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A review by themermaddie
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
4.0
WHEW what to even say! i've been waiting to read this one. this is a polarising book and for good reason. personally i really liked this book, i thought it was great!
...but i also think it could've been better. rebecca kuang is an undeniably talented writer and she's written many a line that i WILL be talking about in therapy but this is also not her usual genre so i was very curious how it would turn out. i see a lot of people criticise her for being too heavy handed and unsubtle, which i think is true to some extent regarding her themes/motifs, but i also think that her characterisations are done well in a still lowkey way to me. but we'll get back to that.
let's start with the plot first: it's insane. the premise itself is incredibly gripping and thematically compelling; who is allowed to tell what stories? who gets to commodify and capitalise off the suffering of others? in an age of accusations of cultural appropriation and discussions of privilege, what other factors besides race come into play?
the answer being, of course, class. june is understandably envious of athena's success and fame, and attributes it to athena's identity, mainly her race and sexuality, although she does sometimes acknowledge the privileges that athena had because of her parents' wealth and higher education. most of the time, however, she focuses on the racial aspect and the class factor is largely left to the wayside. so much of athena's perceived success might have been due to her marginalisation but more of her actual tangible success was due to her money and class privilege, something which felt very under-scrutinised. this felt like a huge oversight thematically; rebecca kuang is great at exploring intersectionality, so that such a huge theme would be scratched at and then left alone felt very strange.
genre-wise, i keep hearing this being called a literary novel, which is confusing to me because i could've sworn this thing was being marketed as a suspense/thriller when it was announced, to the point where i feel like i'm experiencing mandela effect about it LMAO. anyway i think that calling it literary does the novel a disservice, since most people going into it will have the wrong expectations for it. the truth is – you know what it never was? that serious. this is not the highbrow, intellectually serious, devastating takedown of the publishing industry that you think it is. it is a silly little novel about privilege and race and GUILT and a delusional woman who will make logic work soooo hard just so that she doesn't ever have to be the villain. it's wildly chronically online and so many of june's haters are just straight up irl critics of kuang and yknow what? it's so fun. it's unhinged, it's clearly very personal to rebecca, and it just feels fuckin' silly sometimes! gleefully, spitefully so. this isn't to say that it isn't smart, but it just doesn't have to be so serious, even if it tackles some more serious controversial topics.
what i DID feel let down by, however, was the serious lack of spooky! i was so expecting june to get like, fr fr haunted by athena's dead ass. some real spooky shit, like a true suspense not-sure-if-i'm-losing-my-mind-or-if-it's-really-supernatural haunting. i would've even accepted some loosely defined horror sci-fi type of magic that's more thematic than concrete system (i'm thinking the sunken place typa beat) but i found the reveals to be disappointingly normal. so much of this book takes place online or as long monologues inside june's head, so i wanted freakier shit to be happening to cut through the banal day-to-day stuff.
june's pov: i thought it was great, and a little terrifying/meta. i've seen people online, especially woc and EA people, criticise the book for being just a series of microaggressions committed by an obviously racist plagiarising thief, but i actually don't think that june is that obviously racist. that's the scary part: june IS racist, but i know plenty of people who would disagree with that statement based off her monologues in the book. white people are often so eager to believe other white people have the best intentions, and kuang humanises her through the first person pov and the sympathetic – but not absolving – perspective. even i found myself being taken in by june's self-justifications for her own actions sometimes, understanding where she's coming from, and feeling disenfranchised right alongside her at the insufferable unfairness of all of athena's success, even while june committed microaggression after microaggression and fully just did not understand the gravity of her actions. it's hard not to see things from june's perspective, both literally and also because june's thoughts about storytelling – "why should she be frowned upon for telling the stories of chinese migrant workers just because she's white? why is athena better suited to this narrative when she herself has never experienced hardship like this? don't these stories deserve to be told regardless?" – are genuine criticisms and complex modern discourse.
here's my lukewarm take though: i've seen criticisms of kuang's inability to dive into the class wealth factor of athena's privilege with anything more than a cursory mention, choosing more to focus on the microaggressive minutia of june's racism. honestly, i'm not mad about it. the class thing IS an oversight like i mentioned before, but in the end, kuang's decision to focus on june's racism is just a different path that the book ultimately went down. now, you could say that an entire book that's just a white lady justifying her theft to herself is dull, but i actually think the repetition of it actually compounds the horror of what she's done over time as the book goes on. june's narrative voice gets increasingly jaded and resentful of the public's disappointment that she's white, and it slowly radicalises her over time. it's so slow in fact that it actually kind of feels like an understandable progression; she goes from "oh i'm not saying woe is me" to straight up "I am the victim here". to me, the scariest thing is that there are still some people out there who will read this book, read june's pov, and still come out the other side thinking that either 1) both june and athena were horrible people and therefore their horribleness equalises the playing field or 2) that june had every right to tell that story, even as a white woman, but either way, june deserved to come out of this whole mess because she had earned it. i know some readers felt beat over the head with the repetition of june's racism, but i honestly kind of think that it was needed in order to really drive the point home. as an asian woman, i am more familiar with the microaggressions that june commits and i'm aware of why they're harmful, but i also think that there are plenty of white people out there who wouldn't realise those things are harmful, in which case hey! that's real world learning babey, and now they know. so i'm not so mad about rebecca holding my hand through june's casual racism, especially not when her touch is so gentle with it.
sorry, we're circling back to the class thing. i'm sure it's lost on absolutely no one that athena liu and rebecca kuang are extremely similar to a practically self-insert degree; this is fine, ofc, write what you know etc etc and what rebecca knows is being an upper class highly educated asian woman with an international spotlight on her. she only briefly addresses the wealth gap between athena and june, something which is just sorta glossed over as yet another thing that athena has that june doesn't, but in reality is probably the most relevant piece of information to athena's barriers to success. as many people have pointed out before, athena's story mirroring rebecca's means that rebecca can't criticise the power structures that uphold athena and her generational wealth without also critiquing her own upbringing. it therefore makes sense that dismantling class in a meaningful way would be kuang's blind spot. this also isn't a genuine 'take down' of the publishing industry; it's very clearly a fictionalised version of the industry from rebecca's experience, a large portion of which includes social media and booktok, and therefore is a much newer brand of literary fame and stardom than the traditional awards and processes. the obvious point here is that you can't rightly write a takedown of the very industry about to give you a huge platform to publish it, so instead this is a softball milque-toast commentary on the fickleness of publishing and the importance they place on the marketability of not just the books but also the author. withcindy made a video about Yellowface and she absolutely ate when she said that a large conceit of this book is that it treats publishing as though it's a meritocracy and not utterly driven by publishers who are just thinking about the bottom line and therefore favour authors who tend to be financially well off. treating the publishing industry as a meritocracy is disingenuous because it perpetuates the somewhat romantic idea that if you just worked hard enough or loved your craft enough then you too would be as successful as these NYT bestselling authors. obviously, this isn't true. rebecca's class privilege doesn't detract from her talent, but it is telling that she glosses over it.
ANYWAY i think the book is more about the fragility of white ego and how white people are often unable to decenter themselves in conversations not about them. yes, athena had a lot of unchecked class bias, but it doesn't change the fact that june (and many other white people today) feel as though being a "plain boring straight white person" is a disadvantage in today's market. it's not an uncommon rhetoric nowadays in right wing circles to hear people talk about how being white is actually a minority these days, how affirmative action is taking spots away from all these poor deserving white kids who worked so hard, and how poc are all so sensitive nowadays with their cancel culture and their cultural appropriation etc etc. june is more than happy to take that narrative and run with it because it assuages her guilt, using buzzwords like 'reparations' to co-opt experiences she doesn't fully understand. and the thing is that she doesn't even understand that she doesn't understand! she thinks that she's done enough research, has read enough books, that now she feels like an expert on the subject of chinese history and chinese diaspora experiences. even athena faced criticisms from other chinese diaspora about disingenuous storytelling and race-based trauma porn, but that would've been a discussion that would've been athena's to have; no matter how much reading june has done, she will never have enough lived experience to be able to contribute to that conversation in a way that matters. and that upsets her! when white people are so used to having all doors open to them, poc gatekeeping specific stories or narratives can feel like discrimination.
ultimately, rebecca opened up such a messy and nuanced can of worms with this novel that was actually very good on its own. she's opened up all these compelling discussions – inequality in publishing/other industries, suffering narratives, cultural appropriation, when should we be gatekeeping – and for her main focus she's chosen to focus on june co-opting diversity to exploit for success and financial gain, which is cool but also the least interesting path she could've chosen out of a very long list of interesting topics. it's fun to watch june's downward spiral, in a twisted way like a car crash, and see how far she'll go to defend what she thinks she's owed by the world. it only scratches the surface of what otherwise would've been a much more intense and controversial book, but i understand that those topics tend to be in rebecca's blindspots. thus, a good-but-not-great book.
...but i also think it could've been better. rebecca kuang is an undeniably talented writer and she's written many a line that i WILL be talking about in therapy but this is also not her usual genre so i was very curious how it would turn out. i see a lot of people criticise her for being too heavy handed and unsubtle, which i think is true to some extent regarding her themes/motifs, but i also think that her characterisations are done well in a still lowkey way to me. but we'll get back to that.
let's start with the plot first: it's insane. the premise itself is incredibly gripping and thematically compelling; who is allowed to tell what stories? who gets to commodify and capitalise off the suffering of others? in an age of accusations of cultural appropriation and discussions of privilege, what other factors besides race come into play?
the answer being, of course, class. june is understandably envious of athena's success and fame, and attributes it to athena's identity, mainly her race and sexuality, although she does sometimes acknowledge the privileges that athena had because of her parents' wealth and higher education. most of the time, however, she focuses on the racial aspect and the class factor is largely left to the wayside. so much of athena's perceived success might have been due to her marginalisation but more of her actual tangible success was due to her money and class privilege, something which felt very under-scrutinised. this felt like a huge oversight thematically; rebecca kuang is great at exploring intersectionality, so that such a huge theme would be scratched at and then left alone felt very strange.
genre-wise, i keep hearing this being called a literary novel, which is confusing to me because i could've sworn this thing was being marketed as a suspense/thriller when it was announced, to the point where i feel like i'm experiencing mandela effect about it LMAO. anyway i think that calling it literary does the novel a disservice, since most people going into it will have the wrong expectations for it. the truth is – you know what it never was? that serious. this is not the highbrow, intellectually serious, devastating takedown of the publishing industry that you think it is. it is a silly little novel about privilege and race and GUILT and a delusional woman who will make logic work soooo hard just so that she doesn't ever have to be the villain. it's wildly chronically online and so many of june's haters are just straight up irl critics of kuang and yknow what? it's so fun. it's unhinged, it's clearly very personal to rebecca, and it just feels fuckin' silly sometimes! gleefully, spitefully so. this isn't to say that it isn't smart, but it just doesn't have to be so serious, even if it tackles some more serious controversial topics.
what i DID feel let down by, however, was the serious lack of spooky! i was so expecting june to get like, fr fr haunted by athena's dead ass. some real spooky shit, like a true suspense not-sure-if-i'm-losing-my-mind-or-if-it's-really-supernatural haunting. i would've even accepted some loosely defined horror sci-fi type of magic that's more thematic than concrete system (i'm thinking the sunken place typa beat) but i found the reveals to be disappointingly normal. so much of this book takes place online or as long monologues inside june's head, so i wanted freakier shit to be happening to cut through the banal day-to-day stuff.
june's pov: i thought it was great, and a little terrifying/meta. i've seen people online, especially woc and EA people, criticise the book for being just a series of microaggressions committed by an obviously racist plagiarising thief, but i actually don't think that june is that obviously racist. that's the scary part: june IS racist, but i know plenty of people who would disagree with that statement based off her monologues in the book. white people are often so eager to believe other white people have the best intentions, and kuang humanises her through the first person pov and the sympathetic – but not absolving – perspective. even i found myself being taken in by june's self-justifications for her own actions sometimes, understanding where she's coming from, and feeling disenfranchised right alongside her at the insufferable unfairness of all of athena's success, even while june committed microaggression after microaggression and fully just did not understand the gravity of her actions. it's hard not to see things from june's perspective, both literally and also because june's thoughts about storytelling – "why should she be frowned upon for telling the stories of chinese migrant workers just because she's white? why is athena better suited to this narrative when she herself has never experienced hardship like this? don't these stories deserve to be told regardless?" – are genuine criticisms and complex modern discourse.
here's my lukewarm take though: i've seen criticisms of kuang's inability to dive into the class wealth factor of athena's privilege with anything more than a cursory mention, choosing more to focus on the microaggressive minutia of june's racism. honestly, i'm not mad about it. the class thing IS an oversight like i mentioned before, but in the end, kuang's decision to focus on june's racism is just a different path that the book ultimately went down. now, you could say that an entire book that's just a white lady justifying her theft to herself is dull, but i actually think the repetition of it actually compounds the horror of what she's done over time as the book goes on. june's narrative voice gets increasingly jaded and resentful of the public's disappointment that she's white, and it slowly radicalises her over time. it's so slow in fact that it actually kind of feels like an understandable progression; she goes from "oh i'm not saying woe is me" to straight up "I am the victim here". to me, the scariest thing is that there are still some people out there who will read this book, read june's pov, and still come out the other side thinking that either 1) both june and athena were horrible people and therefore their horribleness equalises the playing field or 2) that june had every right to tell that story, even as a white woman, but either way, june deserved to come out of this whole mess because she had earned it. i know some readers felt beat over the head with the repetition of june's racism, but i honestly kind of think that it was needed in order to really drive the point home. as an asian woman, i am more familiar with the microaggressions that june commits and i'm aware of why they're harmful, but i also think that there are plenty of white people out there who wouldn't realise those things are harmful, in which case hey! that's real world learning babey, and now they know. so i'm not so mad about rebecca holding my hand through june's casual racism, especially not when her touch is so gentle with it.
sorry, we're circling back to the class thing. i'm sure it's lost on absolutely no one that athena liu and rebecca kuang are extremely similar to a practically self-insert degree; this is fine, ofc, write what you know etc etc and what rebecca knows is being an upper class highly educated asian woman with an international spotlight on her. she only briefly addresses the wealth gap between athena and june, something which is just sorta glossed over as yet another thing that athena has that june doesn't, but in reality is probably the most relevant piece of information to athena's barriers to success. as many people have pointed out before, athena's story mirroring rebecca's means that rebecca can't criticise the power structures that uphold athena and her generational wealth without also critiquing her own upbringing. it therefore makes sense that dismantling class in a meaningful way would be kuang's blind spot. this also isn't a genuine 'take down' of the publishing industry; it's very clearly a fictionalised version of the industry from rebecca's experience, a large portion of which includes social media and booktok, and therefore is a much newer brand of literary fame and stardom than the traditional awards and processes. the obvious point here is that you can't rightly write a takedown of the very industry about to give you a huge platform to publish it, so instead this is a softball milque-toast commentary on the fickleness of publishing and the importance they place on the marketability of not just the books but also the author. withcindy made a video about Yellowface and she absolutely ate when she said that a large conceit of this book is that it treats publishing as though it's a meritocracy and not utterly driven by publishers who are just thinking about the bottom line and therefore favour authors who tend to be financially well off. treating the publishing industry as a meritocracy is disingenuous because it perpetuates the somewhat romantic idea that if you just worked hard enough or loved your craft enough then you too would be as successful as these NYT bestselling authors. obviously, this isn't true. rebecca's class privilege doesn't detract from her talent, but it is telling that she glosses over it.
ANYWAY i think the book is more about the fragility of white ego and how white people are often unable to decenter themselves in conversations not about them. yes, athena had a lot of unchecked class bias, but it doesn't change the fact that june (and many other white people today) feel as though being a "plain boring straight white person" is a disadvantage in today's market. it's not an uncommon rhetoric nowadays in right wing circles to hear people talk about how being white is actually a minority these days, how affirmative action is taking spots away from all these poor deserving white kids who worked so hard, and how poc are all so sensitive nowadays with their cancel culture and their cultural appropriation etc etc. june is more than happy to take that narrative and run with it because it assuages her guilt, using buzzwords like 'reparations' to co-opt experiences she doesn't fully understand. and the thing is that she doesn't even understand that she doesn't understand! she thinks that she's done enough research, has read enough books, that now she feels like an expert on the subject of chinese history and chinese diaspora experiences. even athena faced criticisms from other chinese diaspora about disingenuous storytelling and race-based trauma porn, but that would've been a discussion that would've been athena's to have; no matter how much reading june has done, she will never have enough lived experience to be able to contribute to that conversation in a way that matters. and that upsets her! when white people are so used to having all doors open to them, poc gatekeeping specific stories or narratives can feel like discrimination.
ultimately, rebecca opened up such a messy and nuanced can of worms with this novel that was actually very good on its own. she's opened up all these compelling discussions – inequality in publishing/other industries, suffering narratives, cultural appropriation, when should we be gatekeeping – and for her main focus she's chosen to focus on june co-opting diversity to exploit for success and financial gain, which is cool but also the least interesting path she could've chosen out of a very long list of interesting topics. it's fun to watch june's downward spiral, in a twisted way like a car crash, and see how far she'll go to defend what she thinks she's owed by the world. it only scratches the surface of what otherwise would've been a much more intense and controversial book, but i understand that those topics tend to be in rebecca's blindspots. thus, a good-but-not-great book.