Yellowface follows June Hayward, a white writer who steals the manuscript of her recently deceased (and far more successful) Asian American friend, Athena Liu. June publishes the book under a vaguely Asian pseudonym—Juniper Song—and watches it skyrocket to success. What unfolds is a vicious, painful look at the publishing industry and its trysts with racism, cultural appropriation, envy, and the rewards for performance over substance.
I’ve been following RF Kuang for a while now, both out of an interest in her books and her career. Her trajectory is unusually legible: the Poppy War trilogy was grim-dark military fantasy steeped in Chinese history, and then Babel, which was bigger, denser, surprisingly more politically charged. (Babel remains at the top of the list of all-time favourite novels in my library). So far, all her books deal, in one way or another, with systems of power.
Yellowface is also a finger pointed in the face of power, but not geopolitically, this time. If Babel was Kuang’s breakout moment, Yellowface is her self-interrogation. What does it mean to be read as a representative of something? What does the publishing industry reward you for being, and what does it punish you for refusing to be? It’s meta all the way down.
What I enjoyed the most about this book was how Kuang made it impossible to fully separate herself from the narrator. June Hayward/ Juniper Song is a liar, a thief, and often insufferable. But she’s also sharp, aware of how the system works, and frequently right. That slippage is where the novel gets interesting. There’s a deliberate superimposition between the author and her creation: both are ambitious, both benefit from the performance of identity in some way, and both clearly understand how narratives get shaped and sold. Throughout the book, I was constantly wondering: is this self-parody?
Kuang’s own career has been marked by instances of an audience that wants something specific from her and punishes deviation. Readers want her to be angry in a particular way, political in a particular way, even diasporic in a particular way. In an interview with NPR, she says this:
*…I think that a lot of our standards about cultural appropriation are language about “don’t write outside of your own lane. You can only write about this experience if you’ve had that experience”… I think they’re actually quite limiting and harmful, and backfire more often on marginalized writers than they push forward conversations about widening opportunities. You would see Asian American writers being told that you can’t write anything except about immigrant trauma or the difficulties of being Asian American in the U.S.
And I think that’s anathema to what fiction should be. I think fiction should be about imagining outside our own perspective, stepping into other people’s shoes and empathising with the other.*
It’s a point the protagonist also emphatically makes.
Stylistically, the prose feels just as intentionally abrasive. It’s slippery, reactive, bitter, and always managing the reader. Kuang weaponises first-person narration in a way that feels claustrophobic, even irritating, by design. Juniper is probably Kuang’s most unreliable narrator yet—even more so than Rin in the Poppy War trilogy—and there a desperate self-mythologising that runs through the entire novel that you can’t tear your eyes away from. It’s what makes this novel such an uneasy read, that you’re reading to find out how she (June? Kuang?) will go to justify what she does next.