Review: Yellowface

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

R.F. Kuang has established herself these last several years as a new genre titan in fantasy, but now she takes a sharp left turn into contemporary metafictional satire with her fifth novel, one which managed to go viral in a lot of literary circles - including, of course, Book Twitter - months in advance of its publication. And it's easy to see why. Yellowface is, yes, a searing satire of the publishing industry and its tendency to talk out of both sides of its mouth when it comes to diversity and equality, but it's also one of the most absolutely, eminently, despisable books I've ever read, and that owes almost entirely to its cast of characters, each one more disgusting and punchable than the last. The only reason this one doesn't get a one or two star rating from me is because the unlikability is precisely Kuang's point.

There are a lot of hot button topics that go into a book like this, and coming from Kuang, who unflinchingly depicts racism and its associated violence in all her past books, that's no surprise. There's the obvious based on its premise - plagiarism and cultural appropriation, as protagonist June (the epitome of every "basic white girl" meme ever) steals her friend (after a fashion) Athena's unpublished manuscript, depicting an obscure piece of Chinese diaspora history (laborers being drafted to serve in the Allied army in World War I.) There's the question of who gets to write whose stories, and whether or not it's permissible for writers to write outside their culture, no matter how much research they may have done (although that's a moot point because June, while she does do some research, backs out as soon as she finds herself unable to understand certain topics - she thinks the Chinese language and kinship systems are a huge joke, and that the names of Athena's characters are so similar to each other that they might as well all be committing incest.)

There's also the question of representation within the community, with nods to real world discourse about the differences between different Asian nations culturally - and, as it happens, a lot of Asian readers in universe are portrayed as having had axes to grind with Athena for various cultural issues, such as depiction of the Nationalist army when they had historically oppressed indigenous Taiwanese (I'm sure this would have stung for Kuang a lot IRL, because Kuang's maternal grandfather was a Nationalist soldier under Chiang Kai-Shek.) The book also throws in Chinese writers who talk shit about diaspora writers, and some Asian MRA's who get mad at Athena in particular because she at one point was dating a white man. There's no specific parallels to any particular Book Twitter figures, though Kuang sketches them well enough that they come off eerily realistic to anyone who's spent enough time on that section of the hellsite bird app. (I, however, suspect that at least some inspiration came from Xiran Jay Zhao, but that's probably my bias because I really, really don't like them on a number of levels.)

I said that nobody in this book is likable at all, and that's unfortunately true of Athena too. Other reviewers have said that she came off as a self insert of Kuang herself, but if so, Kuang definitely wasn't afraid to poke fun at herself. She comes from a similarly privileged background to Kuang's, having had the good luck to be able to attend a prestigious university, writing fellowship, etc. etc. Before her untimely death, in the first chapter, we also see that she's surprisingly vapid and pretentious and ignorant of the struggles of poor people (at one point, asking whether or not the infamously low salaries of an entry level publishing job are a lot of money.) And while she can be friendly, she tends to have ulterior motives that slowly but surely reveal themselves over time.

Yeah. This one, like all Kuang books before it, will stick in my mind for quite a while. But as for whether or not I'd recommend it? Only if you think you can stomach these disgusting characters, and laugh a little at how profoundly screwed up publishing as an industry really is.

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