Beyond Whiteness: on "Yellowface" by R.F. Kuang
Reviewed by Katie McKay
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang depicts a tale of plagiarism, resentment, and relentless striving through the eyes of a white woman, a young writer with aspirations to become a famous author. Kuang’s fast-paced, satirical novel is both a sendup of the oppressive whiteness in the publishing industry and a broader social commentary on racial tokenism, cultural appropriation, and whiteness itself. Kuang uses the first person voice to allow the reader into June’s internal cacophony of anxieties, hostilities, and machinations. In so doing, Kuang both challenges the reader to resist identification with June, as one instinctively might when reading first-person narration, and holds the reader uncomfortably close to the realities of June’s insidious racism and the myriad ways in which she tries to justify her behavior.
When we first meet our narrator, an author named June Hayward, her career has stagnated after the publication of her first novel came and went with little fanfare. However, she maintains social ties with her friend and former college classmate, Athena Liu, who has become a rising star in the literary world; she experiences Athena’s success by proximity. After she is the sole witness to Athena’s accidental death, June snatches an unpublished manuscript from Athena’s next project—a heavily researched magnum opus about the forgotten Chinese laborers of World War I—from her desk and surreptitiously absconds with it. June soon publishes the manuscript as if it were her own and launches a campaign to shroud her racial identity in mystery to avoid criticism from what June derides as the “Twitterati,” the hyper-online, identity-conscious, social justice-oriented—and, in June’s eyes, cancel-hungry—literary community. This act of misappropriation sets in motion a cataclysmic, dizzying chain of events of June warding off the consequences of her misdeed to prevent her life from unraveling entirely.
Readers may recognize the underlying fact pattern of this plot as reminiscent of real world racial pretenders, like the infamous Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who claimed to be Black and built a career in social justice until she was exposed, or the even more on-the-nose Michael Derrick Hudson, a poet who published under the Chinese pseudonym Yi-Fen Chou. Kuang makes a conscious choice to tell this story from the perspective of the pretender herself. In June’s case, the manuscript she stole from Athena is an epic, fact-intensive exploration of a forgotten Chinese subculture and history. When she first gets her hands on it, the manuscript includes historically accurate racial slurs, untranslated portions of Mandarin, authentic Chinese naming conventions, and so on, though June later strips much of that away in an attempt to make the novel more generalizable and, coincidentally, palatable for white audiences. Or, as June puts it, she transforms the novel into “a story that anyone can see themselves in.”
June and her publishers alike fear that the inconvenient fact of her whiteness could call into question her authority on the subject and even her right to tell such a story at all. Together, they consciously and strategically create uncertainty about her race and ethnicity through the adoption of the more exoticized pen name Juniper Song, a fresh set of artsy and racially ambiguous author photos, and a marketing strategy to “position” June as “worldly.” June also takes cues from her deceased friend’s internet presence to begin following people in the social justice community, tweeting about BTS and bubble tea, and avoiding certain opinions and topics that are considered taboo within the online Chinese diaspora. Neither June nor her publishers outright state that their strategy is to deceive readers about her race.
Throughout the novel, June insists that her actions were innocent, even justified. She contends that she put so much work into the revision of Athena’s manuscript that it substantially became her own, and, in the alternative, that even if it were not her own, she simply prevented it from a number of harsher fates—from obscurity, from protracted legal disputes, from the disrepute in which multiple-authored texts are held, from being read by the general public in its unedited form. “I felt like I was writing for both of us,” June says. “I felt like I was carrying on the torch.” This despite the fact that she makes edits to the text that undercut Athena’s message about the mistreatment of these forgotten laborers and the harsh realities of white supremacy, even among allies—edits that include race-swapping that flies in the face of the historical record, the inflated development of white side characters, the removal of some of the novel’s darkest episodes of racism.
An undercurrent of racial animus courses through June’s attitude towards Asian people—especially Asian women—beginning with Athena herself. June seems to feel that she is owed something from the publishing world because her first novel failed, and she resents Athena for finding a level of success of which she can only dream—one that results in Netflix deals, six-figure book advances, and prestigious teaching positions. June claims that she is Athena’s only friend, but Athena seems to be hers as well, despite the fact that June is brimming with resentment. Jealousy courses throughout her descriptions of Athena, and she describes her cruelly, with terms like “unbearable,” “desperate,” and “manipulative.” She rejoices that “someone’s calling Athena out on her bullshit” after receiving edits on portions of the manuscript that Athena crafted, and she repeatedly compares herself favorably to Athena, whom she portrays as inauthentic, privileged, and elitist.
June’s descriptions of other Asian characters in the book rely on racial tropes and stereotypes in a shameless inner monologue, though she repeatedly scoffs at accusations of racism from the external world. At Athena’s funeral, June desperately looks for an opportunity to exit, stating that she “can only take so much pungent Chinese food and old people who can’t or won’t speak in English.” June repeatedly stereotypes Asian people in this way, fixating on their “greasy” food and their “broken English” or, sometimes, English that is “a lot better than…expected.” She also appears consumed with thoughts about the perceived sexual desirability of Asian women and her attendant resentment towards them. She notes Athena’s grieving mother’s “elegant, petite frame and sharp cheekbones.” “It’s true what they say,” she says, “Asian women don’t age.” Nearly every time June meets an Asian woman, of any nationality, June remarks that she bears an uncanny resemblance to Athena.
June makes some half-hearted attempts at karmic redemption, but again and again she runs into trouble when interacting with actual Asian people, especially Asian women, in real life. She writes a check to the Asian American Writers’ Collective; she creates a scholarship in Athena’s name. She volunteers to mentor underrepresented writers and is paired with a young Asian-American woman, but when they actually meet for a video call, June freezes over when the young woman asks if she is Chinese. She clashes with Asian-American bloggers, social media users, and audience members at panels and readings. While preparing her book for publication, she skirmishes with a Korean-American editorial assistant who insists upon a sensitivity reader, and she gets her removed from the project and, later, fired.
Kuang’s decision to explore the subject of race in publishing through a white narrator, particularly in the first person voice, holds the reader uncomfortably close to June’s moral transgressions and acts of karmic violence against her deceased friend—frenemy, for June—and the Asian-American community writ large. By forcing us to see the world through June’s eyes, Kuang challenges us to interrogate our own complicity. By refusing to allow us the satisfaction of June’s defeat, Kuang reminds us that whiteness is a resilient and mutating force. Kuang told The New York Times last May that she “want[s] people to be uncomfortable,” because “reading about racism should not be a feel-good experience.” June’s internal monologue can be exhausting as she searches for explanations that will alleviate her guilt and burgeoning sense of dread, desperately seeking an escape hatch from her misdeeds. Kuang holds us relentlessly close to this chaos, as June appears to have few outside influences in her life and lives in overwhelming isolation, rendering us just as alone with June’s thoughts as she is.
I happened to pick up Yellowface shortly after seeing the recently released film American Fiction (2023)—an adaptation of the novel Erasure by Percival Everett—and I was struck by the parallels in these narratives. While Kuang chooses to explore the racial pitfalls and impossibilities of the publishing world through this white narrator, American Fiction centers around a Black author who is struggling to build a career despite the pressures that reward tropes and tokenism from authors of color, with a particular focus on Black authors. As I continued to mull over these connections, I stumbled upon a review that Kuang wrote about American Fiction for Time Magazine. The review opens with the line, “[t]he trouble with satires about white people is that you’re always left with the question of what next.” She continues, “[t]he greatest frustration with a race satire is that it turns all the focus back onto white people.” She notes that Yellowface begins and ends with June, a choice she writes was deliberate to underscore Athena’s voicelessness in the narrative and the effect of that narrative silence. However, Kuang writes, “I’ve always known I wouldn’t write that sort of story again.” Instead, she writes, “I’d like to work on filling in the absence.”
This absence in Yellowface is palpable. We receive very little of Athena’s original prose, only those passages mediated through June’s editorial process. It would be easy, in some ways, to read this novel as a satire of white people’s relentless need to appropriate coupled with their desperate, existential fear of so-called “Cancel Culture.” (At one point, Kuang literally writes, “Juniper Song is Canceled.”) In her review, Kuang discusses the structure of American Fiction, noting that there are two plotlines occurring simultaneously: there is the trope-laden story of the main character’s satirical—though its satirical nature is known only to the author and his agent—novel My Pafology (later changed to simply Fuck), and the unfolding events of the protagonist’s real, complex life as he and his family reckon with the loss of a close relative and his mother’s worsening dementia. Just as in American Fiction, Yellowface contains two narratives—June’s narration of her own life as she descends into a madness of her own creation, and the shadow narrative of Athena’s life and her own work. This is not merely a novel about the narratives over which whiteness makes illegitimate claims, but also the narratives that whiteness drowns out with its undying urge to pilfer and proliferate, to claim all the space in a room (and then some).
As we follow her deeper and deeper into her descent towards madness and self-destruction, June begins to hallucinate Athena in the real world, recognizing her faces in those of other Asian women on the street and seeing apparitions of her in windows. She is also haunted by a twitter account, @AthenaLiu’sGhost, that first spreads the rumor that she plagiarized Athena’s work and which tweets out vague threats and hostile words in Athena’s voice. “She stole my book, stole my voice, and stole my words,” the account tweets. (Ironically, we learn the account is run by Athena’s white ex-boyfriend.) June is literally and figuratively haunted, and we as the reader grow increasingly suffocated as we are forced to watch her time and time again fail to reckon with her mistakes. The Athena that haunts June, however, is one of her own creation—this silent critic with whom she engages in debates in her head when she is feeling especially vulnerable or paranoid.
Though June is our first-person narrator, the presence of an alternate narrative—Athena’s narrative—courses throughout the work. In letting us into the mind of this twisted white woman, Kuang’s novel expertly pillories what she describes in her review as “the white gaze” in equal parts humor and incisiveness. The novel is an inversion of the white savior narrative itself, and in that sense it is a resounding success as a satire. At the same time, the question of unfulfilled narrative possibility haunts the work just as Athena continuously haunts June. Kuang’s comments about the limitations of narratives on racism that center white people—and her desire to structurally emphasize the voicelessness of Athena, who lies at the center of the entire narrative, without whom the entire story would not be possible—underscore the existence of vast possibilities outside the constraints of June’s whiteness.
This is not just a satire—it’s a novel about the karmic debts that white authors owe the authors of color from whom they crib their inspiration, the karmic debts the publishing industry owes the authors of color whose stories were never told in the first place, who were overlooked or flattened for the sake of white audiences. In writing this novel about a white woman, Kuang has created a Trojan Horse of sorts, proffering a satire but instead gifting us something much more tantalizing. As Kuang writes, “[w]hen the joke is told, and the laughter’s died down, what story do we tell next?” I, for one, don’t have the answer—but I look forward to seeing Kuang take on this challenge.