Rebecca F. Kuang – Yellowface

I’m fifty-one years old and I have just finished Yellowface.

My age is critical here: 

• one, because the book was bought for me in 2023, and it’s only now that I’ve got to the end.
• two, because my age might have something to do with not liking any of the characters.

It hasn’t taken all that time to read but it did take me a while, about five months because I put it down partway through for a while. I’m not sure why because I read the first section quite quickly. It’s a very engaging book. But it is a bit daring to have the main protagonist, the narrator in this case, so unlikeable.

June Hayward is a Caucasian writer, with middling success, who is a ‘frenemy’ of Athena Liu, a highly feted Chinese American author. When Athena accidently chokes to death on her food, June calls the medical services but also pops a first draft of a new manuscript of Athena’s into her bag.

June edits the manuscript and passes it off as her own. Her new publisher gives her a pen name of Juniper Song, and she finds the stellar limelight that she had so often coveted. But alongside the adulation, there are social media rumblings about whether this work is genuinely her own. The book she produces is about the experience of Chinese labourers sent to the frontline by the British. Not an obvious fit for a white woman who’s never taken an interest in any kind of history before, let alone that of Chinese labourers. 

This work is a thriller and a satire on the whole publishing industry. There was some trepidation about whether any publisher would pick it up, given that she was being so critical, but Harper Collins have bagged themselves a bestseller.

The book is funny and very well written, but I put it down for a while because virtually every character is mean, backstabbing and self-centred. As well as June, the dead author Athena had had a reputation of being a literary vampire, unconcerned about how people felt if their words and actions came out in her book. The editorial assistant (Candice Lee) who June got fired to stop ‘her’ book from being probed too deeply before it was published, returns in a horror-tinged manner to get her revenge. 

It’s not the book. It’s me. And maybe that’s because I’m older than the millennials, I don’t fully get the intensity of the social media world that they wrap themselves in. Although, having said that, if I ever have any kind of success with my writing, I’m not sure I wouldn’t be similar. But as I currently don’t, I had to take a break from it.

I have finished it now, and generally, I liked it. It has a lot of interesting and relevant things to say. A little bit like that recent film ‘American Fiction’, where the black guy can’t get published unless he writes in a stereotypically ‘black’ fashion, this book looks at the racial pigeonholing and tokenism prevalent in the publishing world. They both talk about this problem with humour. But the fact that Yellowface tells the story from the point of view of the woman who essentially takes advantage of that problem creates a deeper layer for analysis.

From the outside it seemed strange that June had written such a book, but Athena’s link to the topic of Chinese labourers was also tenuous. She only spoke English and none of her family had ever had these experiences. It would have been a bit like me writing about Indian soldiers in North Africa during the Second World War. My folks were born in India, but we had no army connections, and I only really speak English. Who gets to tell the story?

Giving June the racially ambiguous pen name might seem obviously duplicitous, but haven’t women written with men’s names or just put letters down instead of a first name in order to for the reader to buy the book with less judgement? After all, the publishing world is a business, and it is all about how to get the reader to buy the book. Or rather, how the publishing world pre-supposes who the reader is. 

I’m glad I finished this book, and I’m glad it’s over, as I don’t really want to spend any more time with June and her cohorts. If another book came my way by Rebecca Kuang however, I would pick it up, as I really enjoyed her style of writing.