The Diversity Elevator: On R. F. Kuang’s “Yellowface”
R.F. Kuang | Yellowface | HarperCollins | May 2023 | 336 Pages
Historically, yellowface was a Hollywood phenomenon. The portmanteau, like the offense it characterizes, is hideously obvious, wherein a white actor transforms into an Orientalist caricature for racist comic relief. On the page, however, this minstrelsy is more subtle. The fraudulence is professional, encased within a name.
Since the 1990s, at least two instances of literary yellowface have arisen in the world of American poetry. The poet Kent Johnson contrived an exhaustive biography and body of work for a fictitious Japanese poet named Araki Yasusada. Johnson never expressly admitted to fabricating the persona, but served as its “executor,” overseeing all matters of correspondence and even compiling a volume of his poetry. Similarly, Michael Derrick Hudson adopted the Chinese moniker Yi-Fen Chou to submit poems previously rejected under his real name, a move that apparently increased his work’s prospects for publication. Hudson only admitted to doing so in 2015 when one of his poems was selected for that year’s Best American Poetry.
These poetic provocations were not malicious, so Johnson and Hudson have claimed. Johnson has, more or less, insisted that the fabricated persona was a postmodernist response to “the unrepresentable acts of Hiroshima [and] Nagasaki.” Meanwhile, Hudson’s deception seems to be a sorry attempt at validating the artistic viability of his rejected work. The implications of this racial subterfuge have been subject to much literary debate, and constitute the central theme of R.F. Kuang’s unsubtly-titled novel Yellowface. I don’t intend to relitigate the rationale behind these hoaxes, except to remark that if Kuang’s protagonist, the young white novelist June Hayward, had possessed a sliver of Johnson’s or Hudson’s delusional gall, Yellowface would have made for a much more exciting read. Instead, the novel is a lackluster examination of plagiarism, privilege, and cultural appropriation that is too assured of its own righteousness; that fails, in its moral assertions and limp characterizations, to conclude anything besides the painstakingly obvious. With a contrived plot and colorless, cliché-ridden prose, Yellowface, which is billed as a “razor sharp” satire, offers remarkably little novelty and nuance into contested artistic territory.
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June Hayward is a novelist whose coming-of-age debut was released to middling acclaim. Wracked by careerist envy, June is debilitated by the success of her friend and fellow writer Athena Liu, the newly-crowned Asian American darling of the literary world. Athena, at the ripe age of 27, has three bestselling novels, a Netflix deal, and “a history of awards nominations longer than [a] grocery list,” while June is adrift with an agent who doesn’t seem to even like her work. Knowledge of Athena’s success only exacerbates June’s writer’s block. She was “derailed for days” after hearing of her friend’s six-figure option deal, an admission that leads the reader to wonder: Was June ever much of a writer at all?
Turns out, she’s more of a plagiarist—and a puzzlingly diligent one at that. After bearing witness to Athena’s untimely death, June steals an unfinished manuscript off her dead friend’s desk, substantially reworks the stolen material, and claims it as an original work. The manuscript, a historical epic about Chinese laborers in World War I, launches June to literary stardom. But June’s duplicity doesn’t stop after she rejoices in “breaking the glass ceiling.” At the behest of the white editors who acquired her manuscript, June rebrands as the vaguely Asian-sounding Juniper Song “to have a clean start.” She manipulates Athena’s mother to keep her from sharing her dead daughter’s diaries with the public, fearing they contained evidence of her plagiarism. She extorts Athena’s ex-boyfriend and gets an editorial assistant who harbored suspicions about her writing fired. She even briefly considers murder.
Contrary to this aforementioned plot summary, the novel’s tone is not one of Ripley-esque malice, but is self-consciously confessional à la Sally Rooney. The novel’s sophomoric and humorless prose is cluttered with banal exposition (“I shut the lid and push my laptop across the desk, breathless at my own audacity”), dull dialogue, trivial observations (“The line at the campus Starbucks was moving at a glacial pace”), and weak clichés (“I can tell this book is going to dazzle”; “I glimpse something that makes my heart stop”; “I fall in love with writing again”). The diaristic narration speeds through June’s most shocking transgressions and skips past the manuscript theft, effacing the novel of any psychological momentum. The chapters end hastily, often with a foreboding sentiment, dangled like a carrot to entice the reader on. The first chapter features one such example: “Meanwhile, in my bag, tossed at the floor of my bed, Athena’s manuscript sits like a hot sack of coals.”
As the novel progresses, these narrative cliffhangers serve as fleeting proof of June’s entitled delusion. The perfunctory dialogue is set up to be a weak defense of June’s worst, cancel-worthy traits. Consider this feeble rebuttal mounted amidst her impending Twitter cancellation: “It’s the internet that’s fucked, not me. It’s this contingent of social justice warriors, these clout-chasing white ‘allies,’ and Asian activists seeking attention who are acting up. I am not the bad guy. I am the victim here.” This is, of course, a roundabout reminder that June is the bad guy. Her objections are not persuasive, as they are an unsophisticated ploy to peel back the authorial curtain, revealing the earnest plot designer behind the page, ready to clue readers into her manufactured conclusions. Yellowface, then, becomes an excruciatingly cumbersome mental exercise, as the reader is asked to suspend disbelief that such an eminently skittish and stupid character, on the basis of her whiteness, could fool the publishing industry with little more than a half-baked plan in place. When sustained over the course of 336 pages, the narration sags in its inverted moral didacticism. The novel doesn’t seem to “grapple with questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation,” as the jacket copy claims, as much as it regurgitates palatable groupthink on the matters at hand.
June is no Rachel Dolezal, strategic and self-righteous in her racist ruse. We learn that her plagiarism is motivated by puerile revenge, a tit-for-tat since Athena, so June claims, stole from her first. June was sexually assaulted in college (“my maybe-rape”), an experience that’s callously recounted in a few pages over the novel’s halfway mark. The assault is alluded to only once beyond that section. June claimed to bury her trauma “so deep in the back of my mind that [it] wouldn’t resurface until therapy sessions many years later.” We learn that June first disclosed this sexual trauma to Athena, who, in a “Cat Person”-like twist of events, mined it for a short story.
One could recognize how Athena’s emotional theft fueled June’s rage over time, her success finally pushing June off the embittered edge. But June, as far as we know, had no ongoing scheme against her nemesis, nor was she a compulsive plagiarist in college. In the third chapter, which was crafted to function as an anticipatory aside, June mounts a self-reflexive defense of the theft, declaring that it “felt like reparations, payback for the things that Athena took from me.” It’s a rare instance of the character’s deranged folly on display, as her postmortem resentment is felt in timid doses, and her jealous obsession (“I feel this hot coiling in my stomach, a bizarre urge to stick my fingers in her berry-red-painted mouth and rip her face apart”) is alluded to but left largely unexplored.
There are many discrepancies in Yellowface, least of which is how a white girl from Philadelphia can physically pass as a part-Asian writer by adopting the surname Song and donning a bad tan: “I’ve never pretended to be Chinese,” June says, after an older Chinese woman confuses her to be of Asian heritage. But the most incongruous aspect of Yellowface is the self-conscious moral schema imposed upon June, who should be, by all accounts, a far more shameless and shrewd anti-hero. June is so skittishly insecure that she lives more in fear of cancel culture than a hefty lawsuit from her publishers. She is preoccupied with appearances (“I want bloggers, reviewers, and readers to know I’m the kind of person who, you know, cares about the right issues”), an obsession that leads her to fund an annual scholarship in Athena’s name and volunteer to mentor young AAPI writers. “I’m going to be better than Athena. I am a woman who helps other women,” she says.
June’s moral framework—specifically her compulsion to perform goodness—seems to be imported directly from Twitter, the virtual world where the novel briefly achieves its parodic foothold. But let’s not mistake parody for profundity. Anyone who has spent time scrolling through literary Twitter is capable of imitating its dialogic absurdities. This uneven characterization is puzzling, as Kuang has said that she set out to write an unlikable narrator in the vein of Gone Girl and The Girl in the Window. Fictional narrators are generally understood to be unreliable, though unlikability is, as of late, a trendy provocation. The novel’s form has become “a tool for moral instruction,” argued the critic Lauren Oyler, a technique to “make [a] feminist argument about how the shiftiness of narrative can be used and abused in imbalanced power relations.” Yellowface attempts to subvert this from a racial vantage point, though Kuang does little to disguise her didacticism.
Kuang seems more determined to establish June as a run-of-the-mill racist than to develop a character with a shred of complexity or moral conviction. The narration is littered with racial fumbles; every slight feels like a moral box for Kuang to check off. June mispronounces an Asian American writer’s name on a panel and cracks a pun when corrected. She thinks all old Asian women look alike. Even her well-intentioned comments come across as thinly-veiled microaggressions. In one scene, June thinks to herself: “My mind races to come up with some quippy response, but I can’t think of anything that isn’t pathetic or plain racist.”
In an interview with NPR, Kuang said she wrote a white character to counter the “limiting and harmful” belief that writers, regardless of their identity, should only write about people like them. “Fiction should be about imagining outside our own perspectives, stepping into other people’s shoes and empathizing with the other,” she said. However, Kuang seems to conflate authorial empathy with contrived sympathy. June feels designed to be at once uniquely self-aware, a ploy for readerly sympathy, and brazenly stupid enough to be found out. Born from this incongruous characterization is a narrator who is not quite a character, but a loosely constructed caricature whose dimensionless voice is neither compelling nor revealing.
The novel also hesitates to fully implicate June. It’s the editors who suggest that she go by Juniper Song, the editors who chose to fire the editorial assistant that she ratted on. And yet, there’s little more to the character beyond a flimsy archetype of a casually racist, entitled white writer who’s set up to be the punchline to Yellowface’s B-horror climax: June grows convinced she is haunted by Athena’s ghost. Is it a lack of empathy or just bad writing? Either way, I’m reminded of what Brandon Taylor once wrote in an essay on writing characters from outside one’s own experience: “Solipsism is anathema to good writing.”
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The object of Yellowface’s unconvincing satire is the publishing industry, but the novel hesitates to deliver a heavy-handed systemic critique. The myopic narration avoids analyzing the profit-driven motives of a billion-dollar industry, opting to focus on the superficial metrics of how writers are marketed. The literary agents and editors who protect June’s reputation are described with spectacularly little detail, akin to stock characters. Perhaps the effect was to liken them to interchangeable cogs in the greater publishing machine, which only further obscures the power that these gatekeepers actually have. The literary figures are too mundane to be menacing, too insipid to mock. Some public statements are made and posted to Twitter, but no one gets sued. No editor or agent is held accountable for the plagiarism scandal.
Unbelievable as this all sounds, Yellowface is also being praised as if it’s the first novel to ever explicitly address racial authenticity and cultural appropriation in publishing. Thankfully, it isn’t. On my second read of the book, I picked up Percival Everett’s Erasure, a 2001 novel that contends with similar questions of literary visibility, albeit from the perspective of a black narrator. Erasure follows Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a black novelist and academic who publishes “unreadable, boring” novels about post-structuralist philosophers. Monk bemoans how black and white people alike think he is “not black enough,” simply because he is different. After another manuscript rejection, Monk seethes over the success of a young black author whose book We Lives in the Ghetto (an allusion to Sapphire’s Push) he denounces. To prove a point, Monk writes a parody of We Lives in the Ghetto titled My Pafology, and has his agent send it out under a pseudonym. The manuscript was intended to be an overt insult to editors (Monk describes it as “offensive, poorly written, racist, and mindless”), but once Random House purchases it for $600,000, Monk goes along with the hoax because he is in need of money. Erasure lays bare the absurdities of cultural authenticity, and reveals how even a proud intellectual like Monk can begrudgingly succumb once a hefty payout is promised.
Yellowface, on the contrary, manages a shocking feat for its subject matter: No specific dollar amount is ever attached to Athena’s or June’s work. The material nuances of the industry, down to how titles go to auction, are glossed over. We learn that June was paid $10,000 upfront for her debut novel with royalties, a meager amount compared to Athena’s elusive six-figure deal. All that is revealed about June’s earnings from her plagiarized novel is that she could “survive the next ten to fifteen years” on royalties, provided that she lives modestly: “I could walk away from all of this and be perfectly fine.” In fact, June is rewarded for her plagiarism. Her controversy, which bears some resemblance to the real-life American Dirt, led to a spike in sales. Yet money remains a baffling afterthought—an added perk of literary fame, not the reason to crave it in the first place. For this reason, Yellowface neatly elides the notion of “selling out” one’s identity, although it raises the issue of racial tokenism—how non-white writers are often pigeonholed into certain genres or narratives.
The novel considers cultural appropriation as an ethical issue, rather than a deliberate action with significant material consequences, enabled by the promise of profit. Athena’s appropriation of other people’s stories is litigated at length, but the novel concludes with a pat resignation that all writers steal, that “truth is fluid [and] there is always another way to spin the story, another wrench to throw into the narrative.”
Yellowface does acknowledge that books and authors are manufactured commodities that can be launched to bestseller status with the help of a marketing team. There is a lot a writer can gain from commodifying their identity, in abiding by the unspoken rules and rituals of a cutthroat industry. It’s “publishing [that] picks a winner,” June says, “someone attractive enough, someone cool and young and, oh, we’re all thinking it, let’s just say it, ‘diverse’ enough—and lavishes all its money and resources on them.” The characters seem to shrug their shoulders at the system’s arbitrary selection with little care for its effect on literature and prose. In Yellowface’s world, there are no writers worth mentioning beyond publishing’s institutional purview. You’re either “chosen” or you’re not—and even the chosen writers, like Athena, are treated somewhat poorly because the industry is dominated by affluent and subliminally racist white people. Yellowface fixates too much on its protagonist’s personal vendetta to make any provocative assertions about publishing’s fetish for a certain kind of “diverse” voice.
Perhaps the novel’s failures can be chalked up to the limits of satire in our post-postmodern world. Our social media feeds are a blend of earnestness, irony, and meta-irony, wherein satire becomes hard to parse. Yellowface reads more like a parodic blueprint akin to My Pafology, the seventy-page metafictional manuscript inserted midway through Erasure, than a satire. I have periodically wondered whether there was a conceit behind the novel’s impoverished prose and preposterous plot. Maybe it was a conceptual experiment all along and this post-release publicity craze is the final, ironic act, as Yellowface has, in effect, become what it sought to critique: a bestselling literary phenomenon, its success “hinge[d] on factors that have nothing to do with the strength of its prose.” Supposing that a novel’s style and substance fail to matter, one might as well, as a character remarks, “ride the diversity elevator all the way to the top.”