Slightly undercooked takedown of publishing politics

Just an early warning that this review will contain *SPOILERS*

Yellowface isn’t quite about actual yellowface, but about that surprisingly and increasingly common crime of digital or literary yellowface – when a white person publishes under the false identity of a person of colour. It is the story of a white author who steals the manuscript of her deceased Chinese-American friend and passes it off as her own. June Hayward rebrands herself as Juniper Song following a failure of a debut. She publishes a historical novel based almost completely on the manuscript of her deceased friend Athena Liu, who by contrast was feted as a literary genius, and whose wealth and success June bitterly envies. The novel follows hers attempts to maintain her deception, and culminates in her eventual downfall. It is without a doubt an entertaining novel, with a slightly Talented Mr Ripley feel to it. Although June doesn’t kill Athena, the fraud she pulls off feels almost as weighty.

The first thing that struck me and I’m sure many others was that Athena reads as a self-insert by Kuang. A beautiful, riotously successful writer who attended prestigious universities and writes historical novels, who in spire of everything is impossible to not like. Ok Kuang, we get it. So if Athena is Kuang, who is June? Perhaps there is a June out there, but what seems more likely is that there are many Junes. She is an amalgamation of Kuang’s critics, and some of the complaints she has faced since becoming successful. I am always wary of applying biographical readings to novels, particularly those by women, which are often unjustifiably read as auto-biographical in a way that those of their male counterparts are not. But the similarities here are just too close – surely Kuang wants us to see them?

It is ultimately these similarities which led the book astray for me. June quickly devolves into a straw man, voicing easily debunked and extreme views about the position of marginalised people in the publishing industry. You can just hear that these are the things Kuang has had thrown her way in the wake of her success. Perhaps it is the close-to-homeness of this material which left it feeling a little less critically examined than it might have been. Athena is the most interesting character, but we get so little time with her. It would have been fascinating to see how Kuang handled a more nuanced exploration of Athene, funding the truth between the criticisms and the propaganda. Instead we follow the fairly one-note June through her various rants and misdemeanours.

Basically, June is in opposite land. Everything she says is the opposite of reality. Her complaints about white people being overlooked in publishing, for example, are just so obviously untrue to anyone who has been in a bookshop, let alone looked into the stats. It’s hard to believe that people like June exist and can seriously hold these views, but they do. The very real occurrences of yellowface in publishing show that Kuang is really barely stretching credulity with this plot. But spending the majority of the novel with such an abhorrent and essentially simplistic character removes scope for exploring the complexities of Athena’s character, and her experience of the publishing industry. Her education, financial, and for want of a better word aesthetic privilege and how these intersect with other identity as a Chinese-American and her reception in the very white world of publishing would have made for a far more engaging read. But June isn’t the right person to consider these things, and so thanks to her single first person narrative, we don’t get to either. Let’s be clear too that I’m not really the right person to discuss Athena either – we share educational privilege but beyond that I’m closer to June than Athena in most aspects of my identity. I just don’t share enough lived experiences with Kuang to fully understand the nuances of either her or Athena’s experiences. It’s worth taking a look at other writers’ and content creators’ feelings on Yellowface for this type of analysis. I particularly enjoy With Cindy’s videos, and she also has some entertaining take-downs of ‘[…]face’ publishing scandals.

The book makes for a fun mystery. I for one was hoping the supernatural hints would pay off, particularly given Kuang’s other work. This leads me to the other thing that perplexed me, and made the book feel like a kind of one woman vendetta – it is just such a different subject to Babel, through which I discovered Kuang. Set in almost as present-day as it gets, this isn’t the place you’d expect to find the author of that magical realist, post-colonial tome. Rarely does an author pull off a curveball this wild. And I suppose Kuang has pulled it off, giving us a fun mystery with some thought-provoking reflections on the very serious issue of discrimination in publishing. But personally, I hope this novel offered some kind of catharsis, after which Kuang can return to the more involving and innovative realms of Babel and its like.

In conclusion, Yellowface is an interesting and entertaining read, but which left me with the sense that it didn’t quite fulfil its potential. Perhaps fittingly for a novel so deeply engaged with the writing process, it would have benefitted from another draft.

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What did you think of Yellowface? I’d love to hear your thoughts, and recommendations for novels that cover similar topics but perhaps in a more critical, engaging way!