C

“Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much.”
― R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

“Alt-right free-speech proponents have made me their cause célèbre. I and my pretty, Anglo-Saxon face have become the perfect victim of the left-wing fascist cancel-culture mob.”
― R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

“writing is fundamentally an exercise in empathy. Reading lets us live in someone else’s shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller.”
― R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

“We soften the language. We take out all references to “Chinks” and “Coolies.” Perhaps you mean this as subversive, writes Daniella in the comments, but in this day and age, there’s no need for such discriminatory language. We don’t want to trigger readers. We also soften some of the white characters. No, it’s not as bad as you think. Athena’s original text is almost embarrassingly biased; the French and British soldiers are cartoonishly racist. I get she’s trying to make a point about discrimination within the Allied front, but these scenes are so hackneyed that they defy belief. It throws the reader out of the story. Instead we switch one of the white bullies to a Chinese character, and one of the more vocal Chinese laborers to a sympathetic white farmer. This adds the complexity, the humanistic nuance that perhaps Athena was too close to the project to see.”
― R.F. Kuang, Yellowface