This week, a Guardian article’s been making the rounds, about the apparent mental health crisis in the publishing industry. The story itself isn’t all that out-there—publishing, like other businesses, has its structural failings, which can impact any which way with mental health—but the framing does not elicit sympathy. The photo illustrating the piece is of a blue-haired young white woman whose plight is that she was 28 when her first novel was published. “Suddenly I was treated like the most important person in the room, and it really did a number on me.” I’m… so sorry?
Given the nature of plights generally, it’s not just that this doesn’t rank. It’s that hers—at least as presented in this article, there may be more to it—is a situation that inspires tremendous envy in… some percent of the population. It’s not what everyone aspires to, but there are a lot of would-be authors out there, both unpublished writers and people outside that field who feel they have a book in them.
R.F. Kuang’s new novel, Yellowface, is about exactly that sort of envy. There are these two young women, both novelists, one successful, the other not. The impressive one dies in a freak pancake-eating accident, and the failure seizes the opportunity to steal her deceased frenemy’s unfinished manuscript and pass it off as her own work. The twist is that Athena, the successful one, was Asian-American, while June, the loser, the biggest loser since George Costanza, is white. June wants in on Athena’s success, but also, kind of, on her Asianness. Thus the title.
I first heard about Yellowface in a New York Times piece about how there was this new novel satirizing the nice liberal white ladies of novel-publishing, that oddly enough, these very same ladies adore. I read this and couldn’t make sense of it. Why is it meant to be surprising that a demographic whose trademark is apologetic self-flagellation and promises to Do Better would get behind a novel, by an author of color, whose thesis (it is a good novel but it has a thesis, I’m getting to this…) is that well-educated white ladies are the worst?
For what it’s worth, I enjoyed Yellowface, because it’s a briskly-paced, funny novel with good twists, about a world I know, and ideas I choose to spend time thinking about. It’s clever on many levels, starting from the idea of a novel called Yellowface being in fact a Chinese-American author writing a white protagonist.
Making June, the meh writer, the narrator is the prose equivalent of the thing where an actor who’s an excellent singer plays a character with a terrible voice. The result is never quite the same as the genuine article, nor can it be. For the novel to work—which it does—June the character needs to be an unimpressive writer, while June the narrator must excel at the storytelling craft.
The book opens with a vivid account of what it feels like to be friend-quantances with someone where you’re far more aware of them than they are of you. June tells Athena things about her own life, which Athena appears to forget immediately. For a second, it almost seems like you could feel for June. Don’t worry, it won’t last.
June is present at Athena’s death, but not technically responsible for it, and observes, of the incident, “No jury would convict.”
It’s a line, a meme about how no one would convict you for murdering someone annoying, but used here to mean that no one would think she’d done a murder. It’s a novel with a lot of great lines. In presenting the stolen book—as if her own—to her literary agent, June writes, “‘I’ve found a new voice, and I like it.’” I see what she did there.
That the unsuccessful white writer is the villain challenges exactly zero expectations. The novel is told from June’s perspective but doesn’t even flirt with taking her side. June is less appealing than Athena—less talented, less attractive, and more privileged, benefiting as she does from whiteness. She has thoughts like, “I am the victim here.”
She suffers from an acute case of cannot hear herself talk. “Taking Athena’s manuscript felt like reparations, payback for the things that Athena took from me.” Yes, she really said reparations, like for historical injustices (slavery, the Holocaust), in this context. Cancel her!
Her inner monologue is suffused with racism, and not the subtle kind. About a reader who’s invited her to speak, she observes, “Her face looks tight, but maybe it always looks that tight; maybe that’s how all middle-aged Asian ladies look.” Who thinks like this? This fictional Yale graduate, apparently.
But because the reader doesn’t think like this, it’s not, as per the Times coverage, “uncomfortable.” It’s the opposite. It offers an opportunity to feel good about oneself for having unconscious biases, sure, but not thinking anything so crude as that they are look alike.
The novel dodges the more difficult questions of authorship. Could a white author write a sweeping novel about Chinese people? I would say yes, but this is at any rate a story about a specific white author who did not write a specific novel about Chinese people. The whole whose story is this to tell? debate requires a level of ambiguity that’s simply absent. If the frenemy who’d stolen the manuscript were also Asian, the contours of the narrative would have been different, but the central fact of plagiarism would remain.
June’s no Sinophile (“before The Last Front, I had no interest in modern Chinese history whatsoever”), which absolves her of the Orientalism charge, but opens up other issues. Chinese food nauseates her. She’s never visited her city’s Chinatown, because she’d read that it “has the highest crime rates in the city.” When she finally does go, she is confronted with Chinese food, which we have learned earlier in the novel disgusts her. “I don’t know what a soup dumpling is, but it sounds gross.” She pretends that Vietnamese iced coffee is her regular order, then tries one and is aghast. This young white woman, a Yale graduate living in D.C. after NYC, has time travelled from 1950. By all means make your white character a dimensionless bigot, but who doesn’t like Asian food? Doesn’t add up.
Culture wars aside, it also skirts bigger questions about cheating. Someone who gets into a good university after cheating on one but only one of their many school exams might feel they earned their success, even if they did not. Someone who literally stole their dead friend’s book manuscript is more clear-cut.
And as much as anyone—writer or not—might identify with the resentments of someone who hasn’t reached the heights they’d hoped in their profession, there’s something revolting about the way June enjoys her unearned success. The dream of being a bestselling author is partly the money and glory, but also the fact of having written a great book.
June is An Entitled White Lady, with no distinguishing features. She responds to the financial windfall by going to the doctor and dentist (a comment on the sorry state of American health care that she couldn’t otherwise do so), switching to a pricier supermarket, and buying high-end “ethical” jewelry. She has a clique of colleague-supporters who speak in girlboss, attributing her every (justified) setback to sexism. (How 2017!)
June’s so basic that when she’s outed as a plagiarist she drowns her sorrows in reruns of the sitcom Friends.
If Yellowface is a comment on cancel culture and Twitter pile-ons, the comment would appear to be that the fury is righteous and correct. The recipients of a pile-on may be miserable, but they had it coming.
The strangest aspect of the plot is that June’s whiteness only comes up after the stolen manuscript has sold, at auction, for some unfathomable amount of money. Her publishing house is trying to figure out how to market a novel about China by a white writer, while avoiding charges of cultural appropriation. Their answer they go with is to publish it under her middle name, Song, ostensibly to avoid reminding of her poor sales record as June Hayward, but also, well, you know. Seinfeld viewers will recall the “Donna Chang” episode, in which Jerry dates a woman he mistakenly thinks is Chinese, only to learn it was shortened from “Changstein.” Couldn’t make that episode now… or could you? A publishing house would not, in this cultural climate, knowingly position a white author as Chinese.
When satirizing mediocrity, the usual approach is to treat it as a central part of the human experience, something every reader can identify with. But this is instead a narrative of weaponized mediocrity. We’re not meant to feel bad for June for her failings, but to despise her for her entitlement. Given that Athena is a stand-in for the author (whatever their particulars, they share demographics and success level), maybe this is about a blind spot regarding failure. Or maybe losers are out, winners are in.
The novel certainly marks the cultural end of #MeToo, with white female victimhood reduced to a punch line. It turns out Athena used June’s real-life date-rape story in her own fiction, a theft the novel treats as the smallest of potatoes, as an example of June wilfully confusing an artist’s borrowing from life with her own actual physical manuscript-theft. June is no victim. Of course, the way the publishing cycle works, the moment where race replaced gender as the one thing that counts has also now passed, making the anti-girlboss ethos itself seem dated. But whatever, we now have a Karen novel for the time capsule.
I have this (wholly evidence-free) belief that this novel is an elaboration of some work the author did several years ago as part of school or as part of her development, and picked back up again after finishing her (very good, much longer) fantasy novel Babel. Because this one seems either instantly-dated, or the output of a very young person who is feeling disillusioned after being exposed to anti-Asian racism/orientalism + publishing BS for the first time. (Perhaps after reading that amazing New Yorker story about one unsuccessful writer stealing the life story of another -- again I have no evidence for this, just random musings).
Nice try Phoebe but it will remain fair game to make fun of white people for as long as they drink things out of those mason jars