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March 2025 book review

Yellowface, by R. F. Kuang

 R.F. Kuang's 'Yellowface' takes white privilege to a sinister level : NPR

 

Yellowface is about a young writer, Juniper, who witnesses the death of her rival and friend, Athena, and in the flurry of trauma picks up the manuscript from Athena's desk and decides to pass it off as her own. Beyond the opportunistic theft, the problem is that the book is about Chinese labourers in World War I, a topic June knows nothing about and which she has no cultural claim to tell. As she spins more and more lies to keep herself safe, she finds herself caught up in social media battles about race, industry greed, plagiarism, and white privilege.

I found this book incredibly stressful. It's satire not in the sense of being humourful, because this book is not funny, but because it holds up the publishing industry to ridicule. The funniest thing about the whole book is that the publishing industry irl lauds it as a scathing commentary, and has made it fit their own narrative of being charmingly self-aware and -effacing. An irony I'm sure is not lost on Kuang. It is of course beautifully written, as Kuang's stuff always is, and there were some passages which were extremely poignant.

The book is racially charged, and I won't try to parse the nuances here; as a white woman, I don't feel like it's my place. It may feel like a cop-out, but I just don't feel I can speak to other people's experience of discrimination. I can however speak to the publishing experience as a debut; I am also a writer with the same publishing house as Kuang, and being published has been a mixture of hard work (conglomerative hard work, including agents and beta-readers), sheer dumb luck, and a great deal of privilege. Being published is always a mixture of these three things, in varying degrees.

A lot of reviews have tried to parse which character exactly Kuang is identifying with in this book. I can understand the frustration of seeing the successful writer write a successful writer - who has all the hallmarks of Kuang's own background - as a hard-done-to victim, but Athena doesn't escape judgement, none of the characters do. This was part of what made the book so difficult to read; they're all absolutely awful people. I don't believe you're meant to root for any of them, and I don't believe Kuang identifies with any one of them. She's magpied her own experiences and background for every one of the characters, so I believe she is all of them and none of them. She's being #meta.

It's written vitriolically, and if there's any sense of Kuang as a person in the book, it's in the tone; deliciously scathing of the industry, regardless of whether you're a struggling debut or a successful one, regardless of race or background. Having seen behind the curtain myself, speaking from the position of a white woman: yes, it's all accurate, unfortunately. If you fail to fit the pigeon hole that the industry has carved out for you, you're left by the wayside, regardless of whether the book you've created is good or not; if you have anything differentiating you, it will be mined; social media will define your success. This book feels like it was written for people who have been there, done that, bought the t-shirt, but instead of feeling like I've read something cathartic - 'at last, someone is voicing the elephant in the room' - I just feel weirdly despondent. This is a slightly irrational hot take, I'm aware, but I even felt a little attacked, as if by wanting to be part of the industry I am somehow enabling it (I just want to write fairystories, dude, if I could do it from the safety of my mushroom hut in the forest and send my manuscripts straight to the bookshop on the back of a march hare, I absolutely would).

The book explores racial discrimination and profiling in publishing, at where the line should be drawn between inspiration and plagiarism (if it's possible to draw one anywhere when you're a creative, given everything is inspired and taken from something else), at the industry as a parasite and at the inherent loneliness of being a writer in your own head. The book made me uncomfortable and it made me think, which is valuable, but I did not enjoy it (if you're meant to, that is). This book was born out of a great deal of frustration with the industry and a rational person's detestation of social media. It feels like an outlet for many years' worth of anxiety. But perhaps I am projecting.

Saying all this, I have worked with some people in the industry who are absolutely still here because they love books and sharing their love of books. They are real, not myth, and it's part of what keeps publishing alive, not in the sense of hooked up to machines to prolong a painful if profitable existence, but actually living and breathing and frollicking through meadows. Kuang may think that's naive, but I'm not completely jaded just yet. So if there's anything I took away from this book as a message for writers, it's this: simply do not care. Write and have fun writing, support yourself by other means than writing so you're never reliant on the industry, and sod the rest of the world.

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