As R.F. Kuang explains in the Yellowface afterword, her 2023 novel is a “horror story.”
The conflict over a plagiarized manuscript may seem mundane compared to typical horror plotlines. Still, Yellowface captures the real-world terror of anxieties and racial tensions in a chronically online post-COVID world in a way few psychological thrillers could match.
Yellowface marks a welcome departure from Kuang’s previous fantasy efforts, with all the necessary beats for a classic of modern literary fiction.
The story is written from the first-person perspective of June Hayward, a struggling novelist who watches her more successful friend Athena Lieu choke to death in front of her. Hayward then steals Lieu’s unpublished manuscript and submits it as her own. What follows is a near-Shakespearean spiral of guilt, madness and denial, complete with a scene of a hallucinated best friend’s ghost reminiscent of Banquo in Macbeth.
From start to finish, Kuang succeeds in drawing the reader into Hayward’s twisted mindset. Portraying Hayward as never fully redeemable but always adamant about her innocence and convictions, readers can’t help but sympathize or at least grudgingly relate. Her downfall is gradual but keeps the reader’s attention with small developments on nearly every page.
As the book’s title suggests, themes of race and racial identity are omnipresent from the first chapter. Questions of what stories belong to which creators constantly roil and create tension in Hayward’s life.
Since the manuscript she plagiarizes, titled The Last Front, is about Chinese labourers in the First World War, other characters cast doubt on June’s ability to tell this story as a white woman. This theme of ownership is a constant, open-ended presence in the story. Questions of identity, experience and intent define the motivations of characters wanting to make a name for themselves. June’s guilt over publishing The Last Front under her name suggests she could not have written it, as it is fundamentally the story of a community to which she does not belong.
Hollywood studio executives attempt to adapt The Last Front for screen by making it more appealing to a wider audience, equating it to the next Dunkirk. One startling passage even reveals that Lieu was prone to mining the traumas of her peers to find story ideas.
This theme of ownership is where the brilliantly frustrating personality of June “Juniper Song” Hayward (the “exotic-sounding” alter-ego given to her by publicists) comes into play. She scoffs at those who suggest her identity as a white woman devalues the authenticity of her work, despite having blatantly stolen it from her Chinese-American friend. When The Last Front receives praise, she basks in the compliments of “her” work. When it draws ire, she says it feels good to finally see someone criticizing the work of her too-perfect friend.
The one area in which Yellowface falls flat is its dialogue. Though most of the text is June’s internal monologue, her interactions with publicists, agents and other authors are often marked by quippy or too-obvious remarks. Famous authors remark to one another that “this industry is cutthroat.” The protagonist’s mother suggests her daughter “try a real job.” These words feel more like hasty attempts to communicate character traits than real-life interactions, shaking the reader abruptly out of their immersion in intense scenes.
Yellowface succeeds at what it sets out to do: Make the reader deeply uncomfortable by putting them in the shoes of an insecure, envious creative blinded to her prejudices. Hayward’s downfall feels unnervingly possible in the modern era of online hate. Yellowface examines who gets to claim what stories, making its audience reflect in a way that never comes across as directly accusatory but instead deeply personal.
Yellowface is 336 pages long, published by HarperCollins and available in stores and online.
Featured image by Jonah Grignon/the Charlatan.
