Book: Yellowface
Autor: R.F. Kuang
Country: China
Format: Audio
Narrator: Helen Laser
Length: 8h
Publication: 2023
This is the second book I read by R.F. Kuang. Babel was a 5-star for me, and she became a serious candidate for my current top 10 favourite authors. I was a little nervous reading Yellowface, because: 1. It’s a completely different genre from Babel and 2. All the hype surrounding it (hyped books and I sometimes don’t work well).
But in the end, it was a really interesting read that I couldn’t put down (or stop listening to). As someone put it: compulsive reading.
Yellowface is the first-person story of June “Song” Hayward, a failed writer who has in turn a very successful writer as a friend. But when her friend Athena chokes in a pancake and dies in front of her, June decides to steal a manuscript from her house – a story about the forgotten Chinese soldiers who fought in World War I. June then works on the draft and turns it into a book that becomes a bestseller, giving her the fame she craves so much. But the internet will not let her go so easily.
“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.”
Yellowface
The racial element and cultural appropriation are at the center of this book, as June is White and the author who had her work stolen is Asian.
Right off the bat, June is criticized for writing a story centred on the Asian diaspora, while being a White woman. Here Kuang doesn’t run from the controversy and instead lets all the arguments fly while the debate rages on Twitter.
In an interview, Kuang expressed her view on the topic: she calls herself an extremist when it comes to freedom for artists. “when we begin the conversation with ‘you don’t have the right identity to write this book, I find that incredibly dangerous because then you start appointing cultural gatekeepers to make those decisions”
This is only one of the hot debates on Twitter, and I’m not going to go into detail about all the chaos June gets herself into, but let’s just say that there’s a lot of internet rage going on.
“But Twitter is real life; it’s realer than real life, because that is the realm that the social economy of publishing exists on, because the industry has no alternative. (…)
Yellowface
Most of the accounts that participate so clearly do not care about the truth. They’re here for the entertainment. These people love to have a target, and they’ll tear apart anything you put in front of them.”
Yellowface also exposes the publishing industry as a field full of desperate authors trying to climb over each other and agents who will only favour authors that they immediately perceive as success. If you consider how much work publishing houses put into promoting the books they think are promising and how much of a book’s success depends on how it’s marketed, it raises the question: who determines what gets to be a best seller?
“I wonder if that’s the final, obscure part of how publishing works: if the books that become big do so because at some point everyone decided, for no good reason at all, that this would be the title of the moment.”
Yellowface
I really like the writing style, Kuang writes beautifully. I also like the personality she gives the main character. June is obviously not a good person (who steals a dead friend’s manuscripts after watching her die?) but she is not painted as the classic flat villain here. She stumbles, she panics, she has issues with her mother, she’s mortified that she could not save her friend, and she even misses their friendship.
Athena, the writer who had her work stolen, is also not the ideal victim as well. She’s also self-centred and uses people in her own way to her advantage, betraying their trust. Their broken friendship is one of the biggest tragedies in the book, as Kuang pointed out in that interview.
“People always describe jealousy as this sharp, green, venomous thing. Unfounded, vinegary, mean-spirited. But I’ve found that jealousy, to writers, feels more like fear. Jealousy is the spike in my heart rate when I glimpse news of Athena’s success on Twitter—another book contract, awards nominations, special editions, foreign rights deals.”
Yellowface
Despite all of that, I think the plot got a bit lost in the last third of the book. There were a lot of scenes that didn’t add much to the novel, and you keep expecting something to happen. Also, I think there was a brilliant opportunity near the end to make it sort of a narrator-under-a-narrator and turn the book itself into another one of June’s machinations, but Kuang went another route.
In the end, I think this is still a great read. But be warned, you need to have a stomach for some nasty comments and actions along the way.
Love this book? You can pick up a copy at Bookshop.org.
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Read more about R.F. Kuang’s books:
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