Yellowface

by R. F. Kuang

Yellowface tells the story of a writer, June Hayward, from her point of view. And what a point of view! From the very beginning, it’s clear that she’s unlikable and that envy will color everything she tells us. She drowns in self-pity while supposedly celebrating her friend Athena Liu’s new Netflix deal. Even so, we do sympathize with her. Athena and June were classmates at Yale, and June thought that they would both rise to literary stardom together. But while her friend’s career took off into the stratosphere, our narrator’s first novel flopped. She’s heartbroken that her love of writing hasn’t translated into a career. June’s racism rears its ugly head early on. Yes, she believes that Athena’s writing is brilliant, but she also thinks that her Chinese American friend has gotten ahead because the publishing industry is trending towards young, “diverse,” writers.

In the opening chapter, Athena dies right in front of June. She’s traumatized, yes, but she also takes the opportunity to steal her friend’s manuscript. She decides to co-opt Athena’s latest novel, a work about Chinese laborers in World War I. It’s typewritten, and no one else knows about it. As she edits and rewrites the book, June becomes more and more convinced that the work is her own, thus putting a white name on an Asian author’s work. As we begin to suspect that June’s denial is taking a strange turn, accusations of plagiarism surface from a mysterious source. The novel veers into thriller territory; I’ve seen it described as a “literary thriller,” which is a perfect characterization. June eventually questions her own sanity, while we wonder what could possibly be going on. It’s the perfect direction for the novel to take—just when we’re sick of hearing June justify her actions and opinions, things really pick up on the outside.

The sense of danger we feel has to do with whether or not June will be found out as a plagiarist, and also with the sense of horror we feel at the dangerous direction her mind is taking. Because we’re in her first-person point of view, she snags us with pleas to consider her perspective, which can be hard to resist, even when we truly do not want to sympathize with her. In an interview with NPR, Kuang said,

I love writing unlikable narrators, but the trick here is it's much more fun to follow a character that does have a sympathetic background, that does think reasonable thoughts about half the time, because then you're compelled to follow their logic to the horrible decisions they are making. … I am trying to take all those tropes and inject them all into a singular white female protagonist who is deeply unlikable and try to crack the code of what makes her so interesting to listen to regardless.

I love the phrase “compelled to follow their logic” here, because June doesn’t start out as some kind of rabid racist. She simply operates under the kind of unconscious bias that so many white people fall prey to. As much as we dislike her, it’s hard to want to see her completely destroyed (there’s the “sympathetic background” and “reasonable thoughts”). She starts to dig in her heels rather than face her own harmful assumptions, but we get the sense that she can still stop herself. This is a brilliant way of writing about plagiarism and racism at the same time—once she’s in it, June just can’t see a way to dig herself out. Kuang’s satire really shines here, as the tone of the novel undermines even the narrator herself. We do follow June’s “logic” and also pray that she will actually become aware of her bias and learn from the accusations of racism. We want her to find her own voice and write her own work.

An anecdote about Athena Liu questions how much an author can borrow before it becomes stealing. At an exhibit on the Korean War, June finds Athena speaking intently with a veteran of the war, nodding and asking him many questions. Soon, she publishes a short story that’s almost too faithful to what she learned from the exhibit. June wants to accuse her of collecting other people’s pain for her writing. Of course, this becomes a rationalization of June’s theft of a real manuscript, but the question remains—if a work of art uses stories, even dialogue, from others’ lived experiences without crediting the original source, is that stealing? This taps into a larger conversation about appreciation versus appropriation. Does Athena’s work pay homage to the pain she witnesses, or does she appropriate it? Meanwhile, June indisputably appropriates Athena’s work. Is it an appropriation of an appropriation, or simply a cultural violation?

Kuang, a Chinese American writer, challenges social discourse about race and appropriation as she writes from the perspective of a white woman. The novel’s very existence raises the question of who can write about whom. In June’s case, her rewrites/cultural appropriation get her in trouble because of her tone-deafness about race. However, it’s not June alone, but her agent and editor as well. Almost no one spots the trouble ahead. It remains clear throughout Yellowface that unconscious bias and systemic racism make it almost impossible for a white writer to take on the voice of a marginalized group. The novel is, of course, not a cautionary tale against writing outside one’s own identity, because Kuang is doing just that. It’s a cautionary tale against writing without careful examination and sensitivity. June’s problem, aside from the theft, is that her obsession with bestseller lists and awards blocks her from even exploring her own voice. “Writing is the whole world,” she says. But because she has no idea who she is, she cannot write without the prop of someone else’s work.

The changes June makes to Athena’s novel include the insertion of a few white savior moments, often at the insistence of an agent or editor who wants to “soften it up” or “reach a wider audience.” This reflects the systemic racism within the publishing world at large; it’s obsessed with appearing diverse by promoting marginalized voices, but also with reaching every possible customer. Kuang explores tokenism, in which a non-white author like Athena Liu is held up as proof that the industry is more inclusive, even as other minority writers are excluded. The literary world includes or excludes authors on a somewhat arbitrary basis. What’s selling? Who’s selling? No one publishes a book based on merit alone. Not only that, but June finds out the hard way that stardom is fickle. Feted one year and ignored the next, she becomes increasingly desperate to achieve her dream—to write the next great novel, and the next, until she is part of an elite within an elite, in which authors can afford to wait a decade between novels.

I read Yellowface not only because of its popularity, but also because I absolutely loved Kuang’s previous novel, Babel. On the surface, the two could not be more different. The earlier work is set largely in Oxford in the 1830s, in a world colored by magic. However, in Babel, Kuang also writes from the perspectives of people of several different races, albeit not in the first person. The novel is about white supremacy and the damage done by an empire that appropriates cultures around the world. Yellowface discusses a literary empire built around manipulating readers and authors into buying what the industry insists they read. As June says, “The truth is fluid. There’s always another narrative.” Ultimately, the question of this novel centers around who is marginalized, who is included, and why.