In her latest novel Yellowface, her first foray outside of the fantasy world, R.F. Kuang has penned a meta-critique of the publishing world and its fetishistic interest in diversity. The novel is narrated by June Hayward, a 20-something writer whose career is floundering after the lackluster performance of her debut novel, whose embittered by seeing former classmates like Athena Liu rise to literary stardom: getting huge advances, tons of praise from readers and the establishment alike, and Netflix adaptations. But June’s fortunes are reversed when Athena dies in a freak accident while June is at her apartment, and June takes the opportunity to steal an unpublished manuscript and pass it off as her own work.
The manuscript is a polyphonic historical epic that focuses on the Chinese Labour Corps, a group of Chinese laborers sent to the front lines during World War I by British Troops—Athena had put in months of research on this period of history, compiling strenuous notes. When June decides to move forward with publishing, she mostly makes the work more friendly to a mass audience: making the white characters more sympathetic, injecting some romance, and sanding off the edges of the story about racism and exploitation. It also doesn’t hurt that her publisher suggests that she publishes under the name Juniper Song (“No one says explicitly that ‘Song’ might be mistaken for a Chinese name”), and gets a fake tan for her author photo to seem racially ambiguous. When the novel becomes an instant bestseller it opens June up to questions about her identity, her ability to tell this specific story, and of course threatens to lay bare her theft and deception.
The novel is structured as a sort of literary thriller, although there are no real twists to be had. The entirety of the story, the reader is just waiting for the other shoe to drop—June’s narration reveals her to be casually racist, borderline delusional, and deeply desperate for a modicum of acceptance from a very fickle reading public—all of which betray any confidence that she’ll be able to maintain her ruse. June is constantly making thin excuses for her betrayal of her friend, she justifies her actions mostly by decrying Athena’s success as unfair and ill-gotten, a product of social media hype and publishing’s need to elevate a diverse voice in order to distract from the prevailing white homogeneity. She also begins to buy into her own web of deceit, reframing it as a nuanced exercise in authorship, responding to one Asian reader’s question as to why she felt qualified to write about collective Chinese trauma: “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?”.
Kuang seeks to explicate these tensions between authorship, identity politics, and diversity by telling her story through the unreliable and untrustworthy white narrator: clearly a meta-commentary on who is entitled to tell these kinds of stories. The novel offers an interesting and nuanced critique on the publishing establishment, the perils of being a public figure on social media, and the ways in which diverse voices have been tokenized and commodified in the literary world. But one wonders if the novel would have a little more bite if Kuang pulled some punches earlier in the novel in favor of more interesting reveals. The narrative could also be served by a sharper critique of June, who doesn’t really feel like a real person but a collection of clichés without much room for interpretation.
Simply put, it’s impossible not to hate June: she blames Athena for all her her failures even though it seems that Athena was mostly very kind to her, she’s openly racist towards her Asian readers, she’s deeply bitter and childish, and she makes a variety of extremely harmful decisions that hurt anyone who stands in the way of her success (including manipulating Athena’s grieving mother to seal away all her notebooks in case they could reveal June’s deception). But its mostly frustrating that she doesn’t have more teeth, she’s constantly plagued by insecurity and is usually portrayed as more suggestible than outright malicious—which feels like a disservice in an otherwise well-paced and sharp thriller.
The novel is very clear in the conclusions it would like you to draw, which isn’t altogether a bad thing given the message it is trying to teach readers. Capitalizing on the discourse surrounding “Bad Art Friend” and other wider discussions of authorship and identity, Kuang does make interesting points about the fickle nature of success in an industry that heavily influenced by constantly evolving social media discourse. Yellowface offers readers a look inside the insidious machine of the publishing industry, and a satire of authorship and authority.