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
In her searing new novel Yellowface, R.F. Kuang turns her penetrating literary talents towards interrogating the thorny issues of cultural appropriation, racism, and authenticity in the publishing world. The result is a darkly comedic satire that is as biting as it is thought-provoking. At the center of the storm is June Hayward, an unfulfilled white writer who witnesses her former friend and literary star Athena Liu’s sudden death. In a morally dubious act, June seizes Athena’s latest manuscript – a novel about the Chinese Labour Corps in World War I – and publishes it under the pseudonym Juniper Song, achieving runaway bestseller status.
But June’s ill-gotten success comes at a cost, as she finds herself haunted by Athena’s lingering spirit and allegations that she is a plagiarist and cultural appropriator looking to cash in on stories of oppression she could never truly understand. Kuang thrusts the reader directly into June’s increasingly addled psyche through an immersive first-person narrative, allowing us to feel the feverish anxiety and guilt that consumes her as she attempts to cling to her position by any means necessary.
On one level, Yellowface operates as a scathing satire that takes a hatchet to the predominant whiteness, cultural cluelessness, and commodification of diverse stories that remains deeply entrenched in American publishing. We see industry professionals remake June into an inscrutable, ethnically ambiguous figure to aid in the marketing of Athena’s novel about the oppressed Chinese identity. Kuang’s laser-focused character work and biting humor lend startling immediacy to the cringeworthy ways that nonwhite stories get packaged and sold by an out-of-touch literary culture.
But Kuang’s greatest achievement is her deft psychological portrayal of June’s spiraling descent into delusion as her guilt over stealing and diluting Athena’s work consumes her. We see June haunted by Athena in an almost supernatural fashion, with her ghostly presence manifesting in uncanny online videos and photographs intended to shame the thief. June’s panicked visions and fragmenting sanity add a propulsive edge of horror to the satire. She is not just haunted by a literal specter, but also the fraught legacy of the very story of subjugated identity she has appropriated and remade into a fraudulent commodity for personal gain.
No matter how hard she tries to inhabit the story through edits or rebranding, this is a narrative June can never authentically own from her position of white privilege. The novel is most transfixing when plumbing June’s moral contortions as she tries to justify her plagiarism through increasingly deluded rationales – that she was faithfully adapting Athena’s abandoned work, that someone needed to tell this overlooked story regardless of the teller, that her hoax is an avant-garde satire on the industry’s fixation on narratives of racial oppression. Kuang presents June’s antics not just as despicable but remarkably human and at times relatable, capturing the deep insecurities of a struggling writer all too willing to sacrifice integrity for a long-desired taste of success.
Kuang is at her most lacerating when depicting June’s attempts to prolong her ill-gotten fame through craven performative allyship, cynical pitches for more Asia-inspired stories to exploit, and a desperate bid to novelize her own cancellation as a misunderstood martyr for free speech. These sections present a withering portrait of how white creators remain drunk on assertions of being “allies” while remaining blinded to their own privilege and unearned platforms.
While Kuang’s surgical satire can slice with brilliant precision at times, her deployment of it against the cruel harassment June suffers online from “social justice warriors” can occasionally miss the mark and veer into gratuitous cruelty more reflective of an internet cesspool like Reddit than insightful commentary. The degree of personal ruination June endures also strains plausibility and borders on an author’s revenge fantasy against her haters rather than a cohesive critique of any substantive systems or power structures.
Indeed, while the novel takes a nuanced tack towards interrogating June’s fragile psyche, the individuals actually victimized by her crimes – Athena and her surviving family – receive comparatively little development and remain cyphers. This imbalance of perspective can read as an overly cozy centering of the white creative’s solipsism, the very pitfall the novel ostensibly aims to critique.
The finale too loses some of its earlier satiric momentum, devolving into an overly drawn-out game of cat-and-mouse between June and her prime tormentor Candice, an unhinged ex-publishing assistant intent on exposing the truth. As contrivances mount, the outrageousness that was so deliciously unhinged earlier starts to feel strained. A disappointingly tidy ending resolves lingering plot threads, but leaves a sense that Kuang pulled some punches after spending so much of the novel reveling in deranged, biting fun.
Still, despite some storytelling lags, Yellowface succeeds as a gutting examination of the cyclical nature of cultural appropriation, white grievance, exploitation, and racial alienation in American literature. Kuang shrewdly dismantles the machinery by which nonwhite writers are tokenized – simultaneously pigeonholed into circumscribed narratives of oppression yet resented by the White mainstream when they achieve visible success in filling that very niche. This enables white authors like June to reappropriate those same dispossessed stories into personal white savior narratives centered on their own cancellation and self-proclaimed martyrdom.
Kuang’s mordant wit and ferocious intelligence are on full display in these sections. While the satire’s frequent bluntness can sometimes read as undiscriminating and even cruel, it remains anchored to clear-eyed examinations of how publishing remains an inherently colonized space, one built on extracting authentic nonwhite voices and narratives as lucrative commodities while denying their creators the very platforms they sell a superficial version of “diversity” on. Yellowface is a scabrous read to be sure, but in its anger lies gnarled, indelible truths about the enduring divides plaguing American literary culture and who can claim ownership over which stories.
This is provocative, button-pushing material that will leave readers squirming at times, forcing them to interrogate the boundaries between storytelling and appropriation, between allyship and predation, between legitimate marginalization and self-serving identity politics. Kuang presents no easy answers, but the white-knuckle journey of Yellowface’s unraveling plot and satire ensures the questions linger long after the final page. Like all great literature, this is a novel haunted by the complex tensions and psychologies underpinning its creation, a disquieting examination of who controls American letters and the violent ghosts they traffic in. Yellowface pulls no punches, but in doing so heralds the arrival of a new virtuoso voice unafraid to scream in the face of literary propriety.
