belongs to. Reading Yellowface was like riding a roller coaster with no safety belt. I screamed the whole way through!" -- Peng Shepherd, author of The Cartographers
"Excellent satire from Kuang...This is not to be missed." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"This unsettling and electrifying book piercingly addresses issues of cultural appropriation and racial identity." -- Library Journal
"There's SO MUCH I recognised (with the odd full-body cringe) about the vagaries of publishing and the ego bin fire of being a writer and SO MUCH I learned about my own white privilege but above all it's a funny, engrossing read about what people do when they reckon they can get away with it." -- Erin Kelly, author of The Skeleton Key
"Her magnificent novel uses satire to shine a light on systemic racial discrimination and the truth that often hides behind the twisted narratives constructed by those in power." -- Booklist (starred review)
About the Author
Rebecca F. Kuang is the #1 New York Times and #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy, Babel: An Arcane History, and Yellowface. Her work has won the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, and British Book Awards. A Marshall Scholar, she has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford. She is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale, where she studies diaspora, contemporary Sinophone literature, and Asian American literature.
Product details
Publisher : William Morrow & Company (16 May 2023)
Language : English
Hardcover : 336 pages
ISBN-10 : 0063250837
ISBN-13 : 978-0063250833
Dimensions : 15.24 x 2.77 x 22.86 cmBest Sellers Rank: 309,778 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)567 in Asian-American Literature
871 in Satire (Books)
1,318 in Lawyers & Criminals HumourCustomer Reviews:
3.8 out of 5 stars 32,085
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R. F. Kuang
===
Rebecca F. Kuang is the #1 New York Times bestselling and Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award nominated author of Babel, the Poppy War trilogy, and the forthcoming Yellowface. She is a Marshall Scholar, translator, and has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford. She is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale.
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Top reviews from Australia
Nadira Mailewa
4.0 out of 5 stars Yellow Face - an unforgettable read
Reviewed in Australia on 22 March 2024
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I loved the book. I couldn't put it down. The book is so well crafted; the characters multi-dimensional and the language crisp, witty and sharp. R. F. Kuang tackles complex issues of race and culture, problems with the publishing industry and the dark side of social media, with ease.
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Glen Donaldson
5.0 out of 5 stars Best Novel I've read in a long time
Reviewed in Australia on 24 February 2024
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Entertaining from it's first sentence to it's last.
I would describe the writing 'voice' as witty, nuanced and overall entertaining in the extreme.
Loved every moment of this writerly adventure/part ghost story.
Will be first in line to buy the authors next novel, due 2025.
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Koo Greenway
3.0 out of 5 stars Didn’t enjoy this book
Reviewed in Australia on 10 November 2023
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Found the story frustrating and became irritated with the main character. I did enjoy the writing style
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Amazon Customer
4.0 out of 5 stars fast-paced, intriguing literary hoax tale
Reviewed in Australia on 19 January 2024
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Loved this page-turner. Hits so many current themes - cancel culture, racism, political correctness, the vagaries of creative industries and those who live-or die - by them.
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Amby b
5.0 out of 5 stars Sharp, witty and kept me wanting more
Reviewed in Australia on 10 January 2024
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This book is the best I’ve read since Evelyn Hugo … really sharp and witty - had me laughing and hooked after the first chapter. Relevant and interesting insight into the modern day world of publishing & social media presence… just devious enough to make you smirk & keep rooting for the main character.
Would read again… really great book!
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Barsha
3.0 out of 5 stars Basic
Reviewed in Australia on 6 December 2023
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The story line wasn’t even captivating, it just felt long for nothing. I went in with higher expectations i guess, cause the books been suggested by quite a bit of people i know. It felt like reading just another story of bullying in teenagers.
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Luci
2.0 out of 5 stars hmmmm
Reviewed in Australia on 4 February 2024
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IS the storyline the farce or is the the book a farce. Either way, I feel duped and disappointed. Great writing, quick pace, characters well developed, great themes. Ultimately unsatisfying (for me at least).
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Good design and compact, perfect for travel. On my issue was a small cut / tear on the outside of the jewellery box.
4.0 out of 5 stars Great read
Reviewed in Australia on 8 January 2024
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Perfect length for holiday read. Dissapointed with packaging as book arrived bent and with a couple of blemishes on cover. Did not affect its use.
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===
Athena Liu is a literary darling and June Hayward is literally nobody.
White lies
When Athena dies in a freak accident, June steals her unpublished manuscript and publishes it as her own under the ambiguous name Juniper Song.
Dark humour
But as evidence threatens June’s stolen success, she will discover exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.
Deadly consequences…
What happens next is entirely everyone else’s fault.
With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface grapples with questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation, as well as the terrifying alienation of social media. R.F. Kuang’s novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.
Genres
Fiction
Contemporary
Audiobook
Literary Fiction
Thriller
Adult
Mystery
...more
336 pages, Hardcover
First published May 25, 2023
===
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ishika
64 reviews · 935 followers
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January 13, 2024
2.5/5
i feel weird writing this review. for one, Yellowface isn’t out until next year. two, the book is very meta about twitter and book reviews—ratings on goodreads even make up several important plot points. i feel like me and the book are engaging in some inside joke.
i’ve decided not to include any quotes from the book and talk in general terms with minor details to avoid spoilers (not anything that’s not in the premise, anyway), but i’m still talking about how i felt about different parts of the book, including the middle and end, even though I won’t be talking about what happens in them. so if you want to go in blind, beware. i know this runs the risk of me describing something one way, but then you going and reading it and interpreting a different way, but until it actually comes out and i can drop the ‘extended’ (and hopefully more sophisticated) review, this will have to do.
yellowface is meant to be drama and dark satire. it’s a bit hilariously grim and grimly hilarious to anyone who’s ever needed to close booktwt and touch grass, but also interesting to anyone moderately familiar with books, writing or publishing. the prose isn’t babel, where i was stopping every page to savour the writing style, but it is fast-paced and fairly easy to get through. and i’m kind of torn about yellowface, but the worst part is that i can’t figure out whether it’s in a “this didn't work for me, personally” way, or a more objective “this is a Critique” way.
my problem with yellowface comes down to the fact that i cannot separate the narrative voice from rfk’s voice at all. a lot of the experiences of a certain character lines up very much with what i know is rfk’s own, and that is on purpose and not necessarily bad—she’s an author who’s always been very open about putting a lot of herself into her books and it’s one of the things that can add to their emotional depth. a lot of readers will likely proclaim the fact you can’t unsee the hand of the author in the writing is The Point. however, when the characters start to receive criticisms that are very similar to criticisms rfk has faced, but represented somewhat flatly, i cock my head a bit. see: problematic representation of Taiwanese indigenous people (a criticism in isolation that depnding on the book may be valid, but in yellowface is shown to be made by people who are just jealous of the author and don’t actually know what they’re talking about), privately-educated, rich western diaspora writing about traumatic histories of working classes from the homelands they’ve only visited a few times (a criticism in isolation that depending on the author may be valid, but in yellowface is made from the perspective of the racist white woman using it to justify her horrible actions), etc.
this may not bother other readers, but i can’t help but side-eye it. she gets around it by having these criticisms be made by mouthpieces—that’s another thing about yellowface, by the way. so many mouthpieces. i don’t think this is a book where readers will get very attached to the characters, not just because the mc is an unreliable narrator, but because yellowface is more of a book where characters are tools that represent different things and perspectives and are meant to be grimly watched, observed and laughed at from above. which is mostly fun, until you start to distinguish between rfk’s mouthpieces a bit: which ones she represents more flatly and more caricatured, and the one she gives more nuanced paragraphs to, from under which i think I can make out the haze of her opinions. and i’m not fond of them all the time.
as always, it’s certainly interesting, but the middle of the book is basically all twitter discourse. it had me wondering if i could just scroll through my timeline and get the same experience instead. it’s veryyy meta—sometimes fun, sometimes obnoxious. maybe it’s too ‘high concept’ for me, sorry, or maybe it's heavy-handed. and it makes my job writing this difficult, because how much can i attribute to the unreliable narrator, satirical style or rfk herself? where does one end and the other begin, if they do so at all?
(which was a big thing that irked me with tpw. people would make criticisms of rfk's narrative choices and plot points and the response would be ‘well, rin is an unreliable narrator!’ yes, but there is such thing as framing and context which are important things to consider when trying to figure out what an author actually is saying, intentionally or not. but anyways.)
speaking of slightly more well-written unreliable narrators, juniper song is… a character. more of an awful ball of jealous, racist, liberal misery who you get to follow the entertaining downward spiral of throughout the book than a person. at least, when she's not hindered by rfk's blunt writing style striking her on the head. the commentary and discussion yellowface wants to have about publishing and racism is genuinely interesting and important, but I enjoyed yellowface most when it doing less back-and-forth with its own themes and more about the fucked up relationship between athena liu and juniper song/june hayward/athena liu. ie, when it was more about actual people than rfk's comemntary. despite athena dying at the very start of the story, she haunts the narrative, sometimes through flashbacks, sometimes through other people’s experiences, sometimes literally. and the narrative is juniper. i love a good fucked up friendship/rivalry/impersonation?/whatever the fuck this is. there's a flashback where we find out about a fucked up thing athena did regarding a traumatic event juniper went through--something which in no way justifies the scale of what juniper does throughout the book, but muddies the waters and makes everyone involved seem like more flawed, three-dimensional people. keyword, people! and whenever that relationship had the spotlight, i couldn’t put yellowface down. it's insane the narrative spent more time on its self-indulgent satire than it does on its genuinely compelling emotional core.
which is why i was really loving the third act, in which a lot of my criticisms seemed to fall away and the mess of the premise was really coming to a head. i was reading it late at night and, even though it’s not a horror, i got actually creeped out by several parts. to be honest, if yellowface had stuck the landing, it could have been four stars.
and that’s my final problem with yellowface. it has a decent plot, interesting cast of characters, interesting themes and discussions, but my only feeling on the ending was, ‘…that’s it?’ i know i said i wouldn’t do quotes, but im making an exception for the bit where our narrator says, ‘I’ve written myself into a corner. The first two thirds of the book were a breeze to compose, but what do i do with the ending? Where do I leave my protagonist, now that there’s no clear resolution?’ Which is very meta, because based off the ending, i feel that’s the position rfk was in at that exact point. i can somewhat tell she struggled with where to take the ending and i have more thoughts on why i felt underwhelmed by it, but i guess that’ll be for 2023, for when it's no doubt on all the 'Very Important Books of the Year' lists. for now, i can see myself rereading babel and parts of tpw, but i don’t see myself rereading yellowface.
it's now 2023. in short, the ending is less a bang, and more of a whimper. rfk rules out a geoff-style ending for june, someone who disappears quietly from public memory after the scandal and becomes old news. she's too attached to athena's image. this is the right choice--june is too much of a villain-protagonist to get an unearned, 'soft' ending at the end of this. but then the 'crash-and-burn' ending needed to be a lot more to be satisfying for me. we get hallucinations, suicidal ideation, her isolating herself from her support network, all of this building and building and building--and then it goes...
nowhere.
oh, we get a fascinating final confrontation with candace, one of athena's fellow asian-american authors, who gets to deliver the most cutting, messy and brutal line of the book: "Who gives a fuck about Athena? Fuck Athena. We all hated that bitch. This is for me."
but what happens after?
we get a prediction from june, which is basically that the cycle of controvery and scandal that this whole book has shown us for however many hundreds of pages will just keep going, and going, and going, and maybe june will win (at least in her eyes). it's just such a nothing ending. sure, it's #commentary and a criticism of the publishing and media industry, but that does not make it satisfying. it's not an emotional resolution, and it's not even a more sophisticated commentary on the cyclical nature of scandal and how white people don’t face consequences than what the story has shown us already. we've seen the cycle and her getting away with it. the whole book so far has been the cycle and her getting away with it. i think it's a good example of what i've been saying, to be honest, about how yellowface is more about The Point than any story it's trying to tell. The ending is all about The Point, but is not an emotional resolution to anything developed or a conclusion to any charater arcs. just "and this will continue, because doesn't it always continue? isn't this ending so clever?" the worst part is that it teases you with the prospect of something more compelling: june plays with the idea of 'accidentally' killing candace and knowing she would get away with it because she's a white woman, a horrific mirror to the start of the book and a sign of june's complete downward spiral, because at least Athena's death was an actual accident (and would be a frankly brutal commitment to the “they always get away with it” message). in a different moment, it makes you wonder if june may even be the one who might die an accidental death and now candace is the one to continue this twisted cycle, a horribly circular but somewhat karmic ending. instead, the cycle continues... in the most uninspired way possible. the third act of yellowface feels like it's hurtling towards a great ending and then face-plants over the finish line at the last minute. despite being a protagonist who is more well-suited for a crash-and-burn ending than any other i've read, juniper song doesn't burn. she barely sizzles. and to me, that's disappointing.
trigger warnings for this book: racism, c slur, suicidal ideation, sexual assault
edit 24/05/2023: unsurprisingly, some people on twitter cannot fucking read, so to clarify some things: 1) i am not white. i am asian, 2) I DO NOT CARE THAT JUNE WAS IRREDEEMABLE. I DID NOT WANT A REDEMPTION FOR A RACIST. my main problem was that i found the way yellowface handled its themes came at the cost of other aspects of the story when it should have been making them better. 3) "[insert criticism here] is literally the whole point of the story omgggg how could you miss the point so bad did you even pass english lit in school etc etc." personally, i do not enjoy 300 pages of on-the-nose commentary through uncompelling mouthpieces. i especially find it questionable when some of these mouthpieces flatly reflect criticisms the authors has actually received in regards to her previous work. if you do, more power to you! if what i disliked about the book is what you enjoyed about it, well, that's just how having an opinion works. i don't know what to tell you. i can definitely understand how someone who isn't as aware of some of the meta-commentary would have more enjoyment. but i find the response that i "missed the point" (to be honest, the writing constantly tries its best to be Desperately Sure You Are Not Missing The Point) that this book is about racism by some white readers when i'm intimately familiar with racism, both as it pertains to real life and in media, kind of... well. racist.
in a way, i guess this book is perfect for booktwitter. a lot of recognisable discourse where the Message and Themes are written out for you in big bold letters, constantly, all the time, throughout the story, just in case you missed it—that way, even your average reading-comprehension-starved twitter user can pick up on it—padded with enough relatable material about being chronically online and plenty of fictional ragebait to distract from a narrative that can’t get its teeth into its own premise and a third act that can’t deliver. target audience acquired.
in line with the theme of the book, i’m going to completely steal another reviewer’s words that i can’t stop thinking about. 'the problem with kuang is that, despite a reputation for in-depth research, she refuses to interrogate beyond her scope.' go read it. and i’d like to add to that: a lot of her most avid readers don’t have the appetite for anything beyond that, either. and take it incredibly personally when at the end of the meal, you’re still hungry.
and to be clear, this isn't a blanket response to everyone who disagrees with me (i've had interesting conversations with people who do)--just to some people who are determined to take the most uncharitable opinion possible of a frankly lukewarm review.
a book can be about an important subject matter and i can still feel it fell short of what it was trying to do. that is not me putting personal attack on the author, the author's identity, the subject matter itself, or any readers who enjoyed the book or their identities. i didn't even hate the book. i liked parts of it quite a bit. i just wanted more.
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s.penkevich
1,137 reviews · 8,963 followers
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March 25, 2024
‘Don’t ghosts just want to be remembered?’
A book about fucking around and finding out.
The question of who should or shouldn’t tell a story has been a hotly debated subject, a discourse that must also recognize the playing field is guided by rules of capitalism in a for-profit publishing industry and a social climate that prods “culture wars” to increase clicks. Still in recent memory are the debates over American Dirt, which sparked months of controversy over white authors using another’s cultural narrative as what many considered “trauma porn,” but also over the publisher’s decision to throw incredible amounts of marketing money at this book when immigration stories by authors living within the culture were being passed over for that novel. R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface sinks its teeth into the world of publishing and the discourses on authenticity through the eyes of June Hayward, a white woman who has taken the draft of a Chinese-American woman’s novel and published it as her own. She will forever be haunted by this choice, like a Lady Macbeth of letters haunted by bloodstains in her attempt to usurp the kingdom. It is a perfect follow-up to Babel and the conversations on how language can be a form of colonialism, though this one has no magical elements like the former. Instead, Yellowface reads like a scandal unfolding before your eyes and transfixes the reader with all the sick satisfactions that keep us scrolling through social media debates and keep hot takes. Kuang makes us sit with our discomfort, through an excellent choice of an unreliable narrator, and forces us to confront our own opinions on the matter. With a sharp critique on the commodification and consumption of art in publishing and reviewing (even Goodreaders are not spared here), a look at online debates, the self-aggrandizing aspects of social media, and the way artists are pitted against each other as if writing was a competitive sport, Kuang’s Yellowface asks big questions on authenticity and identity in a society that has reduced the concepts into marketing metrics.
I’ll be honest, I read this book in a single sitting. I could not look away, and Kuang’s writing sweeps you up in it’s conversational cadance. While I’ve enjoyed Kuang’s writing previously, Yellowface feels very polished and matured, the novel reading with the ease and eagerness of a tell-all memoir, which is the framing of the story. As a fictional memoir, it drops a lot of pop culture references to key into a specific time. Kuang’s choice of perspective through June—who rebrands at the request of her publisher as Juniper Song, Song being her middle-name but also nudges readers to think she may have Chinese heritage—is brilliant as it allows us to feel the floor-dropping-out discomfort of becoming the focus of internet rage as well as navigate a vigorous criticism of the publishing industry. Kuang is able to cover issues without moralizing, making the reader sift through alternating opinions that are likely to expose their own assumptions and discomforts, and we must always remember the telling is often guiding us away from judging her and towards everyone else. With a big confession at the center, June can manipulate the reader on smaller issues and in a way it becomes a rather metafictional approach to the way storytelling is just that: fictionalizing stories.
Kuang does well by creating a character that isn’t entirely unsympathetic—we need to want to keep reading her take on the events—and hate reading is a shallow effect that evaporates quickly. Not unlike the social media scandals that hit viciously and are forgotten days later. Not that June is innocent, and being disgusted with her is half the fun, but Kuang will force us to consider what exactly it is that disgusts us and what that means in a larger context about art and the commodification of it. We’ve seen these sorts of scandals, such as a personal favorite bizarre tale of Natalie Beach who wrote about being the ghostwriter for Caroline Calloway, or last year’s Who Is the Bad Art Friend? article concerning Sonya Larson and Dawn Dorland where everyone seemed to be too thrilled by the mess to not pick a side. Though the story that seems closest to Yellowface is the one surrounding Kristen Roupenian’s short story Cat Person (you can read it here) which was defended then later attacked when an article revealing the details was taken from a strangers real life, told to the author by the man who was fictionalized in the story as the sex pest and later committed suicide in real life. Twitter was full of well-known authors debating if personal details and stories of others are always fair game, even though the hometown and place of employment of the girl was not changed for the published version (my college roommate later rented the house Roupenian had previously lived in and describes in story). Literary twitter was confronted with a situation about what level of authenticity is appropriate and can someone tell someone else’s story.
The way social media fuels a fire is at the heart of this story, with twitter challenging authenticity and morals at all times. Which becomes a tragic interplay at the way authors are demanded to be vulnerable, to seek authenticity and expose their pain for book sales, yet social media loves to exploit personal details and use vulnerabilities as an opening for an attack.
‘dozen, maybe hundreds, maybe thousands of strangers are out there, mining your personal information, worming their ways into your life, looking for ways to mock, humiliate, or worse, endanger you. You come to regret everything you’ve ever shared about yourself…because the trolls will find them.’
We’ve all most likely criticized a stranger on social media, sometimes the pile-ups are too fun and humorous to not get a joke in, but Kuang tries to remind us that the targets are real people with real feelings. Sure, June deserves to be exposed and feel bad for what she’s done, but Kuang puts us in her shoes and lets you feel what being a target is like. Because it can come for anyone, even Athena was once the target of harassment, death threats and hacking where she didn’t feel safe all for being called a ‘race traitor’ for dating a white man. ‘In destroying her,’ June narrates the voice of social media, ‘we create an audience we create moral authority for ourselves.’ Such is the nature of social media in the state of a scandal, and all for what? ‘ Allegations get flung left and right, everyone’s reputations are torn down, and when the dust clears, everything remains exactly as it was.’ Nothing changes, but, as we see in the novel, much of this is because someone profits from it. A scandal often turns into book sales (for all the complaints American Dirt was canceled it still remained a bestseller for months) and if you keep selling books you keep getting published.
‘The living are burdened with bodies. They make shadows, footprints.’
But lets move to the scandal at hand. Here we have June, who has a tepid friendship with rising literary star Athena Liu. She feels jealous as well as annoyance with Athena, fantasizing how she’d like to ‘ neatly peel her skin off her body like an orange and zip it up over myself,’ something she is soon metaphorically doing when she edits the now deceased Athena’s manuscript: a WW1 novel about Chinese laborers. It starts off innocently enough (or so June claims) being an exercise in editing that she gets so caught up in loving writing again that she passes it off as herself. It is titled The Last Front, is praised for a mosaic storytelling style reminiscent of the film Dunkirk and becomes an instant bestseller. She will spend the novel fiercely defending she has the right to tell this story—sometimes being rewarded such as when speaking at a Chinese American Social Club she is thanked by a man who’s Chinese father fought in the war for making sure their stories are told—yet at the end of the day, this never was her story. And while she can be a great writer, we see she is never able to come up with her own ideas and the ones she have is derivative of other stories. It is a subtle and clever nod to a gap between being a good writer and being a good author or creator (an offer to write for existing IP disgusts her, perhaps because she is confronted by what she doesn’t want to admit is her strength).
‘It all boils down to self-interest…If publishing is rigged, you might as well make sure it's rigged in your favor.’
While the marketing grab here is definitely the idea of colonizing another’s work and culture and passing it off as your own (there are many moments for readers to fist bump the novel and say “HAHA take that shit, “Junie””) Kuang makes this a symptom of a larger issue. In her acknowledgements, Kuang states that the novel is a ‘horror story about loneliness in a fiercely competitive industry.’ If your ears perked up at horror story, there are some horror elements late in the novel (though perhaps not enough and it could have been threaded in longer, if I have one complaint it is that the novels episodic feel never quite let individual elements breathe enough and makes the last portion feel a bit like going one step more than needed instead of flowing from the book which would have sidestepped that feeling? Maybe thats just me though). But loneliness does permeate this tale, and we see how authors can feel crushed under the way for-profit publishing makes it a competition who awards winners and losers. One author will get a huge deal and seemingly inexhaustible marketing, while another gets one small print run and no publisher support. Kuang looks at publishing as a rigged enterprise, with a small team of (mostly white) executives deciding what gets sold and more or less deciding what will be a bestseller and informing readers to follow suit. Its not a secret that publishers buy space in chain bookstores or that the Big 5 US publishers are 80% of all publishing revenue. It is a market based on profit, and will be manipulated to ensure profits keep coming.
‘This industry is built on silencing us, stomping us into the ground, and hurling money at white people to produce racist stereotypes of us.’
To June, however, she sees diversity as a problem, thinking she is passed over for authors like Athena because it looks good. Which, if we look at the publishing market, shows that about 75% of published authors in the US are white and a 2020 study showed 95% of all books published were by white authors the previous year.
Now everyone probably remembers 2020 was the year many corporations made pledges to be better at diversity, the publishing industry under extra scrutiny as Black authors and anti-racism books were topping the best sellers and showing there was indeed a market for such books, but lets look at the industry itself. Since then, a recent survey shows only a 1% change in the industry, with it being 83% white and that most non-white hires since 2020 are for marketing positions. Which is using “diversity” as a sales technique again.
So what June see’s as a fast-track to success is actually a steep uphill climb. ‘"Do you know how much shit Athena got from this industry?’ a character remarks late in the novel, ‘They marked her as their token, exotic Asian girl. Every time she tried to branch out to new projects, they kept insisting that Asian was her brand, was what her audience expected.’ To be a brand is what publishing reduces identity into is the argument seen in the novel. And, if one is reduced to being a brand of themselves, they are now in market competition. I think of author Brandon Taylor saying identity becomes a marketing pitch, and how Real Life was reviewed as about identity when he says it was about lonely that happened to have explorations of identity in the book. I'm reminded of the reasons authors pushed against #OwnVoices labels as Becky Albertalli felt forced to come out to "justify" her book and others felt boxed in by it.
‘Do you know what it's like to pitch a book and be told they already have an Asian writer? That they can't put out two minority stories in the same season? That Athena Liu already exists, so you're redundant?’
Kuang examines how the idea of being a brand exists in the outskirts of publishing as well. We have the twitter fights where people exist as a self-brand of being antagonists, we have goodreads reviewers where their brand is taking down popular authors (some lines that may sting are remarks from other authors to not read goodreads and harsh takes are more about feeding ego than worthwhile criticism), and journalists who make a brand at hot takes. However, we have to remember that June is directing us to look at how everyone else is the problem instead of her. So while through her telling many of the critiques are cast as villains, the fictional journalist Adele Sparks-Sato (a nod to Andrea Long Chu as Vartika pointed out) is not wrong when writing that June’s version of Athena’s novel ‘joins novels like The Help and The Good Earth in a long line of what I dub historical exploitation novels: inauthentic stories that use troubled pasts as an entertaining set piece for white entertainment.’
‘The appropriation of history, the historicization of the past, the narrativization of society, all of which give the novel its force, include the accumulation and differentiation of social space, space to be used for social purposes.’
-Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism
There is a good deal of nuance in this book about how the commodification of art is an issue, but also a reminder that we can’t scapegoat our own actions on that entirely. There are some great little jabs in this—Junie Song ordering a Miss Saigon drink only to find it “too sweet” for her tastes—and it does emphasize the problems of representing a different culture from a western lens. As Edward Said wrote ‘the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging is very important to culture and imperialism,’ and argued that literature can be a form of colonialism by establishing a perception of a different culture or geography, and in the editing process of The Last Front we watch June make concessions on the text in order to appeal more to a white reader as requested by her publisher. Yes, she did actually do a great deal of research, and her opinion is the criticisms of cultural issues in the book are ‘exclusive cultural snobbishness and authenticity testing’ that ‘are only a form of gatekeeping,’ though later criticisms of her book are that her misunderstanding of how names or families work, or how her positions on certain issues imply a stance on current Chinese politics that are so beyond her understanding can be harmful. Some readers find it to read as a white-savioir narrative, something we know was manufactured by changing certain characters to be white characters to better fit the market needs. Which also returns us to the idea that art under capitalism will always be in service to profits.
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang is a delightful novel with the fierceness of an unfolding scandal that makes us confront many key issues hotly debated in the literary world right now. I enjoyed the nuance here in how it exposes problems from many angles, but does not allow that to be an excuse for bad behavior. Understanding is not the same as condoning here, and it is a page-turning trip watching June dip and dodge as her usurped empire continuously threatens to crash down around her. Kuang writes with confidence and precision and Yellowface makes for an excellent look at the literary world and the commodification of art.
4.5/5
‘Isn’t that what ghosts do? Howl, moan, make themselves into spectacles? That’s the whole point of a ghost, is it not? Anything to remind you that they’re still there. Anything to keep you from forgetting.’
Update: I got to hear R.F. Kuang speak about the book yesterday! She was DELIGHTFUL, discussed why she dislikes how publishing turns identity into marketing metrics, the books Beautiful World, Where Are You, Ferrante's Neapolitan novels and told everyone to read Murderbot. So well spoken, intelligent, and a real wonderful author.
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idiomatic
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January 23, 2023
lmao.
the frustration, as always, is that rf kuang is an intelligent and steady-handed writer. she is ahead of many of her peers in craft as much as sales: she writes a page-turner, she crafts a strong perspective, she is horror-writer good at making the reader feel gut-churning revulsion (whether or not she earns the strong emotion she likes to pull out is another question), and in this book she's capable of being funny. like here's a perfect paragraph, in which our pernicious white heroine works with her editor to chop and change the manuscript she stole:
The hardest part is keeping track of all the characters. We change almost a dozen names to reduce confusion. Two different characters have the last name Zhang, and four have the last name Li. Athena differentiates them by giving them different first names, which she only occasionally uses, and other names that I assume are nicknames (A Geng, A Zhu; unless A is a last name and I’m missing something), or Da Liu and Xiao Liu, which throws me for a loop because I thought Liu was a last name, so what are Da and Xiao doing there? Why are so many of the female characters named Xiao as well? And if they’re family names, does that mean everyone is related? Is this a novel about incest? But the easy fix is to give them all distinct monikers, and I spend hours scrolling through pages on Chinese history and baby name sites to find names that will be culturally appropriate.
like it's absolutely executing all of its tricks as it should: the blinkers of a close first person perspective, the legible different reality underneath. it's not subtle but when done in satire it's not AS hamhanded as kuang's dramatic instincts, per other books. readers who know chinese will scream, readers who don't will still feel their brain itch. the authorial hand is capable.
the author is capable... of more than she writes. the problem with kuang is that, despite a reputation for in-depth research, she refuses to interrogate beyond her scope. in previous books that meant that the sense of history was strong and the rest of the work of writing fiction—character work, plot, tone, anything reliant on the imagination—was comparatively weak. here there's no research to hold it up, just kuang's own posting habits and career success. the step down from jstor to twitter is a violent stumble.
kuang is an accomplished academic but a deeply incurious writer. that is on sharp display here, in a book that is meant to depict success and failure in the literary-commercial circuit—something that kuang knows little about. kuang is a genre writer who achieved crossover commercial success after blowing up on tiktok. her debut was promising and lauded but not uniquely vaunted; she received genre award noms (not wins) but her books blew up on tiktok after the fact and she launched an incredibly successful book this year in the genre space, off the back of her tiktok fame. everything she knows about succeeding she knows about inside her particular bubble, and also, because she has been succeeding since she was an undergrad baby, has been told—and genuinely believes—that she has hit the summit of success. this leaves her totally inequipped to write about what literary success looks like when engineered by the house. r.f. kuang has no belief that there is a form of publishing greatness beyond that which has been bestowed upon r.f. kuang, and a wilful desire not to google further.
the 'publishing details' on display are... well, they all exist IN publishing, curate a FORM of commercial success, and are familiar to kuang, but they don't match the book as described here (a lit-commercial wwii doorstopper, written by a chinese-american author and butchered into commercial sentimentality by a white author and editor, think the bulletproof success of american dirt even in the thick of its cancellation). mainstream literary successes don't come up through pitchwars. mainstream commercial novels don't come up in most book box deals because there is a form of literary success that is not reliant on superfans buying multiple copies apiece. there's a part where our heroine lists the major american literary awards her major literary-commercial war novel is up for and starts with: the goodreads choice awards. posting FROM this bad website: please be serious. it's fitting that the cover looks more like a designed arc than like a book.
there's a note in the babel prologue that i think about all the time with kuang's work, where she says that she was so dazzled by the sight of an oyster tower at a particular oxford party that she put it in the book even though oysters in victorian england were trash food for peasants—she didn't want to capture the dazzle or the waste so much as she wanted to write down her experience beat for beat, and could not conceive of an emotional reality that she did not personally live. this is an oyster tower book. this is embarrassing and technically inaccurate mimesis all the way down, solely interested in kuang's own interests. wow your heroines live in dc? and you lived in dc? they met at yale? you go to yale? omigod rebecca that's so crazy. there was a shorthand term back in the sporking days (i know, i hate my withered hag fingers for typing this too) on LIVEJOURNAL (HAG FINGERS) called 'pepper jack cheese' that was like "hermione ate a sandwich with pepper jack cheese (a/n: that's my favorite cheese!)", the phenomenon where the author would gigglingly and obviously insert a few of their real-life favorite things into the story. kuang's pepper jack cheese is whistlepig whiskey, name-dropped bafflingly twice as a signifier for the nicest possible whiskey, and also every single detail.
it is like. skin-crawlingly secondhand embarrassing to watch an author write their own life beat for beat and also be like 'everyone hated her because she was TOO pretty and TOO smart'. every critique that has ever been leveled against kuang goes into the mouth of her proxy's haters, including the pernicious and grasping white heroine. the belief that her haters are racist comes in a distant second to the belief that her haters are jealous—of her success, of her telegenic prettiness, of her comfortable life. maybe baby but look at the material: there's room for improvement. it is disappointing to watch someone technically skilled grind their intellectual curiosity down to a nub via posting and self-obsession, and it's humiliating to watch an oxbridge-ivy phd student say 'talk to the hand! and DON'T tell me to log off' for three hundo pages. is this the best she can do? does SHE think this is the best she can do? i'm worried that she does.
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Bookishrealm
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July 11, 2023
Whew child. Some of these reviews are doing exactly what Kuang was pointing out through Yellowface. It’s interesting to watch it happen in real time. While I don’t have extensive knowledge of her work, I think what Kuang is doing in this book is actually quite brilliant.
At the most basic of levels, Yellowface is a mash of various genres that follows the passive aggressive “friendship” of Athena and June, two authors in the publishing industry with very different levels of success. Athena has received her big break while June has remained a struggling author. In an absurd (truly absurd if I’m being quite honest haha) turn of events, Athena chokes while engaging in a pancake eating contest with June. After her death, June makes the decision to steal one of her manuscripts and pass it off as her own. What follows next is chaotic descent into the world of publishing and the book community.
What Worked: SO MUCH OF THIS BOOOK WORKED! I’ve seen the countless criticisms of Kuang inserting herself too much into this book as well as the criticisms that indicate that there isn’t much to be gained from reading this book. I wholeheartedly disagree. Oh, my friends, there is much to be gained. Neither of the characters is likeable and that is INTENTIONAL. This isn’t a way to illustrate that everyone in publishing is selfish, but a means to question how much the reader falls into the trap of engaging with the model minority myth. The expectation that Athena is supposed to be likeable is deeply woven in the sociological phenomena that stereotypes many Asian communities as successful, smart, likeable, diligent, docile, etc and the idea that Athena doesn’t fit into that role has made some readers feel uncomfortable whether it is consciously or subconsciously.
Kuang’s evaluation of the publishing industry is layered and forces both publishing and the bookish community to do some reevaluation. What she singlehandedly captures in this book has been the biggest criticism that many of us have been vocal about since 2020. Publishing used the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement to claim to want more diversity and has in some ways published more diverse books; however, have we really paid attention to what those stories have centered? Trauma versus joy. So many of these stories have been centered on generational trauma, books that are used to educate and make the White masses feel better about not knowing much about diverse experiences prior to 2020. Marginalized voices in publishing are “permitted” to be a part of the community as long we play the roles that we are supposed to play. Once we begin to infiltrate the industry too much, those same people with “BLM” in their twitter bios, the same people who claim to be liberal do the same damn mental gymnastics June did to excuse her behavior. The system was designed for June to do what she did and the moment that marginalized communities “steal” the shine, it’s okay to push back because as June believes she’s the true minority and oppressed person in all of this. Don’t believe me, you should check out the TikTok made by an author who claims that white writers now get turned down because all agents want are BIPOC writers. Or better yet, just listen to foolishness that was uttered from James Patterson who had the audacity to state the White men are the truly oppressed writers in the industry.
And let’s take this a step further and look at how Kuang illustrated the danger that publishing has ultimately created with it’s use of terms like #ownvoices. Athena wasn’t ever allowed to write outside of trauma. She’s pigeonholed into only writing one thing. And honestly, I’m sure that happens more than we would like to believe. Authors who want to explore something outside of their “assigned” roles either get turned down or the marketing is trash. It delves deeper into the question of who is allowed to tell what story? Was Athena any better of a fit to tell the story of Chinese laborers of WWI than June? Is research enough to tell something outside of one’s lived experience? These are things to think about and something that we are confronted with every day in this community. Think about books like American Dirt and Memoirs of a Geisha.
This book is both absurd and unhinged because so is publishing and the book community. And I’ve been involved in all of it for so many years. Kuang told ya’ll to kiss her ass with this book. She is behaving in the complete opposite manner that is “expected” of her as young, thin, conventionally beautiful Asian woman. And the fact that she owns that shit makes so many people feel uncomfortable. And quite frankly I applaud her for that. BIPOC writers and creators are tired of the expectation that we are supposed to behave, create, write, and provide educational pieces in way that makes others feel comfortable. We’re supposed to applaud White people for the amazing work they’ve done in “allowing” us to enter the spaces and “give” us the opportunity to tell “our stories.” It’s laughable at this point and while ya’ll give Kuang these 1 and 2 star reviews, she’s going to be laughing her pretty, thin, and educated ass all the way to the damn bank.
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Emily May
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January 26, 2024
If publishing is rigged, you might as well make sure it’s rigged in your favor.
4.5 stars. Holy shit, I had an absolute blast reading this! I inhaled it in a day. Forgive me if I make no sense because I stayed up late to finish it!
To be honest, I wasn't going to read Yellowface. I found Kuang's Babel to be so painfully boring and didactic, like reading a textbook, that I thought we were parting ways for good. But then it seemed like everyone I know read this and liked it, so curiosity got the better of me.
And, wow, is this really the same author? What a ride. The suspense! The vitriol! The fucking audacity!
I want to take a moment to acknowledge something I found quite ironic-- Kuang's other books are fantasy books about magic and colonialism and boarding schools while this one has the very lukewarm premise of being about authors and the publishing process... but, my god, when it comes to pageturners even The Poppy War had nothing on this.
A satire, is it? Well, maybe, but I've never read such a gripping and suspenseful satire. Kuang rips the publishing industry to shreds with this book, and she does it from the perspective of a white author who steals the first draft manuscript of a dead Chinese author.
I sat open-mouthed pretty much the entire time wondering if she was going to get away with it or get caught. Kuang uses a lot of social media to tell this story and it is highly effective at keeping the pacing up. We all know social media is a shitstorm of people vying for attention, performing for validation and, occasionally, making genuinely important points, and we see it all play out here to the extreme.
I thought Babel lacked nuance, but Yellowface is the complete opposite. Both June and Athena are complex characters. Athena is not allowed to simply be the perfect victim and, in fact, what emerges over the course of the novel is someone who is quite unlikable herself. June has done something objectively bad, but the author resists the temptation to paint her as one-dimensional. Her desperation and self-delusion, her anxiety and her jealousy, feel real.
At first glance, June appears to be the villain, but I think it becomes clear as the story progresses that this is much bigger than June. Kuang calls out the publishing industry and the messed up way books are primarily marketed through a social media performance. The young authors choking on their jealousy as they are pitted against one another. The agents and editors urging authors to publish “anything” while they have “social capital” regardless of whether it’s good or not.
And, of course, the way many in the publishing industry view "diversity" as a marketing buzzword to sell more books, rather than having the genuinely noble goal of diversifying literature. As Brett, June's agent, admits at one point: "But at the end of the day all that really matters is cash flow."
This is a chaotic, highly-frustrating, impossible-to-put-down book. I rollercoasted from emotion to emotion reading it and I'm sure I will still be talking about it long after I'm done writing this review.
2024 contemporary
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Nilufer Ozmekik
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March 23, 2024
This is a compelling, cynical, and thought-provoking satire that delves into themes of plagiarism, racism, and internet trolling. It offers a realistic portrayal of the publishing industry within the framework of a heart-pounding thriller. The story revolves around an anti-heroine driven by power and insecurity, who assumes the identity of her deceased friend to publish a masterpiece. Loneliness and the desperate desire for recognition serve as driving forces, pushing the protagonist to extreme measures.
Remarkably, I found myself attached to a book despite disliking the main character. At times, I wished I could physically enter the story and confront June Hayward/ Juniper Song, who committed the ultimate crime: stealing her late friend Athena Liu's unpublished book. The reasons behind this act of creative theft are complex and include jealousy, thirst for power, honoring her friend's work in the best way possible, and seeking personal gain. It is a tale that explores unfairness, harbored resentment, and a thirst for karmic justice.
One of the standout aspects of the book is the author's astute commentary on the perils faced by writers, such as internet trolls who use their freedom of speech rights to berate and belittle their creations. The story skillfully examines the commodification of writers, where their looks, personality, color of their skin and online presence become as important as their writing itself.
This book truly blew my mind. I was unable to put it down, yet also needed to take breaks due to the chaotic and anxiety-inducing experience of living within Juniper's mind. The character evokes strong emotions, including frustration towards her misogyny, blind ambition, and obnoxious justifications for her actions.
It is worth noting that Juniper is not the sole antagonist in the narrative. The judgmental and self-righteous individuals surrounding her also exhibit misogynistic tendencies and relish in criticizing and witnessing the downfall of others, all while raising their champagne glasses in celebration. Even Athena, portrayed as socially awkward and naive, adds depth to the story as a potential soul-sucking character for a gripping plotline.
In this book, nobody is a saint, as being good-hearted does not guarantee financial security, career success, fame, or power. The author skillfully portrays flawed and complex characters who challenge the reader's perceptions.
Overall, this realistic and thrilling read left me feeling anxious and evoked a multitude of emotions including fear, hate, and sadness. It successfully accomplished its mission of shaking the reader to their core and provoking deep thoughts that linger for days. The essence of a masterpiece lies in its ability to challenge readers and evoke a range of feelings, and this book achieves just that.
I wholeheartedly consider this one of the best books of the year, and I urge you not to overlook it or let it languish in your "to be read" list. Grab a copy and immerse yourself in its urgent and captivating narrative.
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✨ A ✨
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January 25, 2024
At this point I'd read Rebecca's grocery lists
“She’s using the pen name Juniper Song 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.”
This book was a fascinating look into the mind of the worst kind of person in the online bookish community.
Every chapter was like watching a trainwreck. I knew it would just get worse but I could not for the life of me look away.
June was unhinged. The kind of unhinged that believes her own lies and thinks she is morally in the right. Girl took delulu to another level.
What astounded me most was how legitimately real her voice was. Hats off to Rebecca Kuang. She killed this.
Honestly i had fun reading this book. It incited so many feelings in me (mainly rage and distress). There were parts where i was in utter disbelief of June, i had to take a step back from the book.
I do wonder though, what with all the niche references to the recurring bookish online drama and controversy that gets dragged up month in and month out, how a casual book reader would experience this book 🤔.
2023-release
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emma
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July 20, 2023
this book is so goddamn annoying.
i love satire.
this was like reading the diary entry of someone who has just had an extremely bad day at work. it was like that trope that seems for some reason very exclusive to the mid-2000s in which people have the worst day of their lives are doomed to relive it, or die and go to purgatory or something like that enjoyed a specific renaissance in spirit in this book.
and it was so frustrating.
but it was also F U N.
it was very heavy-handed, and pretty self-indulgent, but i love three things in this life and those are mean girls, and b*tching with my friends, and books, and this was all three of them in one.
it was a mess. but i liked it anyway.
and everyone who is getting a little prickly over it is only doing so because they see themselves in it. because this all feels so very true!!!
bottom line: people are the worst and so is this book and i'm a fan of all of it.
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tbr review
this book is already polarizing and its release date is 6 months away. so yeah i want to read it
update: let's do this.
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Hannah Azerang
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July 29, 2023
i wanted to like this so much more, but unfortunately it felt really flat to me :(
what i expected to be an insightful critique of racism in the publishing industry turned out to be more of a jab at twitter discourse? more than anything, it felt like the author was using the main character to respond to real life criticism she’s received, which isn’t inherently bad, but it made the story feel a bit shallow.
i think rfk is an extremely talented writer, which is why my expectations were so high. i just feel like this book had the potential to say so much more, but i finished it thinking, “that’s it?”
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===
How R. F. Kuang turned every recent book scandal into the satirical thriller ‘Yellowface’
BY HELEN LISTAFF WRITER MAY 15, 2023 6 AM PT
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“Yellowface,” R. F. Kuang’s fourth novel, is a dark satire on book publishing, racial appropriation and cancel culture.
(John Packman)
ON THE SHELF
Yellowface
By R. F. Kuang
William Morrow: 336 pages, $30
If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.
R. F. Kuang, 26, is hardly a debut author. She has already published four fantasy novels infused with Chinese history and profound questions about colonial legacies, including the “Poppy War” trilogy and last year’s bestseller, “Babel, or the Necessity of Violence.”
But Kuang’s new novel, “Yellowface,” out Tuesday, is both a departure and a quantum leap straight into the zeitgeist. A dark satire on the publishing industry and the many-layered ironies of public discourse around Asian American representation, it starts with a first-chapter twist.
When rising-star novelist Athena Liu dies suddenly, her fellow writer and frenemy June Hayward is right there to pick up the pieces — or rather, to steal Athena’s manuscript, a saga involving Chinese laborers during World War I. June, who is white, publishes it as her own, but under a new, racially ambiguous name — Juniper Song. She scores a big book deal and rides a wave of “own voices” storytelling in ways that make you question everything.
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Charles Yu knows the world isn’t black and white
Feb. 19, 2020
Talking via phone with Kuang felt like finally divulging secrets we’ve all known. As an Asian American journalist, I’ve felt pressures similar to those Kuang explores. I too have wondered if I’m in demand to tick diversity boxes. I too have learned to package myself as a minority voice for white audiences — sometimes unintentionally pigeonholing myself. I too wonder if I’m participating in a machine that claims to redistribute power only to tokenize. In “Yellowface,” I saw my worries on the page.
Speaking from New Haven, Conn., where she is pursuing a PhD from Yale in East Asian languages and literature, Kuang admitted with delight that “every single thing that happens is based on a real scandal.” Folding in everything from the “American Dirt” controversy to the “Bad Art Friend” debate was part of the fun of writing a novel whose dizzying absurdities — oh, and a few ghosts — are still no match for reality.
Our wide-ranging conversation, covering scandals, cultural appropriation and the scourge of social media call-outs, has been edited and condensed for clarity.
(William Morrow)
What was the inspiration for this story?
It was mid-2021, so everyone was sitting at home. A lot of writers I know were in their goblin mode. The novel just plopped fully formed into my head one morning, which is not a super helpful way to understand where creative inspiration comes from.
Publishing was going through what seems like all these watershed moments, having conversations about change and diversity and caring about marginalized writers, et cetera, and I was feeling a bit cynical about it, especially because it seems like very few of those promises have actually come to fruition. So I was thinking about ways in which the industry capitalizes on performative care about diversity and uplifting marginalized voices [while] not ever changing in a structural way.
You’ve just alluded to the diversity pushes that followed “American Dirt,” but you also joined a strike against your publisher, HarperCollins. How much are the plotlines in “Yellowface” shaped by these scandals?
We’ve been pitching it as kind of an absurdist satire of the industry, but on the level of social realism, and it doesn’t even get close to describing the ridiculous things that happen day-to-day. There are so many Junes in publishing, and the things they are doing to each other are much, much worse than what June individually does. “Yellowface” was very much directly influenced by stuff that was happening in publishing.
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I’m very hesitant to take credit for any one thing I did helping out the strike; I think a lot of HarperCollins authors showed up. Obviously the people who deserve credit are [people] in the union who went without pay and put their whole livelihood and careers on the line.
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‘American Dirt’ was supposed to be a publishing triumph. What went wrong?
Jan. 26, 2020
You describe June and Athena as “friends through circumstance.” Is their relationship anything you’ve experienced in writing communities?
I don’t think writing friendships are any more vicious or intense than everyday friendships. But in any industry that feels intensely competitive, we do a lot of clique forming and name-dropping and petty gossip. June and Athena are the only two professional writers that the other knows, so they stick together, even though they really despise each other. I’m fortunate in that my writing friendships are much healthier and mutually supportive.
While editing Athena’s novel, June is trying to preserve an Asian writer’s ideas but not really understanding the personal elements. When some “offensive” things get cut to make her material more accessible, she’s complimented by her editor for killing her darlings. It looks virtuous, but it’s actually whitewashing. Is that a pressure you have ever felt in your career?
I used to feel this pressure a lot more. I think I used to really not get along with my editor who edits my fantasy novels. I would feel all the time I was being pressured to whitewash the story to make things accessible. And the lovely thing about that relationship is that we’ve grown together. I’ve learned to figure out what works about my editor’s feedback and what doesn’t, and also to advocate for myself and explain where I’m coming from, what changes I absolutely can’t make. So I don’t struggle with that as much now, but that’s because I’m much more confident and mature in the editorial relationship.
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Before I read the book, I found people who had read the advance copy on TikTok. They were saying: “Oh, my gosh, this protagonist is so terrible!” But sometimes, June says things I have been thinking about but have been afraid to say for fear of calling out my own community.
You’re supposed to feel for June. That’s the whole hat trick, right? Even when you’re writing the villains, you want somebody whose motivations are sometimes understandable, whose logic is right maybe 60% of the time. She’s just so badly wrong about the other 40%. And the thing is, I think we all can relate to June harder than we can to Athena, because in this industry most of us are Junes. Very few people are overnight celebrity bestsellers. The beginning of my career certainly looks a lot more like June’s career, so I felt her pain. So yeah, you’re supposed to uncomfortably like her, even though she does progressively unhinged things.
There’s a social media storm in the novel that felt very real. Have you ever had the fear of generating backlash?
I don’t think that much about social media backlash. Can’t think too much about it. I don’t think it’s a matter of personal safety for me so much as it is a matter of nuance and care. And what frustrates me about conversations where people are supposedly calling each other out is that it often seems to come less from a place of genuinely wanting to work through thorny issues — instead of doing this work, people tend to just take sides, use very reductive language to describe what’s going on. And I don’t find that helpful for anyone. It’s not good for the community.
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But I mean, for instance, I thought that there are some wonderful critical pieces of this film “Crazy Rich Asians” that were able to acknowledge how much it meant for a lot of people to see themselves as the protagonist of rom-coms while also criticizing the many things the film gets wrong. This kind of conversation is only possible if you don’t have a binary mentality. You can love this thing and criticize it at the same time.
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Throughout “Yellowface,” we see how trauma can become very profitable for the market. You can even profit off being ”canceled.” In your publicity material, you said, “If anything, the system only turns critique into another way of profit.” At the same time, of course, you are part of that system. Did you ever wrestle with that irony?
It doesn’t seem like a terrible contradiction to me, because what was the alternative? Not saying anything at all? I just refuse to publish anything, keep my silence? I think that would be worse. So even though the system, I believe, always swallows its own critiques, there’s still another benefit to publishing stories like this — just that it gets us talking. It gets Asian American writers discussing ways in which we can show better solidarity for one another. It lays a lot of ugly things about publishing out in the open so that maybe writers know what they’re getting into.
At heart, this feels like a story about who gets to tell whose story. Not just another group’s story, but another person’s. Athena used people’s stories in her fiction, June then used her research — on and on. What does it mean to ask for “consent” to use someone else’s experience in fiction?
Obviously, there are lots of different viewpoints on this. The story “Bad Art Friend,” which was circulating around certain parts of Book Twitter a while back, really revealed that people have very differing attitudes on what you can lift from the people in your life. There’s some people who think that anything is fair play, as long as it’s fiction. You can grab other people by the ankles and shake them for the pocket change of their life experiences. And maybe that’s completely permissible from the perspective of making great art. I think it makes you kind of an a— to the people around you if you don’t talk to them about it.
I’m very hesitant to impose hard and fast standards on what people can and can’t write about. That being said, I probably would not write about my friend’s experiences in the way Athena was. But that’s a matter of being a bad friend and a bad writer.
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You have been writing fantasy novels for years. What made you want to do something different?
I love different playgrounds, I think I’ll try to keep hopping genres. As long as I have the career, I hate doing the same thing twice. Maybe I’ll do a rom-com. Maybe I’ll do a hard-boiled mystery novel. Maybe I’ll do a psychological thriller. I don’t know.
Well, June’s work gets optioned by Hollywood. Would you want to do that?
Everything I’ve heard about Hollywood makes me deeply anxious about ever heading over there. And so I have no immediate plans to, since I have to finish my PhD first.
And you’ll also have to go on a 10-city book tour for “Yellowface.” What are you most excited — or anxious about?
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I’m anxious about my laundry. It’s really hard to wash your clothes from your city every week or every day. So I’m not sure how I’m going to have clean underwear for the entire tour. I really need to figure that out.
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Helen Li
Helen Li was a member of the 2022-23 Los Angeles Times Fellowship class. She grew up in Richmond, Va., and graduated from Washington University in St. Louis, where she studied international development. After working as a university teacher through the Princeton in Asia fellowship in China and Nepal, she pivoted to freelance journalism and fact-checking. During the 2020 elections, she collaborated remotely with a team of volunteers to produce “Fresh Off the Vote,” an explanatory podcast about Asian American civic engagement. These collective experiences brought her to The Times, where she worked for the podcast, Business and newsletter teams. She aspires to learn more about the human experience through different forms of storytelling.
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'Yellowface' takes white privilege to a sinister level
MAY 15, 20236:50 AM ET
By
Keishel Williams
Cover of Yellowface
William Morrow
Every once in a while there is a novel that enters the literary zeitgeist and requires discourse — but it feels like there is nothing that can be written or said that will ever do it justice. This is the feeling R.F. Kuang's new novel Yellowface evokes.
The highly immersive satirical novel takes us on a thrilling journey through the eyes of a writer who struggles to make her own way in the cut-throat world of publishing. In a climate where the publishing industry is being highly scrutinized for its gatekeeping, unfair treatment of marginalized writers and editors, its role in appropriation — we all remember the "Bad Art Friend" saga — and more, Kuang's novel is a strong commentary on the exploitation and rigors writers face under the pressure to be successful. What would you do for something you think you need badly? That promotion? That new shoes? That spot in an Ivy League college? That book deal? That next hit project? What happens when your entire identity becomes embroiled in your job — who is a writer if they're unable to write and publish? This is what Kuang's protagonist, June, faces in this novel.
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Yellowface is about a young white author who steals the manuscript of her dead Asian friend, finishes it, and publishes it as her own. Throughout the novel, Juniper "June" Hayward, publishing as Juniper Song, works to maintain the lie that her first big hit novel The Last Front, a story about Chinese workers in the British Army during WWI, is indeed her work and her work only. "That's been the key to staying sane throughout all of this: holding the line, maintaining my innocence. In the face of it all, I've never once cracked, never admitted the theft to anyone. By now, I mostly believe the lie myself," June tries to convince herself more than halfway through the novel. Not only does she face accusations of theft and plagiarism, but the optics of a white woman possibly profiting off the work of an Asian woman also create a platform for accusations of racism and "yellowface."
The story is a multi-layer, complex conversation that tackles a few things about the publishing industry at once. The topic of cultural appropriation galvanizes the entire story and at various angles challenges the idea of what kind of stories writers are allowed to write given their race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. In one scene, June is challenged by a Chinese American reader on why she thinks it's okay to write and profit from painful Chinese history. She responds, "I think it's dangerous to start censoring what authors should and shouldn't write...I mean, turn what you're saying around and see how it sounds. Can a Black writer not write a novel with a white protagonist?"
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The beauty and irony of this conversation is that Kuang herself is an Asian writer telling this story through the eyes of a white writer. As the public continues to challenge the authenticity of June's novel and June herself, she finds herself at the center of online harassment and death threats that sends her into a downward spiral. As June becomes more erratic and her life falls apart trying to maintain the lie, Kuang's writing becomes sharp and poignant, with quick, nail-biting pacing. Kuang's best writing is delivered in the tension-filled scenes when the protagonist is met with online vitriol and has to watch the live exposition of her life unfold on social media, as she is flailed in the public court of opinion with words and memes and half-truths.
By the end of the novel, more questions arise about the role social media plays in shaping an authors' career since, "reputations in publishing are built and destroyed, constantly, online." Yellowface also raises questions about desire and greed, and about privilege on both sides of the spectrum for white writers and diverse writers. As the protagonist says, "It all boils down to self-interest. Manipulating the story...If publishing is rigged, you might as well make sure it's rigged in your favor."
The one wrinkle in an otherwise intoxicating story is June's relationship with her family. There is room to flesh out that relationship and perhaps give a solid explanation for why her family, namely her mother, is so far removed from her world. It's most glaring that an explanation is needed for why June's facing that sordid world alone — going through online bullying and real-life torture on her own — when she has family.
Kuang's first foray outside of fantasy is a well-executed, gripping, fast-paced novel about the nuances of the publishing world when an author is desperate enough to do anything for success. I was consistently at the edge of my seat until the very last page. This type of interrogation of the coopting of culture and stories for capital gain is well-received.
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Keishel Williams is a Trinidadian American book reviewer, arts & culture writer, and editor.
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