R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface was big and splashy in my circles when it debuted. It was one of the few new releases that I actually noticed, though it appears I didn’t take the step of adding it to my TBR. Alas, it won’t count for that goal!
Someone in my Swedish book club floated the idea of R. F. Kuang, though torn between this one and Babel. I’m a bit ashamed to say that I pushed for Yellowface out of the two, based purely on the opinions of other bookish friends whose taste I trust implicitly. I say “ashamed” because I’m not sure I liked Yellowface all that much and wonder if Babel would have been more interesting.
Juniper “June” Hayward is a struggling White author with one flop of a novel under her belt; her Chinese-American Yale classmate Athena Liu is a literary rockstar. When Athena chokes to death on a pancake after the women go out for drinks, June takes the opportunity to steal her latest novel about Chinese laborers in Europe during World War I. June revises the manuscript and sends it off to her agent, passing it off as entirely her own work. The final product, The Last Front, is a runaway bestseller—maybe in part because June capitalizes on her connection to Athena, blowing their ambiguous frienemyship entirely out of proportion. Her publisher, meanwhile, decides to publish under the name Juniper Song and shoots some new, racially ambiguous author photos. June becomes a darling of the literati and the online AAPI community, setting up scholarships, mentoring aspiring writers, getting retweeted on Twitter and liked on Instagram.
The facade doesn’t last, of course, and accusations of plagiarism eventually make the rounds, but rather than come clean June doubles down. She rides out the scandal in the short term, but after she publishes a follow-up novella called Mother Witch that opens with a line she gleaned from Athena’s old notebooks, there’s no way out. While she struggles to revise and rewrite the novel without the plagiarized lines, spooky messages on social media convince June that she’s being haunted by Athena’s ghost. The campaign continues until June spirals out into a mental breakdown that ends with her recorded confession being released to the public. Her reputation now in tatters, June ends the book by plotting her literary revenge: a tell-all confessional memoir where she frames the publication of The Last Front as an elaborate hoax to expose how misogynistic and racist the publishing industry is.
Yellowface feels like a punching bag of a story for the sake of a few moments. By that I mean, it feels like Kuang had some points she wanted to make, and built the premise of the novel and the entirety of June’s character around creating the opportunity to make those points. The result is that when Kuang gets to have those moments in the story, the criticism is sharp, on point, and biting, such as her account of June and her editor—two White women—revising a story by a Chinese-American woman to include more (good) White people, or the fickle nature of the Twitterati. But the only reason those moments can happen is because, after the initial (understandable if morally icky) theft, June continues to make incredibly poor choices that defy all logic or sense of self-preservation. She flatly refuses to send The Last Front to a sensitivity reader for no other reason than it might delay publication; she keeps the plagiarized opening line in Mother Witch. Maybe this speaks to my own risk-averse nature, but if I knew I was already skating on thin moral and artistic ice, I would do everything I could to cover my ass.
All the while, since this is from a first-person perspective, we’re getting June’s unfiltered inner monologue, and it really seems like the point of the perspective is to make it clear to the reader how entitled and clueless she is, even as a White woman with “good” politics. (“I even voted for Biden!” she assures us early on.) I won’t say these people don’t exist, because they do, but June feels more like a low-effort caricature of them than anything else, which she has to be for the story to work. Without giving away too much of a plot twist, refusing the sensitivity reader is a plot-essential event that contributes to her downfall. But then there are other scenes where Kuang really, really nails what it’s like to struggle with a passion, an art that used to bring you joy but is now just DOA. She also makes it clear that June has some real mental health issues, with a past that includes sexual assault and (it sounds like) childhood bullying. If these scenes are meant to humanize June and provide some depth to the caricature, they feel weird next to the scenes where Kuang’s disdain for people like her just radiates off the page. June doesn’t feel like a more complex character for it; she just feels inconsistent.
I have to admit, for a minute I was hoping that the third act twist would be the slow reveal that Yellowface itself, the book you’re reading, is the tell-all confessional that June was planning to write. A meta ending like that would have done a lot to gloss over the failings of the filler. But Kuang doesn’t go there (I don’t think? maybe I missed some subtext) so I was left disappointed.
Obviously, a lot of the plot rides on June skirting the moral line of presenting as AAPI, or at least AAPI-adjacent. The title alone makes that clear. But I’m racking my brain to think of any equivalent scandal in recent literary news, of a White author passing as some flavor of AAPI to sell their novel because of its connections to AAPI culture. Expanding the field a bit, you get noteworthy racefaking cases like Rachel Dolezal, CV Vitolo-Haddad, and the “Gay in Damascus” blogger, but none of them are masquerading specifically as AAPI or to sell a novel. If you start from the published author angle instead of the racefaking one, James Frey made up a whole bunch of stuff for A Million Little Pieces, but he never pretended to be anyone other than James Frey. There was the big plagiarism brouhaha over Jumi Bello’s The Leaving in 2022, but again no racefaking. The only case I can think of that resembles June’s literary yellowface is from over a hundred years ago: Winnifred Eaton writing as Onoto Watanna, producing books like A Japanese Nightingale. Still, her writing was her own work, even if it she was still a British-Chinese woman writing about Japan, a country she had no personal connection to or had ever visited. Am I just out of the loop?
