Bad Romances of the Literary Kind

By Eunice Lim

Review of Yellowface by R. F. Kuang (New York: William Morrow, 2023)

Marie Toh - Snake (2022), Digital
Image description: This vividly-colored portrait features the head of a red-haired female figure, with flowers and snakes surrounding her. The figure’s right eye is rendered as a hole, with bright, purple-and-pink flowers growing out from it. On her right are yellow flowers with green leaves. The snakes surrounding her extend from where her neck should be, and are in various shades of orange, green, red, and brown. The background is a green gradient that gets darker towards the top. 

Known as the fantasy novelist behind The Poppy War trilogy (2018–2020) and having published the speculative fiction novel Babel, or the Necessity of Violence (2022), the multiple-award-winning R. F. Kuang is an accomplished young writer to watch. Currently pursuing a PhD at Yale’s department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, the areas of interest listed on Kuang’s institutional profile include “representations of war, trauma, and nationalism in modern/contemporary Chinese fiction; decolonization, race, and class; as well as intersections of Sinophone literature with Asian American literature”. These interests form the backdrop of Kuang’s 2023 novel Yellowface, which is a significant thematic and generic departure from Kuang’s previous work. Semi-autobiographical in the apparent ways in which the novel takes inspiration from Kuang’s own experiences as a young and rising Asian American author, Yellowface is a novel about the cutthroat publishing industry and the racial politics that trouble the pursuit of literary recognition and success.

The unreliable narrator of Yellowface is an aspiring 27-year-old writer and Yale graduate named June Hayward, and it is through June that we are introduced to Athena Liu, June’s far more accomplished Asian-American peer and frenemy. Athena looks, acts, and lives like someone who wandered off the set of Bling Empire. With a TV deal from Netflix (Kuang’s Poppy War trilogy is also being adapted for television, though not with Netflix) and a list of literary accolades under Athena’s belt, it is not hard to see how Kuang’s own meteoric rise to literary acclaim informs this characterization. The choice to mediate Athena’s experience through the character of June – a self-professed invisible white girl from Philly – is thus the timely central intrigue and racial hierarchy role reversal of the novel, acutely capturing the media-assisted schadenfreude of exposing the depravities of those who lead unthinkable and unthinkingly privileged lives.

The fraught relationship between these two fellow writers of convenience is a familiar one – Athena seems to have it all, while June wants everything Athena seems to have. June serves us the tea on Athena, dishing up the absence of social media evidence to prove Athena’s limited social life before arriving at the self-centring conclusion that she is the only close friend that Athena has ever referenced. June and Athena are not likeable characters, but their moral flaws become a reflection of the masses’ unslakable thirst for gossip, controversy, and unapologetic villains. Like the Netflix deal she covets, June’s narratorial tone resembles the numerous preppy, youth-oriented television series that populate the platform. You can almost see the rapid-fire, upbeat montage unfolding before your eyes as June rattles off the many achievements of Athena and the implications of her successes with sentences like “you should know two things about Athena” and “writers our age – young, ambitious up-and-comers just this side of thirty – tend to run in packs”. Envy festers, and it does not take long before June confesses that she drinks “to dull the bitch in [her] that wishes [Athena was] dead”. This quickly escalates into “a bizarre urge to stick [her] fingers in [Athena’s] berry-red-painted mouth and rip her face apart, to neatly peel her skin off her body like an orange and zip it up over [herself]”. June’s violent compulsion here foreshadows her subsequent opportunistic appopriation of Athena’s writing as her own. The dynamic between the novel’s main characters recalls Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn in the black comedy Death Becomes Her (1992), the unreliable narrator with a literary flair recalls Penn Badgley in the Netflix thriller series You, and the Gossip Girl vibes of this novel self-reflexively demonstrate the extent of June coveting a film or television adaptation for her writing.

As these film and television counterparts have amply cautioned, the preppy good times often disguise the sinister and latent potential for cruelty; and the more charming our unreliable narrator tries to be, the more we should take their words with a pinch of salt. When June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident (death by asphyxiating on pandan pancakes!), she seizes the opportunity to claim Athena’s latest manuscript as her own. This plagiarism of Athena’s experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I poses significant challenges for June due to the perceived racial mismatch between June and the subject matter of the novel. The preppy tone of the first three chapters of Kuang’s Yellowface shifts to a darker one as readers become increasingly alienated from the unrepentant June, who reinvents her identity as the passably Chinese-sounding Juniper Song with the guidance of her unknowing agent and editors.

Marie Toh - The Moon (2021), Digital
Image description: The portrait features the head of a figure who is turned away from us. Her hair extends towards us, rendered as a three-dimensional, abstract landscape depicting flowing water under an orange sky. Where the back of her head should be is a red-and-yellow circle, resembling the sun. In the blue background are lines resembling orbits. 

June’s army of editors and literary agents, the press, and the appetites of the masses inevitably provide ample lubrication for the wheels of injustice to turn, and Yellowface boldly airs the dirty laundry of the literary circus like the “stains on [Athena’s] G-strings”. The coveted survival in a cutthroat industry that compels people to “play the game” is a well-written excuse, an oft-repeated master narrative that absolves one’s wrongdoing, assuages one’s guilt, and keeps the illusion of a blameless “publishing fairyland” intact. Hard truths and difficult racial histories are softened and sugarcoated to avoid accusations of tragedy porn and to protect a trigger-sensitive audience. June and her unsuspecting editors work to “take out all references to ‘Chinks’ and Coolies’ [because they] don’t want to trigger readers” and “soften some of the white characters” even though Athena’s notes on her manuscript suggest that these characters were based on historical records. Accessibility for the masses and inclusivity become trendy, altruistic buzzwords that excuse formulaic, feel-good narratives. The resulting bestselling narrative that June releases as her own is palatable, pleasing, and popular, but defanged in terms of geopolitical and cultural significance. Of course, June takes full credit for the novel’s success, triumphantly detailing the many flaws in Athena’s original manuscript. A skeptical reader might recall, however, that before Athena’s death, June had described the original manuscript as having “none of the juvenile slipups of [Athena’s] debut work” and how “it’s better than anything [June] could ever write, perhaps in [her] lifetime”.

Although some critics raise concerns about how June’s novel glorifies Western missionaries and online allegations of plagiarism and yellowfacing circulate unabated, June’s publicity team wave off the controversy as “free marketing”, even noting how the attention drives sales up “and it’s always nice when sales are up”. In this way, Yellowface gives us an intimate overview of the “mechanics of popularization”. Popularity and success are not accidental or meritocratic, but a coordinated industry effort. Scandal and controversy attract eyeballs and generate sales, and readers are invited to watch June conveniently ride the noise of skepticism, public opinion, and criticism to fame and success. The burden of Juniper Song’s duplicity is thus redistributed to the complicit reader and publishing industry, who are invited to rethink their consumption habits and ethical commitments.

The curtains separating reading, writing, and publishing are unceremoniously lifted, and the proximity unsettles. As June’s whitewashing and yellowfacing gain momentum, it becomes evident that these processes are habitual and systemic, and any guilt-ridden attempt to mitigate the damage will prove futile. Readers will watch June wrestle with her crippling and well-deserved imposter syndrome before witnessing her renewed efforts to contort reality in a desperate attempt to arrive at absolution. Wrap a microaggression, an act of racial injustice, and a crime in the pretty wrapping paper of good intentions and bind them with the decorative ribbons of one’s self-righteous innocence. You might get away with it with no more than a slap on the wrist, as June seemingly does, again and again. You might even, like June, have a glass of champagne to celebrate the renewed attention and limelight. 

Although Yellowface will likely spark important conversations about the literary industry and racial politics, its choice of first-person narration risks trivializing and justifying plagiarism and racial injustices as accidental, petty crimes rather than urgent, racially motivated ones to address. This is, in my view, a critical but expected (and perhaps intentional) flaw of the novel. It is unclear, for instance, if the absence of a resolution in Yellowface’s ending is meant to be a tongue-in-cheek reflection of how such injustices often remain unresolved in the real world, or if the open-endedness is meant to pave the way for a sequel. When a guilt-ridden June desperately burns Amazon-bought incense sticks and an entire IKEA catalogue to appease what she believes is Athena’s vengeful ghost, she comically sets off the alarm in her apartment, pisses off the neighbors, and lands a hefty fine. This clumsy reparative effort disguises another weak attempt to justify her knowledge of Asian rituals without substantive efforts to right the wrongs. These minor annoyances and psychological stressors June encounters hardly account for or redress the crimes that she commits. This flaw is further compounded in the concluding chapters of the novel when the culprit who has been harassing June online cartoonishly “steps out of the shadows and greets our protagonist with a drawn out “long time no see”. Even though the narrator acknowledges that “this scene composition is so fucking dramatic”, this self-awareness does little to redeem the novel’s abrupt segue into the Scooby Doo wheelhouse of unmasking theatrical villains and solving petty crimes. Readers are seemingly encouraged to have a laugh at June’s misdemeanors long after the running joke of her plagiarism and yellowfacing ceases to be funny.

Despite my reservations about the novel’s ending, Kuang is still an impressive and ambitious voice that unflinchingly acknowledges how “Notes app apologies” are a new genre of writing, and Yellowface is commendable for drawing attention to how commercial interests, the court of public opinion, and self-interest pervasively co-influence the literary and publishing industries. June’s self-important desire to “leave behind a mountain of pages that scream, Juniper Song was here, and she told us what was on her mind” comes across as superficial and foolish, especially since she acknowledges repeatedly how fleeting each instance of her popularity is. Ironically, it is June’s tendency to excuse and forgive herself for her moral blunders that allows readers to recognize the same unapologetically exploitative and sensationalizing tendencies in Athena’s writing process. Yellowface is thus an entertaining and self-reflexive exposé that invites readers to take off the rose-tinted glasses that romanticize writers and the publishing industry as impervious to and unadulterated by capitalist greed. The unresolved moral ambiguities and messy ethical entanglements that pervade this novel will likely haunt readers long after they turn the last page.

Marie Toh - Virgin Suicide (2019), Digital
Image description: The painting depicts four female figures in a room. They are lying close to each other on the floor. On the left side, a figure in a bright-blue dress sits in between two blonde-haired figures; the central figure has an orange for a head, which is sliced open. Her left arm is around a woman wearing a red dress. On the right side, a figure dressed in white lies on the floor, but half of her head is missing. There is a brown cavity on the right side of her face. These figures lie amidst colorful blankets, furniture, and toys that are scattered on the bright-orange floor. 

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Eunice Lim will soon begin teaching writing and composition at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She was formerly a postdoctoral teaching fellow in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University and has published journal articles in ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Global Storytelling, and Antipodes.

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Marie Toh an illustrator from Singapore. She works with both digital and traditional mediums, such as embroidery and print making. She enjoys finding beauty in everything - from the mundane to the horrible - adding subtle surreal touches to give a sense of mystery and dreamlike state in her works. She also has an unhealthy obsession with films, hair and her cat Lola.

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