Publisher: William Morrow
First Publication:Â 2023
Book Summary: Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena’s a literary darling. June Hayward is literally nobody. Who wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks.
So when June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I.
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn’t this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That’s what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree.
But June can’t get away from Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June’s (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.
With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface grapples with questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation, as well as the terrifying alienation of social media. R.F. Kuang’s novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.
Book Review: Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang is a biting satire that takes a scalpel to the whitewashed world of publishing and skewers issues of racism, cultural appropriation, and the commodification of diverse stories. At its heart is an antihero for the ages – June Hayward, a struggling white writer who witnesses her former friend and literary star Athena Liu’s sudden death. In a moment of delusion and desperation, June steals Athena’s recently completed manuscript about the Chinese Labour Corps in World War I. She edits it, renames herself “Juniper Song,” and passes it off as her own work, achieving runaway bestseller status.
But June’s unearned success comes at a price, as she is haunted by Athena’s lingering specter and allegations that she plagiarized her way to the top. Kuang’s razor-sharp prose thrusts the reader into June’s feverish psyche as her guilt, anxiety, and imitative writing process slowly drive her to the brink of madness. We see the literary world remake June into an exotic, ethnically ambiguous commodity to better sell Athena’s story of oppressed Chinese identity. Kuang wields satire as a scalpel to flay the predominant whiteness and cultural insensitivity still deeply entrenched in American publishing.
At its core, Yellowface is a ghost story about the haunting alienation marginalized writers face in a system built to suppress and exploit their voices while elevating derivative white perspectives. June is quite literally haunted by Athena’s spirit, which appears in uncanny photographs and online videos to shame her for her theft. But she is also haunted by the fraught legacy of the very story she has stolen—one about the suppressed histories and forgotten sacrifices of Chinese people. No matter how much June edits or brands herself, this is a story she can never truly own or authentically inhabit from her position of white privilege.
While the novel’s take-no-prisoners satire can sometimes veer into gleeful cruelty, Kuang renders June’s anxieties and moral contortions with remarkable psychological nuance and dark comedy. We see June’s delusional justifications for her plagiarism – that she simply desires to tell this overlooked story, that Athena didn’t deserve her success as a tokenized literary minority, that her theft is an avant-garde satire on the publishing industry’s belief in a unified racial/authorial perspective. The satire works because Kuang makes June’s antics not just despicable but also pitifully human and relatable. She captures the deep insecurities of the struggling writer all too eager to sacrifice integrity for a shot at success.
The novel really sings when focused on June’s desperate attempts to cling to her ill-gotten fame by any means necessary. This includes doubling down on her performative allyship to the Asian-American community, pumping out pitches for more Asia-inspired stories to exploit, and even attempting to novelize her own cancellation in a deluded bid for redemption. The novel paints a scathing portrait of the privilege and moral flexibility of the white creative professional, drunk on their own assertions of being an “ally.”
While Kuang’s satire can be brilliant, her deployment of it is also quite uneven at times. The novel can veer between darkly hilarious satire dissecting the power structures of publishing to mere bitter score-settling against straw figures. Certain sections aimed at skewering “social justice warriors” on social media devolve into gratuitous cruelty more reflective of a Reddit chinfest than insightful commentary. The sheer degree of harassment and ruination June endures also starts to strain credibility, bordering on fantasies of lashing out at one’s haters rather than a cohesive critique of anything substantive. There is undoubtedly biting truth in Kuang’s portrayal of cannibalizing social media mobs, but it doesn’t always feel grounded in any recognizable reality.
Similarly, while the novel takes a nuanced view towards interrogating June’s psyche, the actual victims of her crimes—Athena and her surviving family—remain cyphers, oddly undeveloped compared to the energy spent humanizing the perpetrator. Kuang is clearly more interested in satirizing the mentalities that allow someone like June to justify cultural appropriation rather than giving equal shrift to the material harm and inter-generational trauma it can inflict. This is perhaps intentional, an unsparing depiction of the solipsism of white literature’s diversity games. But it can also read as an overly comfortable centering of the white perspective, the very issue the novel is purportedly critiquing.
The novel also loses some steam by the finale, as it devolves into an overly drawn-out cat-and-mouse game between June and her primary “haunter” Candice, a disgruntled ex-publishing assistant intent on exposing the truth. The pacing lags as the outrageousness mounts towards a disappointingly tidy finale that feels like it pulls its punches after reveling in so much deranged fun throughout.
Despite its unevenness, Yellowface succeeds as a gutting examination of the cyclical nature of racial alienation, cultural appropriation, exploitation, and white grievance in American letters. Kuang astutely dismantles the mechanisms by which nonwhite writers are tokenized, pigeonholed into circumscribed narratives of oppression, then resented for their highly visible “success” in filling that very niche. White writers like June then feel entitled to reappropriate their stories of marginalization into their own narratives of white martyrdom and cancellation.
While the invective and satire can be unsparing, Kuang makes clear that the true toxicity lies not in “cancel culture” but an industry and culture at large built on extracting authentic nonwhite narratives as lucrative commodities while denying their creators the very platforms they sell a superficial version of diversity on. Yellowface is a bruising read that will leave readers pondering lines between allyship and appropriation, who has the right to claim what stories, and how to exorcise the haunting specter of cultural oppression for good. In its anger and extremity lie hard and haunting truths about publishing’s enduring racial divides.