Review: Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang-published by the Borough Press (£16.99).
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.
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