Yellowface
RF Kuang (Harper Collins, available now)
RF Kuang offers an indicting, nuanced satire of the publishing industry in her new novel, Yellowface. The protagonist, June Hayward, is a disillusioned creative writing graduate from Philadelphia. She maintains a complex friendship with her old classmate, an ‘ambiguously queer woman of colour’, and literary superstar, Athena Liu.
The novel’s first thirty pages are a deft, tragi-comic whirlwind. Athena dies in a freak accident, after which June impulsively, but opportunistically, steals Athena’s unpublished manuscript. It’s ‘a masterpiece’, albeit an unfinished one. June reworks the book, justifying her theft as an exercise in literary collaboration meant to honour her friend’s short life. When June lands a six-figure publishing deal, and is assigned a savvy publicity team, she feels gratified: ‘I’m living Athena’s life. I’m experiencing publishing the way it’s supposed to work.’
It’s a rare thing when a novel’s reception re-enacts the subject of its critique.
The misappropriated novel, The Last Front, is a complex saga illuminating the role of the Chinese Labour Corps in World War I. When the publicists query June on whether she has any Chinese ancestry (she doesn’t), they set to work on how to best ‘position’ her ‘so that readers trust the work’. Kuang’s critique of the publishing industry is at its most subtle, and blistering, in these moments. June’s publishers—and often June herself—believe that they are doing the right thing. They mask their acts of self-preservation as an interest in cultural awareness. Her publishers discuss hiring sensitivity readers, while at the same time transforming June into ‘Juniper Song’, a name that might strategically ‘[suggest] the right credentials’.
Timely provocations about cultural appropriation and cancel culture are central to Yellowface. However, at a deeper level, the book is a robust interrogation of the powers of self-delusion. We see it in June’s astonishing naivety and ignorance, which lie beneath her carefully crafted personality and liberal education. The cracks in her persona become particularly apparent towards the middle of the book, during June’s psychological unravelling. Here, she indulges in internal monologues that explicitly critique the ‘Powers that Be’ who decide what is published and how. However, it is in these moments where Kuang’s delightfully droll, conversational prose can suddenly feel overly engineered, as if June is being ventriloquised by the author. The character becomes an archetype—one might even say a ‘Karen’ in the making—and is no longer the difficult yet hilarious and strangely sympathetic character she otherwise is in her own right.
It’s a rare thing when a novel’s reception re-enacts the subject of its critique. The terminology used to describe Athena’s fictional book—‘diverse’, ‘important’, ‘necessary’—is magnified across the cover of the much-Instagrammed advance copy of Yellowface, and quickly became the same language used to describe Kuang’s own book. Some early criticism challenged the extensive publicity, taking issue with how the very thing that the book denounces—publishing’s canny manufacturing of hype—is the very same campaign that the novel, and its author, ultimately enjoyed. I see it as an ingenious move on Kuang’s part. In a publishing culture that commodifies identity, exploits it and then reduces you to it, Yellowface’s subversive, tongue-in-cheek satire seems to say: double down.
—Mindy Gill
