Reviews - Yellowface | The StoryGraph

You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.

76.8k reviews for:

Yellowface

R.F. Kuang

3.99 AVERAGE

ailbhe_ronan's review against another edition

5.0

fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

amjt_'s review against another edition

3.75

dark emotional medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

this is my first book i've finished since getting back into reading, and WOW. i was not expecting that twist at all. truly i kept reading just to see how much more i could hate the characters in this book. it just barely missed 4 stars for me because it didn't keep me hooked the entire time. i took a large break in the middle of the book because at some point, i just couldn't stand seeing the main character somehow slither her way into another narrative win for herself. this book is a perfect embodiment of that meme "the whites are at it again!". loved kuang's writing throughout and will definitely read her other works.

Content Warnings

katelyn11's review against another edition

5.0

challenging dark informative fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Overall Rating: 5/5

Yellowface is marketed as “chilling and hilariously cutting.” While “hilarious” is not a word I would use to describe it, I am chilled and cut to the bone by Kuang’s sharp prose and critique of the American publishing system, racism, especially toward Asian Americans, cancel culture, and social media toxicity. It was brilliant, though I must wonder at Kuang’s general psychological state. She writes unlikable, toxic characters so well.

What I Liked

The critiques: Kuang delivers in her usual blunt-force, direct tone. While her prose is decidedly different than The Poppy War or Babel, she still aims each blow carefully and executes it precisely.

”Publishing picks a winner—someone attractive enough, someone cool and young and, oh, we’re all thinking it, let’s just say it, “diverse” enough—and lavishes all its money and resources on them.”

Unreliable and unlikable narrator: You’re not supposed to like June or Athena. Kuang excels at writing unlikable characters, and yet somehow causes the reader to empathize or at least understand the nature of their toxic actions. Plucked from the context, June’s actions are horrific and unethical, but within the story? Well, they make perfect sense for her character, ambitions, dreams, and fears.

“I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE THINKING. THIEF. PLAGIARIZER. AND PERHAPS, because all bad things must be racially motivated, Racist.”

What I Didn’t Like

Author’s autobiography: Kuang might deny it (or not), but there is a sense that she is writing from her own publishing experiences, the critiques leveraged against her following The Poppy War and Babel, and her experiences as a minority Asian American woman. In some ways, I didn’t mind; it offers her perspective wrought from real-life experiences. In other ways, it felt shrill, like a streetside preacher who uses his soapbox and megaphone to loudly proclaim his hellfire message so that the passersby really can’t miss it, or if they do, they are doomed to hell.

Themes and Reflections

Racism and microaggressions: The book’s full of them. June’s name is changed to sound more Asian. Her author photo is doctored ever so slightly to show her more tanned than she is. Her pompous white woman supremacy rings clear as she seeks to maintain her status and power by any means possible.

“I sometimes wonder how my work would be received if I pretended to be a man, or a white woman. The text could be exactly the same, but one might be a critical bomb and the other a resounding success. Why is that?”

Critique of the publishing industry: Publishers buy what sells. It’s a money game at its core, which is all the more tragic because writers are artists, not manufacturers. Kuang is blunt about what sells right now—diversity. The more non-white, the better. And then she captures the white narrator’s frustration with this pigeonholing just as well as the painstaking efforts of minority writers seeking publication in diverse genres.

“And I wonder if that’s the final, obscure part of how publishing works: if the books that become big do so because at some point everyone decided, for no good reason at all, that this would be the title of the moment.”

Plagiarism: Ideas are the property of their creator, as well as the texts and images that accompany them. Protection of creative rights is an important topic in a highly digital and cyberspace age. The topic is dealt with satirically, so much so that the reader is left scoffing at bits where plagiarism is accused. Surely, on those grounds, nothingoriginal or creative would ever exist because we all copy ideas and stories from one another. What about the myriad fairytale retellings or Jane Austen adaptations in modern literature? Thus, the question is posed: What constitutes plagiarism?

I’d seen Athena steal before. She probably didn’t even think of it as theft. The way she described it, this process wasn’t exploitative, but something mythical and profound.

The dumpster fire that is Twitter and social media: Writers rely heavily on social media to promote their work. Kuang exposes the dark trap that it is; it makes no one happy and results in perpetual cycles of greedy gossip and slander.

“Such is the nature of a Twitter dustup. Allegations get flung left and right, everyone’s reputations are torn down, and when the dust clears, everything remains exactly as it was.”

Writing Style

Fast-paced, sharp, and cutting, Kuang delivers an entirely different genre than her previous works, but with just as much force and directness as seen previously. Certainly, a critique might be made that Kuang inserts herself into the narrative. It’s difficult not to see the parallels between Athena Liu’s work in narrative Chinese history and Kuang’s own in The Poppy War, especially as Athena is critiqued as writing on behalf of the Chinese diaspora while holding only loosely to her own Chinese heritage. I’ve read the very same critique of Kuang on Goodreads (ahem, plagiarism??), and Yellowface obliquely manages these criticisms.

Tropes

Price of fame
Stolen identity
White savior
Unreliable narrator
Descent into madness

Content Warnings

General Rating: Adult (18A / R / TV-MA)

Spice Rating: Moderate—descriptions of non-consensual rape
Violence Rating: Severe—bullying, racism, cultural microaggressions, sexual harassment, cyberbullying and harassment
Profanity Rating: Severe—90 uses of f*ck
Other Trigger Warnings: racial slurs, suicidal thoughts, death of parent, multigenerational trauma

Content Warnings

pt_barnum's review against another edition

4.25

adventurous challenging emotional informative reflective tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

R.F. Kuang proved herself to me as a good writer who had greater potential with Babel. It was a good story, but she can do far better. So I already had a good opinion of Kuang going into this book, and I was hoping for something better than Babel. That is what I got. She has more potential, but Kuang is definitely starting to blossom into a truly remarkable writer.

Yellowface follows the story of June Hayward, a white girl, who steals a book about the strife of Chinese laborers in WWI from her dead friend, Athena Liu, who dies in such a comically hilarious way I wouldn't even want to spoil it despite the fact that it happens like twenty pages in. The book then follows the cognition and mental health of June Hayward as she has to deal with all of these really complex issues about race and cultural appropriation, while balancing her attention the hateful discourse of social media with her narcissistic desire for that very attention. My issue with Babel is that there wasn't any subtlety. When you're talking about colonialism, you have to have subtlety because realistically everyone has already come to the conclusion that it's bad, so you don't need to beat the reader over the head with how bad it is lest they fail to comprehend the passage whilst their brain melts out of their ears. On the contrary, in Yellowface, the lack of subtlety works. This is such a viscerally angry book. Like, so angry that it's actively uncomfortable to read at times. By way of arguments made around June, the reader has to form some opinions on their own about these very complicated cultural issues. What does it mean to be racist? When does the identity of an author affect what they can appropriately write about? How does reverse-racism work, and is it as bad as normal racism? Kuang bashes the readers skull in with these questions like one would with a folded metal chair, throughout the entire book. It works especially well because it's also done through social media, which makes the book feel even more claustrophobic and raging. The reader isn't calmly suggested to look inward and see what they think, they're inundated with the kind of frothing vitriol and anxiety that can only be found on Twitter.

Part of this book being so heavily about the effects of social media on these discussions is that they don't go anywhere. Yes, the reader is prodded to think about things like the commodification of racial minorities, and that, at least in me, generated more sensitivity. However, these hate-fuck, go nowhere, scream fights over social media don't accomplish much other than spreading anger. They don't solve anything.

Ultimately, when the actual questions are dissected from the vile sludge and miasma of twitter discourse about racism, I was left feeling conflicted when I was provided these questions. Do minority voices need to be heard, and amplified because in our society white people are more privileged? Yeah! But to an extent they're fetishized. It's gross, calling Asian people "diverse", as is done by publishing companies. This is just an example, but there are lots of kinds of these black and white dichotomies just like this in Yellowface. So I'm left feeling entirely conflicted because it almost seems like that racism is inevitable, which is just upsetting. If racial minorities aren't hated on by Nazis and crypto-Nazis alike, they're commodified by the very industries and groups that claim to care about them. Huh, maybe our societal obsession with race is bad. Who would've thought?

But, of course, I would never say the discussions brought up in Yellowface aren't worth having. To show proper respect to minorities, they need to be accurately and fairly represented in ways that celebrate them, not commodify them. I know I'm like virtue-signaling or whatever, but reading this book is part of my journey towards sensitivity. I'm white. I am a member of the LGBTQ+ community, but that's the extent to which I am a minority. I have regrettably said racist shit and held racist beliefs in the past that I now deeply regret. So to try and better myself, I want to read things like this, because they sensitize me to problems that I as a white person might never encounter, even if I wasn't insensitive in the past. So reading this book felt especially weird for me because I'm in this headspace of personal development, one in which I want to learn from minorities, but this book kind of gives off the vibe that our biggest problem is our societal neuroticism about race, not necessarily just racist, so although I'm already trying to walk the line between "passively supportive" and "white guilt complex", this book makes me think that one of the best ways I can get become more sensitive is by just taking it easy a little more.

Should you read Yellowface? Yes. It's very well written, to the point where a book that could otherwise be a mundane analysis of societal racism and the publishing industry is more like a thriller. The main character is hateable, to the extent of a Dhar Mann video villain, where the person is so explicitly awful you want to keep watching just to see them fail, and although she is 100% racist, most of her racist actions aren't 100% racist so instead of thinking "damn, that's really racist" I just feel icky and kind of off. The book talks about a lot of complex topics, but let it's themes and questions fester in you for a bit, because although this book provides questions and the wrong answers, it doesn't provide the right ones.

This is a book I will want to have on my bookshelf for the rest of my life. Not because it's the greatest thing ever made, but because it's so damn special.