Satire as an attack
weapon is as old as the hills, and Kuang uses it to deadly effect. Her targets include
the publishing industry, plagiarism, literary envy, and the pressures on young
writers in the social media age. Most importantly, she defends the writer's
craft or, more precisely, against the racialisation of literature. Kuang said
she found the idea that writers should only write about characters of their race
"deeply frustrating and pretty illogical". Kuang believes that that
problem is not just confined to the publishing industry but has become a
political issue saying that the situation has "spiralled into this really
strict and reductive understanding of race".
Given Kuang's hostility to
reducing complex social, political and economic problems to that of race, you
would have thought that several reviewers would have been more careful in
clumsily and wrongly saying this is a
novel that tackles “white privilege” and “identity.”
The book is a multi-layered
and complex satire on the publishing industry. Kuang openly challenges the idea
that only authors of a certain race can write about their race, gender, or sexual
orientation. In one part of the book, June is confronted by a Chinese American who
believes that only a Chinese person can write about its history. She responds,
"I think it's dangerous to start censoring what authors should and
shouldn't write...I mean, turn what you're saying around and see how it sounds.
Can a Black writer not write a novel with a white protagonist?"
James McDonald elaborates
on this point: "Art is always an approximation, never fully successful,
but when done well, one that embraces the otherness and the sameness of writer,
reader and subject in the act of inquiry and compassion. To rope off subjects
from artists is to deny the nature of Art itself and to deny activity that is
fundamental to being human. A new form of censorship in publishing has
accompanied the rise of identity politics. The new censors are called
"sensitivity readers." Briefly, sensitivity readers function as the
"Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" inquisitors of the publishing
industry, reading manuscripts and hunting for potentially "offensive"
or "inaccurate" material. The imposition of upper-middle-class
identity politics upon culture is censorious and philistine. But it is also
reactionary. The ultimate targets of identity politics and the language of
"offence" and "sensitivity" are the working class and its
democratic rights. Concepts like "offence" and
"sensitivity" are nebulous abstractions and subject to broad, not to
say nefarious, interpretation. While today it may be deemed offensive to call
someone "fat," in future we may be told that matters of class, class
struggle and socialism are upsetting and offensive."[1]
The plot of the book is
simple and well-crafted. June Hayward is a gifted but unremarkable writer going
nowhere fast. Her friend is the beautiful and successful writer Athena Liu. She
thinks to herself: "What is it like to be you? What is it like to be so
impossibly perfect, to have every good thing in the world?" Unfortunately,
Athena chokes on a pandan pancake and dies in front of her friend, who then steals
her unfinished book manuscript and publishes it as her own after rewriting it.
Yellowface is Rebecca F
Kuang's fifth novel at the tender age of 27, written in the first-person
present tense. It is striking to hear that the Yellowface came about during a
Harper Collins to strike with R.F. Kuang as a supporter.
Her previous books were cross-genre.
Her Poppy War fantasy trilogy, set in historical China, was followed up by the
Sunday Times bestseller Babel last year. Babel is well worth a read.
Richard Bradbury
explains, "At the heart of the book is a simple premise, which becomes a
metaphor for the rise and spread of capitalism and colonialism. Translation
theory understands that literally translating one word into another language is
impossible. It contains translation theory, colonial history, the complicity of
higher education institutions with capitalism, a revolutionary upsurge, and
more.[2]
Kuang emigrated to the U.S.
with her family at the age of four from Guangzhou, China, and grew up in Texas.
She has a significant online presence and has also been the subject of intense
social media debates, which has, like all good writers, managed to weave these
into her novels in one way or another.
As Varika Rastogi writes,
“Kuang—in no small part because of the role TikTok has played in her rise to
success—is also deeply aware of the Internet being the "realm that the
social economy of publishing exists on", and she deploys this novel as a
means to assess how it can both heal and harm projects. A large part of
Yellowface takes place in terms of Twitter discourse and Goodreads reviews. By
placing us in the shoes of the targets of its vitriol and negativity, the
author attempts to make us privy both to the mental impact such harassment can
have on a person, as well as to the fact that "allegations get flung left
and right, everyone's reputations are torn down, and when the dust clears,
everything remains exactly as it was." However, if nothing changes, it is
also because someone is making a profit.[3]
Yellowface is a superb
and intelligent book. Kuang is to be commended for taking to the field of
battle in the war against the racialisation of literature and her defence of
the basic right of an author to write about whatever they want without fear of
their books being burnt or pulped.
About the Author
R F Kuang has an MPhil in
Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from
Oxford and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Literature at
Yale.
[1] Race, class and social conflict in
the United States- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/06/race-s06.html
[2] Babel is a goldmine of
revolutionary politics-
https://socialistworker.co.uk/reviews-and-culture/babel-is-a-goldmine-of-revolutionary-politics/
[3] Racism, scandal, and the rat race
of publishing: Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
