Not-so-mellow: Among the issues Rebecca F Kuang tackles in her novel Yellowface is power play in the modern publishing world. Photo: John Packman
Writer Lionel Shriver’s 2016 dismissive comment on accusations of cultural appropriation that “[writers] are paid to step into other people’s shoes and try on their hats” (while wearing a Mexican sombrero), demonstrated just how lightly writing’s white elite takes the experience of anybody outside their ranks.
There’s a valid, far less flippant, conversation to be had about how writing, as an act of creative imagination, offers freedom to anybody to write about anything. That’s very different from asserting “Your experience is just another object I own — like this hat — and you have no right to comment on how I wear it.”
Another valid conversation might discuss how all writing is to some extent appropriative — we mine others’ experiences, are sparked by their chance remarks and get inspired by what has been written before.
And then there’s the fact that today’s capitalist publishing business, entirely profit-driven and shortsighted, is happy to commodify everything — including identity — as well as being infested with nasty characters.
Rebecca F Kuang takes on all that, and more, in her most recent novel, Yellowface.
Kuang’s writing career began in grimdark fantasy, with a debut novel series, The Poppy Wars trilogy. That opened with classic wuxia tropes — young martial artists coming of age in an Eastern kingdom riven by dynastic wars.
It mined real history, harrowing documentary accounts of the Second Sino-Japanese War Nanjing Massacres were reimagined in a Song Dynasty-like setting to form the basis for a pivotal episode. But, by the end of the series, many characters had thoroughly subverted the expectations set up by those tropes.
Kuang’s next book Babel owed some of its stage machinery to steampunk. An allegory set in a Victorian-era Oxford library, it unpicked the power of language to enforce imperial subjugation and erase identity — and equally to be a weapon of resistance.
The writer has said she never wants to write the same kind of book twice. Yellowface is literary fiction, set in the present day, in America and narrated by Juniper Song Hayward (“Junie”), whose ambiguous first names are a twee legacy of her mother’s hippie youth.
Junie is an ambitious, adequately competent white writer with one near-autobiographical published novel, largely unnoticed by the world of books. She achieves success by stealing, reworking and passing off as her own a draft by a dead college friend, now a much-praised novelist.
The friend was Asian-American; the novel, The Last Front, deals with a neglected aspect of Chinese history, and Junie and her publisher, while never explicitly claiming she has Chinese roots, ride on those ambiguous names.
The book’s surface foregrounds those plot-driven aspects of “whose story is it to tell?” Any even mildly aware reader will be infuriated, laugh out loud and sometimes almost cry at much of the crassness of Junie’s behaviour; at her sense of entitlement and assumed insight into who “they” (in this case, people of East Asian heritage) are, and how “they” should behave.
She’s bewildered, for example, when a cleaner in a Chinatown restaurant speaks: “His English is better than I expected. His accent is heavy, but what kind of new English speaker uses a word like ‘simulacrum’?”
But the surface — plot, explicit rhetoric, and sometimes exceedingly broad comedy — form only one layer of this knowing satire. There’s much more underneath.
The first-person narration means Kuang herself is appropriating another identity to write it — she’s Asian-American; her character is white; she (on the evidence of previous books) is an extremely skilled writer; Junie, well, isn’t quite that good.
One reviewer has complained about Kuang’s occasional use of clichés in this text — but this isn’t Kuang; this is Junie telling the story. The whole book is a conscious act of ventriloquism.
That ventriloquism implies the most challenging questions about who owns a story, how writers should treat one that isn’t their own, and how much reworking of source material it takes for any writer to own any tale.
Junie is no mere stereotype of whiteness; a literary Karen-dummy. She may be crass and obtuse, self-serving and prejudiced but she’s also more than that. What animates her into believable flesh and blood is her passion to write. Junie is consumed by that compulsion; if she doesn’t write, she doesn’t really exist and Kuang takes care to make that truth burn hot.
In her acknowledgments, Kuang describes Yellowface as “a horror story about loneliness in a fiercely competitive industry” and Junie’s terror of being cold-shouldered, trolled and erased by the exploitative machine is no less real and worthy of attention because she’s an impostor. It’s because publishing is what it is that Junie can do what she does.
Athena, the real author of Junie’s hit book, was no saint. She also appropriated raw material before she applied the alchemy of her writing to it. Athena drew from Junie’s experiences, her own boyfriend’s experiences, the experiences of unwitting folk she conversed with.
She could be uncaring and selfish — nothing was permitted to get between her and her words. But she, too, was bullied by publishing — isolated as that season’s “spicy” token writer; trapped in a genre box she wasn’t permitted to leave.
Publishing has alienated both writers from the support of the community, reduced them to anomic individuals with no moral touchstones outside themselves.
Yellowface is no liberal whataboutery contest where everybody is equally bad. The broadest of the book’s humour certainly rests on playing with stereotypes and playing them off against one another — not only the stereotypes of race, but the lean-in female boss, the indolent, privileged agent and more.
Underneath, there’s a far more subtle text — the text of Athena’s original manuscript. What happens to that is a tragedy.
Skip through Yellowface and put together just Junie’s brief, scattered allusions to how she changed the text, adding things that were minimal or absent in the original, such as the roles of various white characters and excising elements that, to her, do not work. “I tidy up. I trim. I decorate.”
Perhaps we could call the “tidying up” and “trimming” taking out certain politics. Perhaps Junie’s judgments about what needs “decorating” are based only on her own position.
The Last Front that emerges might be a good book and it is certainly a highly marketable one. But it’s also a different book, built around another writer’s truths. As much as in Babel, Kuang here uses the embedded story of the Last Front text itself to demonstrate the power of words to enact and reinforce hegemony.
Junie steals and lies, hoodwinks even Athena’s mother, always with a self-righteous justification. She occupies that year’s miserly publishing space fenced off for an “exotic” writer.
She airily dismisses the notion of a sensitivity reader — “I’m pretty comfortable with the research I did” — and gets the Asian-heritage editor who suggests one removed from her team. She re-frames this to draft a sensational, potentially best-selling, confessional follow-up, confident that, ultimately, she’ll get away with it.
The confessional follow-up is, of course, the book we’ve just been reading. And get away with it she will.
Yellowface continues to demonstrate Kuang’s skill in constructing intricate literary machineries of levels, compartments and encapsulated mini narratives with characters you want to follow even as you hate them.
But it also hangs within a bigger implicit frame, the frame of who, still, has power — not only in publishing, but in the world.
Yellowface, Rebecca F Kuang, The Borough Press.