the publisher: William Morrow
First publication: 2023
Book summary: “Yellowface” by RF Kuang
Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. However, Athena is a lover of literature. June Hayward is literally a nobody. June wonders who wants a story about a basic white girl.
There, June witnesses Athena’s death in an unexpected accident and impulsively takes action. He steals Athena’s recently completed masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unknown contributions of Chinese workers during World War I.
So what happens if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to an agent as her own work? So what if she gets her new publisher to rebrand her as Juniper Song, an author of ambiguous ethnicity? What if we posted a photo of it? Isn’t this part of history worth telling, no matter who tells it? That’s June’s argument, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree.
But June can’t escape Athena’s shadow, and new evidence threatens to ruin June’s (stolen) success around her. As June scrambles to protect her own secret, she discovers just how far she will go to protect what she takes for granted.
With its fully immersive first-person audio, Yellowface tackles issues of diversity, racism, cultural appropriation, and even social media’s horrifying marginalization. RF Kuang’s novels are timely, very sharp, and extremely readable.
Book review: “Yellowface” by RF Kuang
RF Kuang’s Yellowface is a scathing satire that takes a scalpel at a whitewashed society world of publishing And it skewers issues of racism, cultural appropriation, and the commodification of diverse stories. At its heart is a timeless antihero. June Hayward, a struggling white writer, witnesses the sudden death of her former friend, literary great Athena Liu. In a moment of paranoia and despair, June steals Athena’s recently completed manuscript about the Chinese Labor Army. World War I. She edited it, renamed her own “Juniper Song” and promoted it as her own work, achieving phenomenal bestseller status.
But the unearned success comes at a price, as June is haunted by the lingering specter of Athena and suspicions that she plagiarized her way to the top. Quan’s sharp prose plunges her readers into June’s frenetic psyche as her guilt, insecurities, and mimetic writing process slowly drive her to the brink of her madness. We see how the literary world has remade June into an exotic and ethnically ambiguous product to better sell Athena’s story of oppressed Chinese identity. Quan wields her satire as a scalpel to strip away the dominant whiteness and cultural insensitivity that remains deeply entrenched in American publishing.
At the heart of Yellowface is the haunting alienation that marginalized writers face within a system built to suppress and exploit their voices while elevating derivative white perspectives. It’s a ghost story about feelings. June is literally possessed by the spirit of Athena, who appears in creepy photos and online videos of her, shaming her for her theft. But she is also haunted by the difficult legacy of the very stories she stole: stories of suppressed history and forgotten Chinese sacrifice. No matter how much June edits or brands herself, this is a story she can never truly own or truly live from a position of white privilege.
Although the novel’s satire of POWs sometimes veers into hilarious brutality, Quan conveys June’s anxieties and moral distortions with notable psychological nuance and dark comedy. We understand June’s delusional rationalization of her plagiarism. She just wants to tell this overlooked story, that Athena doesn’t deserve her success as a tokenized literary minority, that her plagiarism is an avant-garde satire on the beliefs of a unified publishing industry. That’s what it is. Racial/Authority Perspective. This satire works because director Quan makes June’s antics not just despicable, but also pitifully human and relatable. She captures the deep insecurities of a struggling writer willing to sacrifice integrity for a shot at success.
This novel truly becomes a song when it focuses on June’s desperate attempts to hang on to her ill-gotten fame at all costs. This includes doubling down on her performative allyship with the Asian American community, promoting more Asian-inspired stories to exploit, and even deceptive redemption. Including even seeking to novelize her own cancellation. The novel is a poignant depiction of the privilege and moral flexibility of white creative professionals, intoxicated by the claim that they are “allies.”
Quan’s satire is great, but its delivery can be very uneven. The novel can oscillate between a darkly hilarious satire that dissects the power structure of publishing to just a biting showdown with straw numbers. Certain sections aimed at skewering “social justice warriors” on social media have devolved into baseless brutality that reflects more of a Reddit dickfest than insightful commentary. . The level of harassment and destruction that June endures also begins to shake its credibility, making it more of a fantasy lashing out at those who hate her than a coherent critique of anything substantial. While there’s definitely some hard-hitting truth to Quan’s depiction of cannibalizing social media mobs, it doesn’t necessarily feel grounded in any discernible reality.
Similarly, while the novel takes a nuanced look toward interrogating June’s psyche, the actual victims of her crimes, Athena and her surviving family, remain ciphers, and they do little to humanize the perpetrators. Strangely underdeveloped compared to the energy expended. Quan is clearly interested in satirizing the mentality that allows figures like June to justify cultural appropriation, while equally downplaying the material harm and intergenerational trauma that culture can inflict. have. This is probably intentional, ruthlessly depicting the solipsism of the diversity game in white literature. But it can also be read by her as overly comfortably centering the white perspective, the very problem the novel purports to criticize.
The novel loses its momentum in the finale, which devolves into an endless cat-and-mouse game between June and her main “haunt” Candice, a disgruntled former publishing assistant who tries to expose the truth. The pacing lags as the outrageousness builds towards a disappointingly tidy finale that feels like it’s pulling punches after having so much crazy fun throughout.
Despite its unevenness, Yellowface succeeds in poignantly examining the cyclical nature of racial alienation, cultural appropriation, exploitation, and white grievance in American letters. Quan deftly dismantles the mechanisms by which non-white writers are tokenized, trapped within limited narratives of oppression, and resented for any tangible “success” in filling that niche. White writers like June feel entitled to repurpose their stories of marginalization into their own stories of white martyrdom and cancellation.
While the vitriol and satire are unrelenting, Quan argues that the real toxicity lies not in “cancel culture,” but rather in using the very platforms that sell superficial things to deny their creators, while denying real non-white people. It reveals an entire industry and culture built on extracting the stories of people as lucrative products. Diversity on version. Yellowface is a harrowing read that makes readers think about the line between allyship and appropriation, who has the right to claim what stories, and how to exorcise the haunting specter of cultural oppression forever. It will be done. In its fury and extremity lies a harsh and haunting truth about the publishing industry’s enduring racial divisions.