{"id":9985,"date":"2023-09-15T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-09-15T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=9985"},"modified":"2023-09-14T22:17:51","modified_gmt":"2023-09-15T02:17:51","slug":"yellowface","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2023\/09\/15\/yellowface\/","title":{"rendered":"Yellowface."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

R.F. Kuang caused quite a stir earlier this year with the release of her fifth novel and first outside of sci-fi\/fantasy, the scathing satire Yellowface<\/a><\/em>, which bites the very hand that feeds her \u2013 the publishing world. The title hints at the secondary themes of cultural appropriation, racial identity, and who has the right to tell what stories, but the engine that drives this book and its self-justifying protagonist is sheer disgust at how the book sausage gets made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

June Hayward is a young white woman who has written one published novel to scant sales and mediocre reviews, while her college classmate and sort-of friend, Athena Liu, has vaulted into literary stardom in a manner not entirely dissimilar to Kuang\u2019s history. Athena is Chinese-American and is working on her magnum opus, a massive historical novel about the use and abuse of Chinese workers in World War I, when she suffers a fatal accident in front of June \u2026 who grabs the manuscript to the unfinished and unsubmitted novel, The Last Front<\/em>, and decides to clean it up and submit it as her own. June\u2019s agent can\u2019t believe it, shopping the book to a larger publisher, where the marketing folks suggest that June use her middle name, Song, instead of Hayward, ostensibly to get away from the failure of her first novel, but it\u2019s hardly a coincidence that that Song could come across as an East Asian surname, is it? June\u2019s happy to go along with all of this, even when a junior publicist at the firm pushes back on the whole scheme and questions the authenticity of some of the content, but after the book comes out to rave reviews and massive sales, the backlash begins, and eventually enough dirt comes out that June\u2019s authorship becomes the subject of public scrutiny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

June is an anti-hero, an unreliable narrator, and a con artist, where she herself is one of her own victims: She\u2019s so desperate for commercial and critical success that she dupes herself into doing and believing things that will obviously harm her in the end. She\u2019s part Becky Sharp, part Maria Ruskin, and maybe a little Anna Delvey, but in the end she\u2019s willing to do and say whatever she must to get ahead and stay there. That also means that anyone who gets in her way is an enemy and must be dealt with, which is when June becomes either ruthless or just so wrapped up in her own needs \u2013 and I think to her, this is about safety, rather than material gain – that she goes on the attack, or wants to, even when doing nothing is the best option.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n <\/script> \n \n\n\n\n

The level of scorn that Kuang has for the industry is truly something to behold, and it provides some dark humor, not the laugh-out-loud sort but the \u201cI can\u2019t believe she\u2019s writing that\u201d kind. It\u2019s not even a satire that exaggerates the truth to its limits to get its point across; Kuang does little more than sharpen a few details, letting the stark reality of things shock the reader instead. The outsized roles of Goodreads and social media sites, the emphasis on an author\u2019s identity rather than their work, the control the Big Four publishing houses have, it all looks worse under the microscope. I doubt anyone still has the illusion that it\u2019s the merits of a book that determines whether it\u2019s a best-seller, but Kuang makes it clear just how far down the list of factors a novel\u2019s quality sits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The novel\u2019s title refers to the history of white performers in stage and on screen pretending to be east Asian, such as the teeth-grinding cringe of Mickey Rooney\u2019s Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany\u2019s<\/em>. We\u2019ve seen it in the publishing world as well, such as the white poet who submitted poems under a Chinese name<\/a> because he claimed it increased his odds of getting published and another white poet who fabricated an entire persona of a Japanese survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima<\/a> to publish his poems. Is June guilty of \u201cyellowface\u201d here? She takes on an Asian-sounding surname and doesn\u2019t go out of her way to disabuse anyone of the notion that she has east Asian heritage. She takes on Athena\u2019s novel, but makes substantial edits and rewrites, some before submitting it and some with the help of her editors. Is the mere fact that she\u2019s telling a story about Chinese people, with references to Chinese culture and history, enough to say she\u2019s committed this transgression? Is this cultural appropriation? Who can tell these stories \u2013 and if only an Asian writer can tell a story about Asian people, then does that mean Asian writers can only <\/em>tell stories about Asian people? Kuang grapples with this last question at some length, including it in discussions of Athena Liu\u2019s legacy, how the publishing world saw and used her, and how she felt as a token woman of color in what remains a white-dominated space where many decision-makers are still men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I discovered Yellowface<\/em> through several reviews and a Times<\/em> article about the stir it caused in publishing circles, so I\u2019m familiar with some of the criticisms. I do think it\u2019s fair to ask about the quality of much of the prose, even though it\u2019s told in Hayward\u2019s voice, and while she presents herself as an underappreciated writer, she\u2019s also extremely unreliable and likely overstates her abilities. It\u2019s a novel that\u2019s more readable than literary in that sense; the prose moves, and it\u2019s evocative, but the wordsmithing here is unremarkable. What I do not understand or agree with is criticisms of its satire being insufficiently sharp, especially from writers, because I think making the satirical elements more overt or blatant risked taking the reader out of the story. Kuang could have made this funnier, but it would have come at a cost of veracity. This story rings true based on my limited experiences in and knowledge of the publishing world, which made it work for me even when the prose was a little thin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For some comparisons, if you\u2019re interested, you might want to read this very even-handed review by Hugo winner Amal El-Mohtar<\/a> or you could read this incredibly nasty, juvenile review<\/a> in the Cleveland Review of Books<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next up: Ann Patchett\u2019s latest, Tom Lake<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

R.F. Kuang caused quite a stir earlier this year with the release of her fifth novel and first outside of sci-fi\/fantasy, the scathing satire Yellowface, which bites the very hand that feeds her \u2013 the publishing world. The title hints at the secondary themes of cultural appropriation, racial identity, and who has the right to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1359,36,1360,866,684,161,267],"class_list":["post-9985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2023-novels","tag-american-literature","tag-asian-american-literature","tag-contemporary-literature","tag-contemporary-novels","tag-highly-recommended","tag-satire","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9985"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9986,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9985\/revisions\/9986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}