Fiction: Yellowface by R. F. Kuang, 2023
June Hayward, a self-described “brown-eyed, brown-haired basic white girl” from the Philly suburbs, will never be as successful of an author as her counterpart Athena Liu. While June’s debut novel is passed over again and again, Athena is dubbed “publishing’s newest prodigy … here to tell the AAPI stories we need” after her debut novel is nominated for Booker, Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards. According to June, Athena is “diverse enough” to succeed. Then Athena dies, and June finds the finished draft of her next novel.
What defines Yellowface is author R. F. Kuang’s masterful use of an unreliable narrator. Over the course of the book, readers bear direct witness to June’s immersive inner monologue as what starts as a “simple editing exercise” turns into a finalized manuscript of June’s – Athena’s – next novel. Each step of June’s descent seems so simple to her: why not soften some of the white characters when they’re so “cartoonishly racist” in Athena’s version? Why not rename Athena’s characters—the unsung Chinese soldiers of World War 1—to make them more palatable to American audiences? Why not rebrand as “Juniper Song” and speak on a panel about East Asian storytelling? By the time the world begins to learn the truth, June is so lost in her own narrative that at times it seems she’s forgotten that truth entirely. Even by the end of the novel, June never stops spinning a story—“cyberbullied”, “stalked”, and “gaslit” are the words she chooses to describe what she’s experienced.
Kuang crafts an even creepier story by setting much of June’s internal monologue during her endless Twitter doomscrolling sessions. June has few in-person conversations to tether her to reality—her only real friend dies with Athena, after all. Instead, she drowns herself in negative reviews, online discourse, and discussions of what a “tankie” is—all while engulfed in a paralyzing fear that someone might find out her secret and shatter her newfound success. I found that an unsettling nostalgia for my extremely online pandemic years crept up on me during these scenes, though I truly hope that for other readers this will be an unfamiliar experience. Kuang’s commitment to grounding her narrative in the awfulness of the Internet makes June’s narrative spiral even more immersive to the reader.
Halfway through the book, though, the Twitter mob makes an unexpected move: it turns on Athena herself. Formerly idolized by the Internet as a “paragon of good Asian American rep”, her legacy is transformed into that of a “stunning example of Western imperialism brainwashing”. The mob accuses her of every niche moral failing under the sun: from refusing to critique the Tiananmen Square survivors that have become Trump supporters, to being a “champagne socialist” rather than a true Matrix, even the godlike Athena Liu cannot escape the vitriol of Twitter leftists.
Much of this is pulled from Kuang’s own experience in the online literary world. Her previous novels, The Poppy War and Babel, are both undeniably critiques of the horrors of colonialism. Yet the Internet cannot seem to decide whether she is too overtly critical or not critical enough. Even Athena’s in-world haters mirror the words of Kuang’s loudest critics, who described Babel as “heavy-handed”, “didactic”, and “frequently interrupted by lectures on why imperialism is bad”. But like Athena, Kuang is simply telling the story of her life. What’s different about this novel is that in Yellowface, Kuang is looking at that life from an outsider’s perspective. In doing so, she holds up a mirror to the readers themselves and asks: Is this how you view me?