“And f—k it, I’ll just say it: taking Athena’s manuscript felt like reparations, payback for the things that Athena took from me.”
Yellowface by R. F. Kuang is a book about entitlement.
Told through the unreliable narration of June Hayward, a struggling author, it chronicles her spiral from grappling with her vicious jealousy of fellow author Athena Liu—her wildly more successful Chinese-American friend from college—to stealing Athena’s manuscript after her death and passing it off as her own. June is, of course, white—but naturally, in order to market “her” new gripping experimental novel on the Chinese Labour Corps, her publisher suggests she rebrand herself under the racially ambiguous alias “Juniper Song” as she models her social media presence after the feeds of Asian authors and chooses an author photo with lighting that makes her appear “nicely tanned”: an absurd premise that she somehow avoids the consequences of, even as she spins herself deeper and deeper into the web of lies she’s woven.
In some ways, we get a rich illustration of her interiority and how she justifies her own actions to herself. There are moments where she almost seems to approach a level of self-awareness, especially when the story gets to its most unbelievable—at one point, she emotionally manipulates Athena’s own mother in order to preserve her lies, and it genuinely seems to give her pause from the magnitude of what she is doing. Kuang even claims to have taken inspiration from her own life in creating parts of June’s past, especially in regards to her experiences as a writer. Yet the cutting, satirical nature of the novel is what ultimately shines through: time and time again, without fail, June continues to rationalize every single cartoonishly horrible thing she does.
Yellowface rides on suspension of disbelief, carrying the reader through a cast full of unlikeable characters and an even more unlikeable protagonist who just somehow keeps getting away with it. We watch as June slows “way down” and talks “very loudly” for a Chinese audience, as she expresses comical disgust for every Chinese food under the sun (“I don’t know what a soup dumpling is, but it sounds gross”), and as she lambasts an Asian editor at her publishing house for suggesting that she work with a sensitivity reader. Certainly, there is something humorous in how Kuang writes a character who piles microaggression upon microaggression on the ethnic group she misleads the public into believing she is part of, but at some point you have to wonder just how well one can speak to real issues through a one-dimensional manifestation of racist self-righteousness—a choice of protagonist which, as others have commented, led to missed opportunities in the story’s commentary on the publishing industry.
And yet, despite everything, the book feels… disturbingly real.
There are leagues of absurdity to be found in the premise and the plot and the characters, but the concept of an author pretending to be of a different race is so commonly reflected in real life that Kuang evidently had plenty of cases to find inspiration from. From a white woman who quite literally went by the alias “Kim Chi” in an attempt to attract a literary agent to a white man who submitted poetry under the guise of a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing, actual events continuously validate the satirical reality of Yellowface—again. And again. And again.
A screenshot of a tweet by Italian author Kim Crisci pitching a YA book. She includes the Somalian and Korean flags in her display name and uses a stock image of a shadowed woman with her back turned as her profile picture.
This fear that marginalized groups will “steal” opportunities from more qualified white individuals purely for the sake of diversity is certainly not unique to the publishing industry. June’s fears that no one will want stories about “basic white girls” anymore reflect a broader trepidation that the people who actually have the requisite skills for a position will be replaced by “DEI hires” as a result of quotas or targets. People like June feel robbed of what they see as a meritocracy—even if that fear fundamentally stems from the idea that only certain groups of people, on the basis of their being white or male or heterosexual, have the “merit” to be qualified in the first place.
The publishing industry certainly is embracing books that represent a wider variety of people, especially when said people are the ones representing themselves, more than it has in the past. Initiatives like We Need Diverse Books and marginalized authors work tirelessly to continue to make that happen. And people have indeed tried to use cultural authenticity as a marketing tactic through hashtags like #OwnVoices, something successful enough to have temporarily been picked up and seriously considered by real publishers, even if that naturally led to its own share of complications surrounding what corporate powers considered “authentic.”
But it also bears consideration that 2022 data from the Census Bureau indicated that 80.3% of writers and authors were white. And it certainly doesn’t help that the same absence of diversity is reflected in publishers themselves, 72.5% of whom also fall under that category. And then there’s all of the other obstacles that obstruct efforts toward diversity, from low starting salaries discouraging potential hires without outside financial support from broaching the industry to publishers claiming that even if they would like to reach more diverse audiences they either don’t know how to or don’t want to expend resources for it—and in the light of all of that, an “ethnic” pen name and a racially ambiguous portrait photo really don’t seem so advantageous.
So what does happen to June Hayward?
“Diversity is what’s selling right now… I mean, a queer Asian girl? That’s every checkbox on the list. They’ll be slobbering all over this manuscript.”
In text, June’s belief that people of marginalized groups may gain authorial success purely from being marginalized is seemingly validated by the overwhelming popularity she herself receives after taking on an illusory Asian-American identity. But it is important to remember that June is not actually a person of color, and the publisher she works with is aware of this. This is merely the perspective reflected in her unreliable narration: in actuality, Kuang constructs a situation in which a writer escapes the internal challenges of not being white in the publishing industry while reaping the benefits of it in the public eye. June, on virtue of being a white woman who has “written” a Chinese historical novel, transcends typical institutional or individual barriers which stem from race; the publishing house she works with may brand her as Asian, but the people of it still treat her as white—and she is more than happy to edit and revise her deceased friend’s work to be more appealing to white audiences.
What Kuang actually tells us, in the form of this absurd and satirical situation, is this: diversity sells when it’s a lie. After all, the illusion of authenticity is far more palatable than the real thing—why allow marginalized people to tell their own stories when those in positions of power and privilege are there to sanitize them for the public?
The broader issue is, of course, far more complex than the extreme example of authorial race-bending can illustrate. Accordingly, Yellowface’s rumination on who has the right to write what stories extends to Athena’s works as well, a consideration reflected in the discourse of characters inside the novel: if she herself hadn’t experienced the wars she had written about—if she even took the words from actual veterans in her writing—what gave her the right to not only tell these stories of suffering, but profit off of them? Does the fact that she was the one writing about the Chinese Labour Corps actually make the work more authentic?
Kuang offers no clear-cut answer to this dilemma, but one thing is made clear in her cautionary tale: the first step to genuine, effective representation in any media one creates is a healthy respect for the subjects you aim to represent. Though of course, not taking your friend’s manuscript home after witnessing their death might be a good start too.
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