By: Kiera Garcia – Associate Culture Editor
R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface tells a striking tale of the commodification of diverse stories in the media and the negative effects they have. These tend to be on both communities they claim to represent as well as on the authors who aim to fulfil this voyeuristic exchange. Her novel follows June Hayward, a floundering novelist who witnesses the death of her friend Athena Liu, a much more successful author. In Athena’s death, June snatches a manuscript from her desk, ultimately choosing to ‘rework it’ and publish it under her own name.
June becomes Juniper Song, changing her name and taking new author pictures in the aim to appear more ‘racially ambiguous’, enshrining herself as a writer whose new release, a World War II epic following the lives of Chinese labourers in France, becomes an instant bestseller. However, in the process of promoting this novel, June ends up causing harm as she ignores
calls from the Chinese community that she is perpetuating harmful stereotypes and assumptions in her novel. Specifically, this is seen in the erasure of key cultural elements that Athena Liu, a Chinese American woman, brought to the story, such as the removal of Mandarin referents and the transformation of a white female character, meant to demonstrate racism towards the workers, into an object of their desires.
Yellowface explores the publishing world’s hunger for diverse stories, typically ones that exploit the trauma of a marginalised group to satisfy the white guilt inherent in a population whose social currency is their ‘wokeness’. Hayward’s interactions with her publisher quickly betray the lack of actual passion for uplifting these voices, instead demonstrating their want to tick off a ‘diverse’ book from their publishing list. This is specifically seen when there is an immediate adverse reaction from both June and her publishers to the idea of a sensitive reader looking over the novel before it is released. This defensiveness comes from a place of indignity to the suggestion that the work could subconsciously perpetuate harmful ideas about Chinese people and culture, which it clearly does once released.
The novel explores not just the cultural exploitation present in Hayward’s theft of Athena’s novel, but also June’s resentment built up towards Athena and, as a result, other Asian authors and individuals in the publishing space. June recounts her feelings of jealousy towards Athena, consistently claiming that she was a leech on other people, extracting them for their stories. These feelings lead June to assume every Asian person she interacts with, author or panel attendee, is the same as Athena: emotionally predatory and out to ruin her.
Right when the reader assumes that this whole exploitative mess of a situation is over, Candance, the aide who asked for a sensitivity read, weasels an admission of guilt out of June by preying on her weak mental state and impersonating a spectre of Athena who June feels in haunting her. Candace does not do this to protect Athena’s legacy or as a reparation to the Chinese community, but instead for her own personal gain as she sells this admission, and the story of its lead up, to June’s own previous publishers. As June comes out of her intense depression that is caused by her exposure, she decides to further exploit the trauma done to her as well as the trauma she has perpetuated to stay relevant. She decides she will respond with an exposé of her own claiming that all the racist stereotypes she pushed, the accountability she refused to take, and all of the online hate she received were part of an experiment by her to expose the publishing world and netizens for their hypocrisy and desire for a villain.
It leaves one to sit with a question: how far will our current consumption culture push someone to damage themselves, their reputation, and leech off other cultures to keep their name in the ever-changing cycle of relevancy?
Image: Lysander Yuen via Unsplash