I don’t know about this book. I didn’t like it. I feel a bit like I’ve been stuck in one of those one-sided conversations where you agree with the argument but feel you’re being hit about the head with a puppet.
Yellowface offers exactly what it shows on the cover. Americanisation of the Asian. It’s a fictional exploration of the prejudices towards Asian people in the book industry. It’s about representation, exploitation, appropriation. I have no doubt that Kuang has drawn from personal experiences to create this story and wants it to be a fantastically popular bestseller so she can slap about the head with a puppet anyone who has ever slighted her.
It’s satire, with an exaggeration of character and events that I found annoying. I’m not a fan of satire generally, unless it is really classy. This felt particularly heavy-handed to me, without the humour or cleverness that would make the story entertaining rather than just painful.
A brief outline: June Hayward went through writing school with a woman of Chinese heritage called Athena Liu. June’s first novel tanked. Athena’s first book hit the big time. But bloody hell – is the American big time really like this? Sure, the competition is fierce to the American bestseller lists but Kuang makes the publishing process a rout – manipulative and nasty, with king-makers spinning the wins and natural selection a naive myth. Anyway, Athena tries to stay friends with June although June is bitter and thinks Athena only likes her because it’s tough at the top and she needs a non-threatening sidekick.
Then June turns a bit psycho. Athena is out of the picture (no spoilers) and June appropriates her work. This premise fails. What famous, bestselling author leaves a book’s final page in the typewriter with THE END written in caps, having not shown it to anyone, digitised, made copies or even discussed its existence with the publisher? Nah. And the chance of getting away with the theft are stupidly small and the stakes career-endingly, prison-ishly high. The book is about Chinese men recruited to serve the Brits in WWI and June (renaming herself Juniper Song, her true first and middle name that her hippie mother gave her, which sound usefully Chinese) knows zilch about the culture or the subject when she picks up the manuscript from the desk. She leaves the research notebooks (an obvious rookie mistake). Things go right for a while and then wrong. It could have been the type of story where one white lie gets compounded until the cover-up snowballs into something wild. But the book doesn’t quite pull this off. The theft is ridiculously blatant. June believes her own lies too easily. It feels like the author is setting June up for having more involvement in the inciting incident than she is letting on, but then this potential plot line is lost.
We are obviously meant to hate the protagonist. She is unfailingly narcissistic and stupid. A whiney kid, jealous of her more successful friend and blaming it on reverse racism. “ …my voice doesn’t matter, like the entirety of my being is constituted in those two words, “white woman.” ” Oh, my bleeding heart. It is very hard to wade through an entire story when you think the narrator is a self-centred idiot who is gaslighting herself. You wouldn’t suffer friends like this.
Near the end, when comeuppance is nigh, June blurts out everything to her accuser in some kind of detective story denouement, summing up the plot. In case we hadn’t been paying attention. This is a writer who doesn’t trust her reader.
I think the only interesting thing about this book (that I have just trashed) is the topic itself. An Asian novelist writing about appropriation is worth the read, albeit in the context of American extremism and its weird frenzy of social media. It’s a place where publishers say things like: “ ‘We already have a Muslim writer…Any more and we’ll be outnumbered’ ”.
Obviously book is designed to make the reader feel uncomfortable, but making the white protagonist so unenlightened detracts from the very real issues the book raises. “Ever since The Last Front came out, I have been victim to people like Candice and Diana and Adele: people who think that, just because they’re “oppressed” and “marginalized,” they can do or say whatever they want. That the world should put them on a pedestal and shower them with opportunities. That reverse racism is okay. That they can bully, harass, and humiliate people like me, just because I’m white, just because that counts as punching up, because in this day and age, women like me are the last acceptable target. Racism is bad, but you can still send death threats to Karens.” Is it really the narrator here, describing herself as a ‘Karen’? Or is the author, while illustrating racism within the industry, lampooning white women as Karens?
You can go around in circles with this stuff, and at this unsubtle level it is not going to change any minds. I’m guessing the majority of readers of Yellowface will indeed be ‘Karens’, who are not unaware of the stereotype, but won’t recognise themselves in the OTT characters and are already open to change and questioning both institutional and casual racism.
Appropriation is an ongoing and sensitive topic which will only benefit from discussion, so a good one for a book club, but I’d get someone else to read the book, and summarise it for the team.
Cristina Sanders' blog 