Who Gets to Tell Which Stories?
Recently I finished reading Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, and to say I had questions was just the tip of the iceberg. It’s pitched as “a deep-dive exploration into the world of publishing,” but it’s…really…not. The main character, June, is supposed to be unreliable and unlikeable, but…I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her, and understand her actions. According to the high-star reviews, it’s a “keen satire on online book community drama” — except, it’s really just an author lashing out at her own critics and trolls. And at the end of an inconsistent and pretty icky narrative, there are so many things Yellowface totally missed the mark on, when it had the platform to cover a lot of topics we actually do need to talk about in publishing, and in general.
Warning: Alllll the spoilers ahead, even for the ending.
So, the premise is June, a hopeful author who was published, but her debut kind of flopped, is hanging out with her sort-of rival, Athena, who’s a wildly successful author. June inwardly complains about how clueless and privileged and stuck-up Athena is, but here June is, letting Athena buy cocktails at a very fancy bar in Washington, D.C., and letting Athena ramble on about a promotion she’s doing, or a newspaper that wants to interview her, or how her fans just looove her work. And within the first couple of chapters, two things are made very clear: Athena is a jerk, and June is a doormat.
The inciting incident of the story comes pretty quickly: Before this night of partying is over, the pair go to Athena’s (very fancy) apartment, where they engage in a liquor-fueled pancake eating contest, and Athena literally chokes to death on a pancake. No, I’m not kidding. The scene is actually pretty realistic — Athena starts choking, June tries to help, calls 911, but Athena collapses and dies before the paramedics arrive, and June has to sit there, stunned, watching as the EMTs put Athena in a body bag, and stumble through the police asking her routine questions about what happened.
All of this sets an excellent stage for the narrative to come: Because June just watched someone die, she’s traumatized, and it would make sense that a lot of what she does in the next few chapters is basically a trauma reaction. Buckle in and get yourself a coffee, or a scotch, everybody, because I am going deep.
Before Athena dies, she shows June the completed first draft of what she hoped would be her next published work. It’s about Chinese laborers brought to Europe from Canada in WWI, and the struggles they faced, of course in war but also, of course, in terms of racism. (All criticisms of the rest of the story aside, this is absolutely something that many people — not just in the West, but I imagine the East as well — probably won’t have heard much about, and it is great that Kuang mentioning it will hopefully encourage folks to look up the history.) Anyway, somehow — the text literally never states how this occurs — the bundle of papers winds up in June’s bag. Duh that she took it, but I mean, it happens off page, which I found extremely disappointing, since getting into June’s head in that moment would’ve been quite valuable to the reader.
So — really, no shocker — eventually June decides to read Athena’s draft. And as she’s reading, she starts making notes, thinking like an editor (an easy force-of-habit for a writer), considering how some passages could become more affective, and how some just don’t add anything to the tale. Remember, June saw Athena as a rival, not really a friend, so it makes sense that as she reads, June can totally agree with all the critiques she’s heard of Athena’s style. After she’s made extreme use of her red pen, June makes a very bad decision — she hasn’t written anything new herself in years, so she cleans up Athena’s draft and submits it as a WIP to her own agent.
This is where the waters get muddied — in the story of Yellowface, and in the writing by Kuang. Intense breakdown time.
One: Yes, June should not have done this. It is stealing Athena’s work. Does this rightfully create the impending controversy/downfall for June’s character, that we kind of expect as the reader, or wonder if she’ll get away with it? Yes. There are many layers to this, though, and the fact is, June is not the only person to blame for the way the fictional readers feel duped. June’s publisher and marketing team deliberately set her up with a pen name that sounds Asian, and never encourage her to come straight out with, “Hey, yeah, I’m white as milk, but I was drawn to the shared human experience of this subject.” (Which, by the way, is one of June’s defenses — that we all can relate to being far from home, feeling alone, feeling forced to do something we really don’t want to, missing family and familiar environs, and hoping to just get the task done and go back to what we know and love. And whether we’re talking Chinese laborers in WWI, or soldiers in a foreign land in any era, yes, this is quite relatable.)
Here’s where it gets even stickier, however: When June first receives backlash for “her” book, it’s because she’s a white woman writing about Asian history. NOT because she stole Athena’s draft. That’s a secret, of course, but when the accusation of that does come out, the criticism for that is waaay down the line…after the racial stuff. When the fact is, June never wanted to deceive anyone about her own heritage and life experiences. She wants to hide from people that Athena came up with the manuscript concept and characters. Again, not defending the crime June does commit. But I do find it necessary for the fictional crowd to get their priorities straight.
And this is where, for me, the real-life readers of Yellowface completely missed the point. I read several reviews — high and low-starred — of this novel, and the low-ranked ones all agreed: The text purposefully portrays June buying into cliches and stereotypes as her being “racist,” so that it can push the idea that a white woman writing about Asian history is “more” wrong than…outright plagiarism.
Especially since the twist in this novel is that Athena never wrote anything original in her life. All of her previously published essays, articles, short stories, and even full-length books were based on history texts, interviews she did with other people, or — and this is tremendously concerning — even from somebody else’s actual trauma. Exhibit A: When they were in college, June was sexually assaulted, and she told Athena about it, and Athena turned this real incident into a narrative for a school magazine. June KNOWS all this, and, yet, for some reason…SHE NEVER TELLS ANYONE THE TRUTH. June sits back and hides in her apartment and lets the social media trolls leap all over her about the “racism” debacle, INSTEAD OF TELLING ATHENA’S AGENT THAT ATHENA WAS A PLAGIARIZER.
Kuang keeps writing June as an unreliable protagonist, paints her as an unlikeable person, as someone who refuses to admit what she did wrong…while never making Athena have to face some consequences for her truly heinous actions. WHAT. THE. HELL.
Who in Kuang’s publishing house decided it was acceptable to make the SA survivor the villain? WTF?! How did this editorial choice not result in someone being fired? Especially after the #MeToo movement?! How did Yellowface even get published without this twist being removed?! And, sure enough, the high-starred reviews GLOSSED RIGHT OVER this part of the plot, as if it “doesn’t matter, because June is still a white woman writing about Asian history, how racist!”
I repeat: WHAT. THE. HELL.
As a reader, when you come across this big reveal about June’s and Athena’s pasts, how can you NOT help but side with June? As I read the last quarter of the book, I was continually shocked that we were given more and more evidence Athena was a terrible person, that she basically ruined June’s life, and yet, somehow, we’re expected to support Athena and completely vilify June. I had to wonder: what in the literal f*** is wrong with R.F. Kuang, that she thought it was more important to make the white woman the bad guy, to re-create social media troll drama for a good portion of the novel, stirring up all this debate in real life reading communities about “gatekeeping”…even at the expense of gaslighting the valid and intense trauma of her main character?
Given the very real and important concern around a hopeful author stealing their work of an established author, why did June’s SA even have to be a thing? Couldn’t Yellowface have just focused on Athena’s death, June’s taking the draft and passing it off as her own, and then later June discovers — yes, if she hadn’t known to begin with, that would’ve worked SO much better — Athena’s own theft/posing. That would’ve meant the plot and protagonist was complex, layered, and June needing to admit to her own wrongdoing, while exposing Athena, and the kind of moral and personal confusion that would cause — and the amount of character development that could come from it — would’ve made a terrific book.
Following this same idea, did the racial debate even have to be included? If Yellowface had been titled something different, if both June and Athena were the same race, but from varied socio-economic circumstances, and June was still a flop and Athena a success, and the draft posing still occurred — again, this is a deep and complicated literary conversation. Because a major thread being the notion that June “fakes” her Asian connection means readers focus almost exclusively on the race factor — not on June’s motivations for taking the unfinished manuscript from Athena’s apartment. And, in fact, there is no indication in the narration that June ever cared about Athena’s Chinese roots.
The only grudges June holds against Athena are her success, her wealth (both inherited and from her career), her attitude towards less accomplished peers, and her total cluelessness about the reality of struggling with a day job. These are all things that make June easier to connect with, and Athena more the antagonist. Yet Kuang’s ongoing insistence that June is unreliable and unlikable pushes through to the end of the novel.
This is one of those books that gets more and more convoluted the longer it goes on, and it easily continues on 50 pages after a natural ending. (Seriously, what’s up with this trend?) Why didn’t the author and editors find a tangible thread to follow for that span? For example, this notion that Athena wasn’t a genius writer, but rather a rich kid with an expensive college degree who could afford to basically buy her way into publishing?
We cannot bring up the fact that class matters in the publishing industry and then not discuss the ramifications of this. Kuang never explores the very social media posts she created for the story, that accuse Athena of kissing up to whites, of only writing Asian experiences categorized as “trauma porn,” instead of books that would humanize a whole marginalized culture. Some of these posts are vile, using very vulgar language to say the poster doesn’t agree with Athena dating a white man. It’s intense. And exploring more of that would lend credibility to Athena being a conflicted anti-hero. But it doesn’t take place on the page. It’s all treated as internet trolls who don’t know what they’re talking about. What purpose in the storytelling does that serve?
And when I reached the final words of Yellowface, I realized it doesn’t in fact answer the question put forth in its own premise: Who gets to tell which stories?
Is it all right for a white woman to write a historical fiction novel about Chinese immigrants serving in WWI in Europe? Why would it be racist if the author’s intent is to portray a shared human experience? If she doesn’t depict the Canadians and Europeans as being superior to the Chinese? If her goal is to share this little-known piece of history with the world?
If a popular author suddenly dies, and it comes out that she actually stole everything she ever wrote from other sources, I have no doubt the cancel culture folks would be screaming for her head.
In the end, Yellowface was hard to read — not because of the punch it packed, but because of how widely it missed the mark it should have been aiming for.
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