I love a novel about the publishing world! This dark comedy was catnip for me and it absolutely lived up to expectation.
June Hayward is a writer whose only published novel fared poorly. She is sort-of friends with Athena Liu, who is beautiful, successful and rich, author of novels that not only sell well but are critically acclaimed. Ultimately, though, Athena’s luck runs out and she dies in a freak pancake-related accident. June has the chance to steal her next manuscript – and she does, passing it off as her own. Soon she has a deal with a massive advance, an attentive publishing team who throw money at development and marketing, and a buzz attached to her name – everything she ever wanted. Can she keep her secret?
June is funny, clever, manipulative, jealous and self-absorbed; she wrestles with her guilt mainly by casting herself as a victim and by weaving sophistries about honouring Athena’s memory. One of Kuang’s great skills is to make her really quite sympathetic; spiteful one moment, anxious the next, and then buckling under the onslaught of social media hate the next. We see the US publishing scene through her eyes, and Kuang gleefully portrays it as venal and cynical, pitting authors against each other, feigning its interest in diversity and only concerned with the next bestseller. For June, reviewers are driven by their biases and Twitter is a mob dominated by extreme emotions, quick to turn even on those they adored five seconds earlier. In other words, everyone in this novel is enjoyably awful.
Yellowface gets its title because June allows her editor to persuade her into using her full first name and her second name as her nom de plume – Juniper Song – which of course sounds Chinese or Korean when June is actually white. This is significant because Athena’s novel is about the Chinese Labour Corps, recruited by the British Army to serve on the Front during the First World War, now largely forgotten. On discovering that June has no East Asian heritage, many readers are disappointed. Others are angry: if you are not at least part Chinese, what right do you have to tell this story?
June’s reply (to us, not her critics as it would give her away!) is that Athena’s ethnicity gives her no special insight into the experiences of the Chinese labourers she wrote about, which were so very different from her own privileged twenty-first-century life in the US. She had to do just as much research as June did, and exercise her imagination just as far:
Can a Black writer not write a novel with a white protagonist? What about everyone who has written about World War Two, and never lived through it? [...] I think writing is fundamentally an exercise in empathy. Reading lets us live in someone else’s shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller.
But June’s point is undermined by her lack of understanding of the ethnicity and culture she is taking over, which she struggles to distinguish from other East Asian cultures. She makes crass changes to Athena’s book, such as softening the white characters, whom she considers ‘almost embarrassingly biased ... cartoonishly racist’ and adding a trite epilogue. For her, publishing’s commitment to diverse writers discriminates against her; she never considers how much discrimination gets thrown at non-white writers.
Kuang sprinkles metafictional jokes throughout the book, and at one point teases us with the possibility that what we are reading is itself June’s next manuscript. Sometimes it feels as if she is taking a cheeky wink at us. And she asks: stealing a manuscript crosses a line, but are there not degrees of appropriation here? Athena is always on the lookout for new material for her fiction, which she takes from other people. June calls her ‘a vampire [...] She collected true narratives like seashells, polished them off and presented them, sharp and gleaming, to horrified and entranced reader’. She uses an experience of June’s for a story. Her ex-boyfriend says:
Sometimes, when we fought, she would give me this very cool, narrow-eyed look. I knew that look, because it was the same look she got when she was drafting a scene. [...] Sometimes she would say things that made me upset, or ask about things I’d been through – and as time went on, all I could think was that she was mining me, using me as fodder.
Isn’t Athena, then, as parasitic as June? Whether the words you rewrite are a manuscript written by a dead author or the painful secret your friend tells you, is creating fiction inherently exploitative, vampiric? And where does that leave the publishers who make money from them and the readers who consume them and enjoy the suffering of others vicariously?