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A review by notkavi
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
emotional
funny
reflective
relaxing
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Disclaimer: this review is going to be pretty stream of consciousness because I don't want to spend a while editing. This review will contain spoilers I'm not sure what the norm is about that on here so I'll just put the whole thing in spoiler tags.
The one thing that I think struck me the most about this is that I think more than any other piece of media that I have consumed, including hours long video essays by breadtubers who really should understand this culture, this book understood the nature of what internet mobs look like. There is often a tendency from negative accounts to portray these mobs as being largely driven by clout chasers or people who are insincere, and there's also a tendency to sweep under the rug the fact that in a lot of cases the backlash to these mobs is from people who are, you know, generally unsympathetic the kind of person who's making this discourse. This book makes no bones of the fact that while there are clout chasers and bad actors in these mobs off in the ones who are doing a lot of the work of organization and that kind of thing, they're also a lot of sincere actors who are expressing sincere anger, and that a lot of the anti mob backlash can end up just being Nazis.
On the other hand it doesn't step into the role of valorizing these mobs and does describe the ways in which they can themselves use bigoted tropes or have incoherent politics or got a lot of the details wrong and not really care about the facts. It also I think gives a reasonable account of what it must be like to be on the receiving end and realize that in practice there's not a whole lot you can do to satiate one of these, a commonly cited problem with this tactic.
But the thing that really impressed me was the degree to which the author seems to deeply understand the sheer weirdness of online political discourse. The passage that really sang for me in this regard was "A TikTok of someone ripping all the pages out of Athena's books and throwing them on a bonfire goes viral. (This sparks another debate about Nazis and book burning, but I won't drag you down that corner of the internet.)" I could imagine that scenario extremely viscerally even picturing my own response to this which would be something along the lines of the screenshot with the text "so true naziism is when you physically damage a book you own".
As I start to write the next section here I chuckle to myself that this is the part that I put first, but I think it's because the friend I'd recommended this to me was really interested in my views on the Twitter portion and I was deeply impressed by it overall. I will say the one minor inaccuracy is that the numbers are very all over the place. For example gaining a few hundred followers from a major publisher announcing the launch of a book which gets a bunch of buzz from people in your community is completely implausible it would be orders of magnitude more than that. Additionally there is no way you're getting 50 to 60 likes on a typical post while only getting one or two mentions a week. Between this and the extremely strong understanding of the way that Twitter discourse works I presume that the author is someone who spends a great deal of time online but doesn't post very much which is totally understandable.
Okay the second thing I found really impressive about this book (and I'm not sure how much of this is just not seeing this experience represented very much) was the way that anxiety affects June resonates with me in a way that I don't think very many fictional characters have. The feeling she has when the Athena's ghost account first starts posting and the immediate strong anxiety and overreaction followed by pulling back later in the morning and especially after having conversations with like one other person who potentially even has not enough context to be making that determination has been a phenomenon of experienced maybe once every couple years (to be clear at no point was it the result of anything that I did that was wrong in a moral sense rather wrong in a sloppy sense, software bugs and such, but the same feelings generally apply).
I think that I came into this from descriptions expecting it to be a book that was far more on the side of the dominant strain of cultural appropriation discourse that happens within elite liberal circles (I've always joked that this is my one conservative view, so i was going in expecting to disagree). Specifically I was expecting that there would be parallelism in the text between June getting what I would consider to be unreasonable criticism but the author considered to be reasonable criticism for cultural appropriation and June's undeniable though fictional crime. To some degree I think this did happen but I think that it was clear in the book the extent to which these conversations can have reasonable and unreasonable components to them and I don't think that it came down hard on the idea of that all accusations of cultural appropriation are as valid as the ones leveled against June in this text. Specifically I think beyond the theft itself the thing that is being discussed here that the crime June made that got her a lot of criticism earlier before any of the plagiarism was revealed was her softening of Athena's rhetoric in the book: The the grinding of a story about tragedy into a fine powder that could then be reshaped into inspirational sludge for white western audiences. Overall, this was executed well with June's view that what she was doing was in fact removing the preachiness of the original text left as a plausibly reasonable explanation, and one that probably resonates with a lot of people who are frustrated with that kind of tendency in left-leaning literature; but demonstrating that this kind of a process can lead to removing the core of the work in many cases. June's own additions themselves cliched and fall into many of the props that people who are upset about preachiness would also dislike because in practice she is not just de-emphasizing the politics but rather changing it to her own.
The racial politics of this book are also fascinating to me. June's characterized throughout as the kind of soft racist in that we're all familiar with within liberal circles, someone who has clearly developed the assumption that life is easier for minorities in certain contexts because the structures put in place to benefit minorities are visible was the ones to benefit traditionally powerful groups are invisible and considered natural. But I think that one of the really interesting things about this is that this book is about racism that takes the form "Asians are getting too much affirmative action". I'm sure in publishing this isn't particularly alien discourse. Perhaps this is my bias as a member of the very different field of computer science, but I feel like (and you know, it's probably in part because I'm (South) Asian myself so I'm a safe person to air this kind of stuff too in Asian people's minds in a way it's not in White people's minds) I hear this kind of thing most from Asians (East and South), complaining about purported affirmative action benefits being doled out to Hispanic or Black Americans. I think that the creative industries which still harbor much stronger anti-Asian prejudices than society as a whole, and technology which has I would say borderline zero anti-Asian prejudice (as long as you don't have an accent, not saying it's perfect), are two extremes here so I'm not saying that this was necessarily deliberate we might just be coming from different universes but I would be surprised if this wasn't at least in part deliberate.
I think the way that June conceptualizes gender politics is also interesting, she is constantly throughout the book talking about how the natural tendency of cancellation is to go after cishet white men, but at the end she talks about how Geoff bounced back from scandal more easily because he was a cishet white man — obviously this is self-serving rhetoric that she's using, but I thought it was interesting as a window into her relatively contradictory views on the subject.
I will admit I don't quite know what to make of the consistent theme in the second half about Athena herself being someone who is a thief for taking inspiration from other people's personal stories. I think there is a sense that we are supposed to take that this is a rationalization that June has come up with, since it is first introduced by critics of both June and Athena, critics whose criticism of Athena June revels in. However to some degree some of the stuff that she does would cross what I think many would consider to be some kind of a line even if a highly unwritten one. Telling the story of June's feelings towards whether she was a victim of sexual assault is something that most would consider to be at least uncomfortable; however telling stories based on her personal relationship with her boyfriend is the kind of thing that is considered normal and fine.
One interesting thing about this story is that at no points did I really get the sense that June was being an unreliable narrator about any of the actual facts (as she experienced them, of course, her visions of the ghost of Athena are implied to be hallucinations). The book is a somewhat biased telling of what appears to be a relatively coherent story that does not paint the narrator in a particularly positive light. The closest we come to the belief that this is an unreliable narrator is I think when she towards the end starts recontextualizing her relationship with Athena to be more positive than it was at the beginning of the story. Not any particularly strong thoughts there but that was just the thing I was thinking about.
In any case I've been rambling about this out loud to my phone like some kind of old-timey detective for the last 20 minutes while I take a walk so I think I'll wrap it up here.
Overall, an excellent book and probably the first piece of media on the phenomenon of cancel culture that I have ever seen in my life which did not make me want to write a four-page angry response.
The one thing that I think struck me the most about this is that I think more than any other piece of media that I have consumed, including hours long video essays by breadtubers who really should understand this culture, this book understood the nature of what internet mobs look like. There is often a tendency from negative accounts to portray these mobs as being largely driven by clout chasers or people who are insincere, and there's also a tendency to sweep under the rug the fact that in a lot of cases the backlash to these mobs is from people who are, you know, generally unsympathetic the kind of person who's making this discourse. This book makes no bones of the fact that while there are clout chasers and bad actors in these mobs off in the ones who are doing a lot of the work of organization and that kind of thing, they're also a lot of sincere actors who are expressing sincere anger, and that a lot of the anti mob backlash can end up just being Nazis.
On the other hand it doesn't step into the role of valorizing these mobs and does describe the ways in which they can themselves use bigoted tropes or have incoherent politics or got a lot of the details wrong and not really care about the facts. It also I think gives a reasonable account of what it must be like to be on the receiving end and realize that in practice there's not a whole lot you can do to satiate one of these, a commonly cited problem with this tactic.
But the thing that really impressed me was the degree to which the author seems to deeply understand the sheer weirdness of online political discourse. The passage that really sang for me in this regard was "A TikTok of someone ripping all the pages out of Athena's books and throwing them on a bonfire goes viral. (This sparks another debate about Nazis and book burning, but I won't drag you down that corner of the internet.)" I could imagine that scenario extremely viscerally even picturing my own response to this which would be something along the lines of the screenshot with the text "so true naziism is when you physically damage a book you own".
As I start to write the next section here I chuckle to myself that this is the part that I put first, but I think it's because the friend I'd recommended this to me was really interested in my views on the Twitter portion and I was deeply impressed by it overall. I will say the one minor inaccuracy is that the numbers are very all over the place. For example gaining a few hundred followers from a major publisher announcing the launch of a book which gets a bunch of buzz from people in your community is completely implausible it would be orders of magnitude more than that. Additionally there is no way you're getting 50 to 60 likes on a typical post while only getting one or two mentions a week. Between this and the extremely strong understanding of the way that Twitter discourse works I presume that the author is someone who spends a great deal of time online but doesn't post very much which is totally understandable.
Okay the second thing I found really impressive about this book (and I'm not sure how much of this is just not seeing this experience represented very much) was the way that anxiety affects June resonates with me in a way that I don't think very many fictional characters have. The feeling she has when the Athena's ghost account first starts posting and the immediate strong anxiety and overreaction followed by pulling back later in the morning and especially after having conversations with like one other person who potentially even has not enough context to be making that determination has been a phenomenon of experienced maybe once every couple years (to be clear at no point was it the result of anything that I did that was wrong in a moral sense rather wrong in a sloppy sense, software bugs and such, but the same feelings generally apply).
I think that I came into this from descriptions expecting it to be a book that was far more on the side of the dominant strain of cultural appropriation discourse that happens within elite liberal circles (I've always joked that this is my one conservative view, so i was going in expecting to disagree). Specifically I was expecting that there would be parallelism in the text between June getting what I would consider to be unreasonable criticism but the author considered to be reasonable criticism for cultural appropriation and June's undeniable though fictional crime. To some degree I think this did happen but I think that it was clear in the book the extent to which these conversations can have reasonable and unreasonable components to them and I don't think that it came down hard on the idea of that all accusations of cultural appropriation are as valid as the ones leveled against June in this text. Specifically I think beyond the theft itself the thing that is being discussed here that the crime June made that got her a lot of criticism earlier before any of the plagiarism was revealed was her softening of Athena's rhetoric in the book: The the grinding of a story about tragedy into a fine powder that could then be reshaped into inspirational sludge for white western audiences. Overall, this was executed well with June's view that what she was doing was in fact removing the preachiness of the original text left as a plausibly reasonable explanation, and one that probably resonates with a lot of people who are frustrated with that kind of tendency in left-leaning literature; but demonstrating that this kind of a process can lead to removing the core of the work in many cases. June's own additions themselves cliched and fall into many of the props that people who are upset about preachiness would also dislike because in practice she is not just de-emphasizing the politics but rather changing it to her own.
The racial politics of this book are also fascinating to me. June's characterized throughout as the kind of soft racist in that we're all familiar with within liberal circles, someone who has clearly developed the assumption that life is easier for minorities in certain contexts because the structures put in place to benefit minorities are visible was the ones to benefit traditionally powerful groups are invisible and considered natural. But I think that one of the really interesting things about this is that this book is about racism that takes the form "Asians are getting too much affirmative action". I'm sure in publishing this isn't particularly alien discourse. Perhaps this is my bias as a member of the very different field of computer science, but I feel like (and you know, it's probably in part because I'm (South) Asian myself so I'm a safe person to air this kind of stuff too in Asian people's minds in a way it's not in White people's minds) I hear this kind of thing most from Asians (East and South), complaining about purported affirmative action benefits being doled out to Hispanic or Black Americans. I think that the creative industries which still harbor much stronger anti-Asian prejudices than society as a whole, and technology which has I would say borderline zero anti-Asian prejudice (as long as you don't have an accent, not saying it's perfect), are two extremes here so I'm not saying that this was necessarily deliberate we might just be coming from different universes but I would be surprised if this wasn't at least in part deliberate.
I think the way that June conceptualizes gender politics is also interesting, she is constantly throughout the book talking about how the natural tendency of cancellation is to go after cishet white men, but at the end she talks about how Geoff bounced back from scandal more easily because he was a cishet white man — obviously this is self-serving rhetoric that she's using, but I thought it was interesting as a window into her relatively contradictory views on the subject.
I will admit I don't quite know what to make of the consistent theme in the second half about Athena herself being someone who is a thief for taking inspiration from other people's personal stories. I think there is a sense that we are supposed to take that this is a rationalization that June has come up with, since it is first introduced by critics of both June and Athena, critics whose criticism of Athena June revels in. However to some degree some of the stuff that she does would cross what I think many would consider to be some kind of a line even if a highly unwritten one. Telling the story of June's feelings towards whether she was a victim of sexual assault is something that most would consider to be at least uncomfortable; however telling stories based on her personal relationship with her boyfriend is the kind of thing that is considered normal and fine.
One interesting thing about this story is that at no points did I really get the sense that June was being an unreliable narrator about any of the actual facts (as she experienced them, of course, her visions of the ghost of Athena are implied to be hallucinations). The book is a somewhat biased telling of what appears to be a relatively coherent story that does not paint the narrator in a particularly positive light. The closest we come to the belief that this is an unreliable narrator is I think when she towards the end starts recontextualizing her relationship with Athena to be more positive than it was at the beginning of the story. Not any particularly strong thoughts there but that was just the thing I was thinking about.
In any case I've been rambling about this out loud to my phone like some kind of old-timey detective for the last 20 minutes while I take a walk so I think I'll wrap it up here.
Overall, an excellent book and probably the first piece of media on the phenomenon of cancel culture that I have ever seen in my life which did not make me want to write a four-page angry response.