Rebecca F. Kuang is especially gifted when it comes to picking up a fine slice of a story and polishing it perfectly before sending it back to her audience. While doing so, she tends to overlook the bigger picture at times. She may reside inside a literary bubble but, admittedly, she does capture the world in that bubble immaculately.
Yellowface is a disturbingly close portrayal of an unimpressive white writer, June Hayward, who steals an unfinished manuscript from her Chinese-American friend, Athena Liu, that too on the night of Liu’s death. June measures Liu’s success in terms of the “multibook deal straight out of college at a major publishing house, an MFA from the one writing workshop everyone’s heard of, a résumé of prestigious artist residencies, and a history of awards nominations…”
Self-doubt litters the novel. But June braves up, much like a deviant affirming her intentions of doing something for the greater good, and begins to address the problems that plagiarism invariably presents. June spends half of the novel-time trying to coax us into believing the altruistic nature of her motives — “I know what you’re thinking. Thief. Plagiarizer.” — by stating how her whitewashing of Athena’s war novel might even be a homage.
Yellowface unveils the attendant struggles of those with a creative block. It is deeply unsettling because many among us may be willing to exchange our lives with those of
the people whose success stories make us recoil in “shame and self-disgust”. It is also an attempt to bare the warts of the publishing industry. For instance, Yellowface enquires ‘who can authentically tell a story?’ — a discourse marked by the depravities of the market and the hijacking of cultural narratives. Ironically, while June’s meandering debut novel was rejected by the
publishing community, Athena’s voice in the same way. What makes June more appealing to her publishers is that, unlike Athena, she has
no ethical obligation to truly represent the voices of tortured Chinese soldiers during World War II.
Her searching questions notwithstanding, Kuang pokes fun at casual racism through her humour: “The hardest part is keeping track of all the characters… Why are so many of the female characters named Xiao as well?... Does that mean everyone is related? Is this a novel about incest?”
However, there are glaring inconsistencies. Kuang herself shot into the limelight with the help of her clout on social media, the very phenomenon that she chooses to scrutinise in her book. In spite of portraying — dismissing — Athena’s novels as ‘mainstream’, one of the major awards that our anti-heroine, June, celebrates is, astonishingly, the Goodreads Choice Awards.
While Kuang problematises the concepts of victimhood, gatekeeping and metafiction, a more impersonal approach — Athena seems suspiciously like Kuang’s doppelgänger — would have served Kuang well in Yellowface.
