Yellowface

by Rebecca F. Kuang

Synopsis:

What’s the harm in a pseudonym? Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn’t write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American—in this chilling and hilariously cutting novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author R. F. Kuang in the vein of White Ivy and The Other Black Girl.

Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars: same year at Yale, same debut year in publishing. But Athena’s a cross-genre literary darling, and June didn’t even get a paperback release. Nobody wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks.

So when June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers to the British and French war efforts during World War I.

So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn’t this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That’s what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree.

But June can’t get away from Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June’s (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.

With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface takes on questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation not only in the publishing industry but the persistent erasure of Asian-American voices and history by Western white society. R. F. Kuang’s novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.

Have you ever been riveted by the Main Character on a given social media platform on a given day? Rebecca F. Kuang’s Yellowface is basically like that, with a lot of recognisable elements if you follow affairs in the publishing world. The narrator, Juniper, is as unreliable as they come, and as convinced of her rightness as any Main Character: it’s okay that she plagiarised her dead friend’s work, because her friend would’ve wanted her to, and anyway, she’s changed it so much that it’s her work now.

Really, Yellowface is reckoning with issues that keep on rippling through publishing, about #OwnVoices and representation, about the representation of minorities in publishing houses, about people being treated as just the minority they represent — and more. It’s obviously written by someone who is a part of that world, and the description of the book as a satire is an accurate one. Kuang is imagining what someone like Juniper Song Hayward might think and do, the justifications they might make, while turning it all up to eleven to show us how self-serving it can be.

And the thing is, it doesn’t even feel exaggerated to me. There are definitely Juniper Haywards in the publishing world, and they come out of the woodwork on places like Twitter all the time. These are beliefs that people really have. It’s not a biography, of course, and you can’t see the fingerprints of any one single particular incident on it, but it’s still so recognisable.

There’s nobody very likeable in this book, of course, and you can feel the inevitable crash coming, which made it a bit of a difficult read for me; it’s not really in my comfort zone, I suppose, even though generally I like reading a bit of everything. It’s also very clear about the serious mental health impact on Juniper — one can still have a little sympathy for her even though she’s brought it on herself, or at least, one can if one’s also spent time too anxious to eat, too anxious to think, obsessing over a pile-on somewhere or other (in my case, nothing at the same scale or severity; I’m just an anxious mess about any conflict and get anxious if someone didn’t like my fanfic or a friend misread my tone, but that doesn’t stop it being recognisable). There’s no conclusion there about how to deal with the pile-ons that can happen in this kind of situation, and no sympathy for Juniper’s actions, but nonetheless it does make it clear there’s a serious impact on her. Even if you deserve it, that situation is awful.

Because the whole thing is written from Juniper’s point of view and in Juniper’s voice, it’s not always easy to tell whether something is part of the story and part of Juniper’s unsteady view of the world, or whether it’s something non-deliberate by Kuang: sometimes it feels like things about the publishing and editing process are under or over explained, depending on who the target audience is supposed to be. That could just be Juniper, not sure what kind of audience she’s speaking to and trying to fling her net wide to make sure all kinds of people understand her attempt at self-exculpation — or it could be Kuang, not sure whether the audience is keeping pace with what’s going on for Juniper and what it means.

It’s not entirely clear from the first-person present tense narrative whether this is meant to be the manuscript Juniper produces at the end: probably not, because of the present tense and some of the detail (which wouldn’t, I think, be self-exculpating enough to be her work of justification and striking back), but then what? Who is she speaking to? Is this her internal monologue, and if so, why would she need to (for example) define what an “ARC” is?

For my enjoyment overall it’s a minor quibble, but I’ve found myself often wondering about first-person narrators: who are they telling their story to and why? And I’m not quite sure I know with Juniper. In the end, it feels most like she’s telling the story to herself, ready to work it over and pick out the bones of it that most support her view of herself as the victim.

Of course, because Kuang is not just writing for chronically online people who have been watching controversies of the publishing world for two decades, she doesn’t ultimately have much choice: these things need to be defined and explained, so ultimately those bits that slightly stuck out to me were necessary somehow or other.

All in all, Yellowface was a fascinating read, and an unflattering mirror to some of the things that happen on social media and, indeed, in publishing. Juniper’s a fascinatingly flawed narrator, showing off all our human weaknesses of self-justification and making you think — yeesh, I hope I’m not that oblivious to my own flaws…

Rating: 5/5