Some friendships are toxic, some actions become skewered on the sword of social media, and the publishing world is not always a happy place. JENNIFER SOMERVILLE delves into REBECCA KUANG’s new satirical thriller, Yellowface, to see if there’s a happy ending.
There is an ethical dilemma posed in Rebecca Kuang’s new book, Yellowface. Would any writer do the same as the narrator, publishing another author’s work in their own name? Is it plagiarism, or is it just simple theft?
US author Rebecca Kuang is a bestselling author of ‘The Poppy War’ trilogy and Babel. She has master’s degrees from Cambridge and Oxford in Chinese Studies and Contemporary Chinese Studies and is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literature at Yale.
Yellowface is vastly different from her earlier fantasy works, and she has described this novel as a zippy, ridiculous thriller, meant to imitate the roiling schadenfreude of watching a Twitter meltdown.
The novel stars two young writers, with one, Anthea Liu, highly successful, while the career of the other, June Hayward, seeming to have stalled.
Anthea, a Chinese-American, chokes to death on some barely cooked pancakes after showing her friend her raw first draft of a new novel about Chinese labourers sent to World War I. When June finally returns to her own apartment that night after the tragedy, she has that manuscript with her. She works on it, completes it and submits it for publication, using her real first name, Juniper, and her real second name, Song.
So Juniper Song’s novel becomes a hit, until suspicions are raised on social media that all is not what it seems … Is this a case of ‘yellowface,’ the offensive practice of wearing make-up to imitate an East Asian person. To complicate matters, June hears Anthea’s voice in her head as she works and starts to see her everywhere. Is this guilt, or something paranormal?
Kuang reflects some modern publishing trends when she has a publisher’s assistant insisting that a Chinese or Chinese diaspora sensitivity reader be hired to go through the manuscript. That assistant, Candice, claims it is really important, with readers bound to be suspicious of someone writing outside their lane, and for good reason. She claimed this would protect June from accusations of cultural appropriation, and worse, cultural leeching.
June, of course, does not see this as necessary, with the publishers eventually deferring to her ‘authorial judgment’.
Twitter discourse comes in for some pointed criticism from Kuang. With controversy about June’s work feeding opinions from lots of people, she describes Twitter as ‘a chance to grandstand and show off profound thoughts that are only tangentially related to what was actually said.’ The author goes further and has June decide to bunker down and stay silent and unscathed, believing that Twitter discourse never actually does anything, just being an opportunity for firebrands to wave their flags, declare their sides, and try to brandish some IQ points before everyone gets bored and moves on.
I asked Rebecca Kuang about her motivation in writing this novel. Was it a satire about the publishing industry or is it an exposé?
‘I write whatever story seems so compelling to me at the moment that I can’t think about anything else. I remember one morning while I was working out, the plot of Yellowface dropped fully formed into my mind like the goddess Athena springing fully grown from Zeus’s skull. Probably it had been churning in my subconscious for a while. So, if my subconscious is so preoccupied with a problem that it’s begging me to write about it, I don’t say no.
‘Tonally it’s a satire, but realistically it portrays nothing more absurd or nefarious than what already happens every day in publishing.’
Is it commonplace to have a ‘sensitivity read’, particularly if a white author writes about Asian or coloured characters? Kuang says, ‘I don’t know how common it is yet; but it’s certainly become a larger part of the conversation in recent years.’
Social media plays a major role in this novel. While some people may say Twitter is not real life, the character of June asserts that it is real life, with reputations in publishing built and destroyed, constantly, online. I wondered if Kuang had experienced that, on a minor or major level, and what her personal opinions are of the Twitterverse.
Writers burn out and quit all the time. We have to talk about that.
‘I’m not sure that Twitter will still exist by the time this book comes out! I have a healthy relationship with social media so far, but only because I set very firm boundaries on how often I’m online and what I’m willing to talk about online. I use social media to get book recommendations and recipe ideas. For everything else, I pick up the phone and chat with a friend.’
Readers will decide if what June did is ethically right or wrong. But will they develop a sneaking sympathy for June, despite her actions?
‘I hope the sympathy is not just sneaking, but immediate, Kuang tells me. ‘The reality is that very few writers are Cinderella stories like Athena, and the majority of us have trajectories that mirror June’s. Of course, what she does with that failure and resentment is completely unhinged. But that resentment doesn’t come out of nowhere. We need to get better at talking about how psychologically damaging being in this industry can be. Publishing is in a lot of ways structured to kill your love of writing.
‘I’ve felt that; so many other writers have felt that. A piece in the Bookseller recently reported on how unsupported and dejected debut writers feel about the process. Writers burn out and quit all the time. We have to talk about that.’
Athena is described so well by Kuang that she is immediately visible, but June remains a shadowy physical presence, despite telling the story. Kuang says, ‘June is obsessed with Athena’s appearance, so her own self-image pales in comparison.’
There are revelations about the way Athena uses other people, and their experiences, how manipulative she was, mining other people’s lives for the fodder for her writing. I wondered if this is a fair comment for the way writers use what they have observed around them as inspiration.
‘Athena is an exceptional case in that she is particularly selfish about how she uses her friends and acquaintances as material for her work. But everyone does this to some degree. I steal my friends’ idiosyncrasies, their physical attributes, their knowledge of languages, the way they take their tea. The problem is – where do you draw the line? I’m not sure there is a simple answer, and the book certainly isn’t trying to present one. I probably wouldn’t describe a friend’s traumatic experience the way Athena did, but you’ll also meet writers who are convinced that anything is permissible as long as you’re making good art. I don’t know.’
What does Kuang think about the possibility of June making her own literary mark by writing her own version of events? Is this how some authors may think?
‘I think it’s less about the way some authors think and more about how the market thinks. Everything can be repackaged into a narrative for consumption these days. You can watch the commodification of tragedy happen in real time – “Oh, in two years this will make a fantastic Netflix documentary.” Maybe there really is no such thing as bad press. June is correct in thinking there is a market for her version of events because we as spectators will never stop being hungry for the drama.’
