Over the summer, I spotted Rebecca F Kuang’s Yellowface on a number of the book-related Instagram accounts I follow and it intrigued me. Then a friend read it and her flash review made me want to read it even more. So I borrowed it from the library.

Yellowface is about a white woman who publishes a book about the Chinese Labour Corp in the First World War and is subsequently perceived by many as taking on the guise of an Asian American writer to garner a wider audience. There’s good reason for this.

The original manuscript was written by her old college friend, the successful Asian American author Athena Liu, who dies in a freak accident. Junie Hayward is present when her friend dies, not long after Athena asks her to read the first pages of the manuscript for her next novel. Somehow she takes the manuscript home with her. Somehow she starts to edit it and fill in the gaps. Somehow she sends the finished draft to her agent as her own. Somehow she’s able to justify all this as not really being theft. From this point on, though, Junie is on edge, waiting to be caught out, defensive and trying not to acknowledge that she feels guilt about what she’s done.

Kuang satirises the 21st century publishing industry beautifully in this novel. Characters are definite types, whether they are central or marginal players in the story. Athena is archetypal of the exciting, hot new talent fresh from a Master’s, who is photogenic, cool and intriguing. Junie is from the other end of the writing spectrum, a capable writer who scores a book deal for her first novel but then suffers the consecutive blows of the independent publisher going bust, the second publisher reducing the print run and book tour, and then cancelling the paperback. It’s understandable that Junie is jealous of her friend’s success, and that she is tempted, when the opportunity arises, to steal her friend’s creative capital in order to be successful herself.

I liked how meta this novel is. Kuang is Asian American of Chinese heritage. She has won a number of awards and has a raft of academic achievements alongside her best selling novels. Her experience of the world of publishing as an Asian American woman informs the narrative around Athena Liu and, as she takes on the voice of a white woman, in Junie Hayward, allows her to walk a fine line between poking fun at herself and writers like her and peeling back the layers of racism and tokenism in the industry. The novel also questions who has the right to author a story, whether a writer has to be from the same culture as the one that they are writing about to be authentic, or whether it is enough to research a subject thoroughly and be alert to the sensitivities and unconscious beliefs that might offend actual members of a cultural group. Kuang is inhabiting the mind of someone from a different culture to her own, someone who is not of a minority, who has certain privileges that mean she doesn’t have the same obstacles as people who are from a minority group. She has Junie say baldly privileged and racist things when she justifies her actions to herself, and when she encounters opposition to what she has done. Kuang makes Junie particularly affronted when critics call her out on the use of stereotyping language, when that language was chosen by Athena, without questioning why it might be more acceptable for Athena to use the language than herself, or even why Athena might use that language.

Junie is challenging as a character, from her presumptuousness around hiding that the original draft of the novel was Athena’s to her arrogance in equating the subsequent research she does into its subject matter, so that she appears an expert in it, with Athena drawing on family history as well as broader research in writing the first draft. Her willingness to edit the manuscript without questioning why Athena might have included certain things or expressed the story in certain ways, to make it more appealing to a wider audience and strip out anything that might identify Athena as the author speaks volumes, as do the further edits suggested by the publishing team. Junie goes along with all sorts of things suggested by her publishing team. She leans into the subterfuge of publishing under the name Juniper Song, her first and middle names, justified publicly as putting distance between this new work and her first novel, without any acknowledgement that it makes her appear to be Asian American or any consideration of what the consequences might be. Kuang skilfully portrays this as questionable naivety paired with the arrogance of being white and not having to think about these things.

The main consequence of her name change and the theft of her friend’s work is being dragged on social media for appropriating another culture’s story. What happens reminded me of the way school teacher and poet Kate Clanchy was challenged about the way she described some of her students in a book and the social media battle lines that were subsequently drawn. It also reminded me of why I don’t bother with certain social media platforms. Kuang’s depiction of the events and Junie’s response to them is a perfect critique of how all consuming social media has become and how enabling of the worst behaviours. Key to the plot is the danger of inserting yourself into a work written by a well-known, fêted writer from a minority group. Athena’s style is recognisable to many. Some of the people who knew her also know what she was working on. Nobody has hard proof of what Junie has done, leaving accusation and trolling the only routes open to tricking Junie into confessing.

The plot is pacy like a thriller. I was agog to see what would happen next and whether Junie would get away with her theft. I was also delighted by the representation of the literary world, both those who are compelled to enter it and the gatekeepers who get to choose who succeeds in entering and who gets their chance at longevity. Kuang captures the modern variations on ‘who you know’ well; although there is still an element for some of being from the ‘correct’ educational and social background, there is now the consideration of how marketable an author is in terms of appearance, optics and their existing social media brand. She has Junie verbalise how important platforms like Twitter [X] have become for some.

But Twitter is real life; it’s realer than real life, because that is the realm that the social economy of publishing exists on, because the industry has no alternative. Offline, writers are all faceless, hypothetical creatures pounding out words in isolation from one another. You can’t peek over anyone’s shoulder. You can’t tell if everyone else is really doing as dandy as they pretend they are. But online, you can tune into all the hot gossip, even if you’re not nearly important enough to have a seat in the room where it happens.

This sense that writers have no reality unless they are online interested me, because Junie doesn’t seem to have any friends. She doesn’t belong to any writing groups or peer networks. She saw Athena sporadically. She sees her sister sporadically, too. She had a job before the stolen novel took flight, which necessarily brought her into contact with other people. But for the most part, hers is seemingly a life lived remotely. She texts her editor, is part of a group chat with two other women whom she met at a literary event, curates her personal brand on social media and, when everything gets nasty, has nobody real to turn to. She seems to derive validation from how visible and interacted with she is online. She talks about being bullied at school for being bookish. She has panic attacks. Her friendship with Athena comes across as all surface. She is awkward in social situations. She can be quite manipulative. I found myself wondering about her, especially whether the narrative she has built for herself is a barrier for her against the truth of who she is and how lonely this makes her.

Right to the end of the book, Junie learns nothing. She is quick to castigate Athena’s behaviours throughout their friendship without questioning what might be at the back of them. Given her lack of honesty about herself, it’s also likely that Junie isn’t entirely honest about Athena. There isn’t anyone who can corroborate her version of Athena. Hints of how ingrained Junie’s racism is leak out in small phrases and the interactions she has with the Asian Americans she seeks out and patronises as part of her myth building. Towards the very end of the book Kuang has Junie deliver a paragraph of deep irony.

Years of suppressed rage – rage at being treated like a stereotype, like my voice doesn’t matter, like the entirety of my being is constituted in those two words, “white woman” – bubble up inside me and burst.

This is who Junie Hayward is. That Kuang has made her so believable and not a caricature is testament to the truthfulness of this novel. When there are centuries of privilege to fall back on, it’s hard to accept that the world around you is changing or that the microscopic advances the formerly unprivileged are making aren’t a direct attack on your being. But if you are a rational person, it’s surely easier than it is for an arrogant person to take a step back and reassess what your prejudice and defensiveness says about you.

As well as being a ripping good read, Yellowface also made me think. I’ve never read anything by Rebecca F Kuang before, whose previous books were published under the name R F Kuang, but I was so impressed by this novel that I will be exploring her Poppy War trilogy.

Read 15/10/2023-19/10/2023