Title: Yellowface
Author: R.F. Kuang
Genre: Fiction, contemporary
Publisher: Harper Collins
Publication Date: 2023
Format: Paperback
Length: 319 pages

Rating:

Yellowface was a fever dream of a book. It was a wild ride that for the entire time I was reading I couldn’t look away from. R.F. Kuang is a well-known master of fantasy, but I had no idea what to expect from her in her first foray into contemporary fiction. I’m now wholly convinced that there’s nothing that Kuang can’t write.

A masterfully written satire, Yellowface explores who has the right to tell a story, and how society handles these types of issues. Told from the story of a white woman who is unequivocally in the wrong and simultaneously completely convinced of her innocence, the story pitches you through the insanity of the publishing industry, the alienation and vitriol of social media, and the nature of racism, discrimination, and cultural appropriation in America, all at a break-neck pace as you watch the protagonist completely implode.

I consumed this book in two sittings, and that was only because my body insisted that I needed sleep sometime around midnight on day one. This is easily one of the best reads I’ve had this year and I firmly believe it’s worth every ounce of the hype it’s getting.

Fair warning: spoilers ahead for anyone who hasn’t read this book.

The Book: Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

Yellowface is told in the first-person by protagonist June Hayward, who takes on the pen name Juniper Song when she steals her dead friend Athena Liu’s novel. The story opens with June explaining at great length how unbearable Athena is, mostly through a lens of jealousy. Athena is young, successful, wealthy, and in demand in just about every aspect of publishing. While June begrudgingly admits that Athena does have a degree of talent, she also asserts that she believes some of her success is owed to the fact that she’s considered to be a “diverse voice.” This becomes a common theme throughout the book as the chip on June’s shoulder at not being considered “diverse” grows.

Even though June feels her friendship with Athena is shallow at best, she continues to meet up with her semi-regularly, and on one of these occasions, after too many drinks, Athena chokes on a pancake while they’re hanging out and dies. June calls for emergency services, who are not able to revive her, and then before leaving, steals Athena’s unread and unknown manuscript for a novel about the role of Chinese soldiers in the first world war called. She knows Athena’s style is to hoard her novels to herself and refuse to let anyone know what she’s working on, so when June reads the draft and finds it to be brilliant, she decides to do Athena what she considers “a service” and publishes the work under her own name and with her own revisions. She assuages her guilt by assuring herself that the work is unfinished and unpublishable in its current state, so she considers it to be a work original to her, alleviating herself from any fault for her actions.

The novel, called The Last Front, is brilliant. When she sends it to her agent, who previously had completely ignored her, he immediately begins to find her potential buyers and she enters the process of preparing to publish. She reads everything she can about Chinese soldiers in the first world war to be clear from any concerns that the work isn’t hers, but June is consistently oblivious to the perceptions of others around her. She’s insecure and constantly seeking validation, so any time anyone questions the authenticity of her writing, or how her writing as a white woman may be perceived in the telling of the story of another race, she brushes it off or finds a way to silence those asking the questions. This obliviousness also extends to her impact on the book—it’s clear in the edits that pass between her and her editor that June is unknowingly whitewashing the history she’s telling in her book. She softens the hard edges, accidentally creates white heroines, and creates a piece that is far from the essence of what Athena was trying to achieve. She assumes that’s only made it better and goes on with her life until the book is published.

Once The Last Front hits shelves, it becomes a resounding success, and for a brief moment, June is so wrapped up in the praise and honours she receives that she well and truly believes she’s gotten away with it. Athena occasionally haunts her (whether literally or figuratively is hard to tell), but she manages to create a cocoon where she surrounds herself with nothing but positive reviews and social media engagement until a select few people start to notice the startling similarities between June’s work and Athena’s. This ultimately leads to the implosion that will be June’s demise, but before she’s willing to admit to anything, she does a thorough job of destroying as much of her and Athena’s legacy as she can on the way down.

The Review

Yellowface was one of the best social commentaries in fiction that I’ve read in a long time. The exploration of the vitriolic cycle of social media, the impacts of cancel culture, the prevalence of racism and cultural appropriation in publishing and beyond, and the notions held by those who believe themselves to be victims of “reverse racism” all had my head spinning and my heart racing. I was talking to a friend about how impactful these aspects of the book are on the reader and she pointed out that it feels so heavy because honestly, it feels exactly like something that would happen in real life. The stealing from a dead friend is a little over the top, but every other aspect of how the theft unfolds feels like an eerie and depressingly accurate depiction of an actual piece of publishing drama. The racism faced by writers, the difficulty in marginalized voices being heard without having to be victims of tokenism, and the inherent structures in the industry that are designed to oppress are all difficult to see because it feels so close to what the world is actually like.

June might also be the most thoroughly unlikeable character I think I’ve ever witnessed. She’s just irredeemably awful. She wraps up her actions in completely misguided and uninformed justifications, and when consistently faced with the option to do the right thing, she always chooses to ignore it and barrel toward her demise instead. Watching her speed through life with absolutely zero self-awareness felt a lot like watching a particularly bad accident unfold. You just can’t look away.

While the book is, of course, wildly entertaining, it also feels really important. We have to have a diversity of voices in publishing. We have to have a diversity of thought, opinions, of representation, and it should be the actual people of these groups who are empowered to share their art. It’s easy to sensationalize the argument for diversity and inclusion and make it out to be a repression of free speech, but that’s completely absurd, and Kuang demonstrates this magnificently in Yellowface. Racism and cultural appropriation are real and prominent issues, and each time someone chooses to step on the history of another and tell it using an inauthentic voice, without the input and consideration of those impacted, you do real harm.

I just loved everything about this book. I’m sure it’s going to be on book club lists and in classrooms for many years to come, and rightfully so. Kuang continues to be one of my favourite authors of all time and in Yellowface, I think she truly demonstrates that her range has no bounds when it comes to writing.