<i>“We are all vultures, and some of us– and I mean Athena, here– are simply better at finding the juiciest morsels of a story, at ripping through bone and gristle to the tender bleeding heart and putting all the gore on display.” (106)</i>

Yellowface is a witty and emotionally punchy thrill ride that satirizes race and the publishing industry, though in my opinion it misses some opportunities for deeper critique by going after low-hanging fruit. I’d definitely recommend this book for fans of fast-paced satires of media tropes and funny Asian American literature, such as Disorientation and Interior Chinatown.

June, a struggling white author, has always envied her college friend Athena, a wildly popular Asian American writer. When Athena dies suddenly and June happens across her friend’s unpublished manuscript, she chooses to edit it and publish it as her own work under the ethnically ambiguous name “Juniper Song.” Although she finally gets the acclaim and weighty advance she hoped for, she grows paranoid that others will discover her secret and becomes determined to do whatever it takes to stay at the top.

Although I expected to dislike Yellowface after being rather let down by Kuang’s very hyped Babel, I think this new novel is an improvement on Babel in a couple ways. I found Babel to be a bit emotionally flat, more interested in seeing its characters as metaphors than real people with faults and quirks. As a consequence, the characters’ relationships in Babel felt disengaging, and the characters almost all fell into simplistic good or evil categories.

 

In contrast, Yellowface definitely delivers much more emotional substance in terms of its characters and relationships, especially in the relationship between June and Athena. They have a very realistic distant sort-of-friendship, in which June feels insecure because of Athena’s success and cannot see (when readers can) that Athena herself is also lonely and has her own struggles that peek past her polished exterior. 

In part because of the first person narration, the writing carries a distinct voice and delivers fairly often on the humor. Some of the lines felt a little too on the nose or “telling,” which can undermine some of the more emotionally complex or politically charged scenes. (In an unfortunate callback to Babel, another character basically spells out the messages and themes of the story at the very end.) Overall, the style is relatively forgivable given that the book is intended to be satirical.

While I felt that Babel made its heroes and villains too simplistic, I think Athena in particular represents a very compelling complex character– both genuinely affectionate and casually cruel, talented but also a difficult person to love. I don’t really agree with reviewers who read Athena as an insert for Kuang and June as a way to paint Kuang’s haters in a bad light, since many of the critiques that June and other characters have of Athena are valid criticisms. (Namely, her pretentiousness and penchant for turning other people’s personal trauma into profitable work.) Crucially, both Athena and June feel like fleshed out characters with their own idiosyncrasies, not just metaphors for one idea or another.

June usually strikes a balance of being both awful and sympathetic, but her characterization can come across as inconsistent. Her professional anxieties and love of writing feel relatable, and some of the book’s best prose describes her spiraling emotional state and her genuine love for fiction writing. At times, though, I found her characterization and motivations to be a bit unclear. When she first gets the idea to steal Athena’s draft, she knows what she’s doing is wrong and a bit mean-spirited, seeing it as her own form of vengeance upon Athena. However, at other points June flip-flops and feels that she had good intent from the start, but things merely got out of hand, a similar mentality to Evan in Dear Evan Hansen. I think this contradiction could have been done well to show how June’s ill intent lurked beneath her more benevolent excuses of finishing and publishing the draft as a “writing exercise” or “homage” to Athena. However, while Kuang’s narration of June is biting and often funny, it is not emotionally subtle enough to achieve something this layered, which is why to me June felt a little inconsistent.

For me, it would have felt more effective for June to start out claiming her positive intent for finishing the draft and slowly getting tempted into taking her ruse farther once she gets a taste of the glamor and success she’s always wanted. June’s claims of innocence and naivete, on a meta level, could serve as commentary for the way that white women often use their assumed innocence to avoid taking accountability for harm, and that good intent does not excuse harmful behavior.

I did appreciate the satirical look into the publishing industry. Kuang takes aim at tokenism, the ineffectiveness of cancel culture to hold celebrities accountable, and the way that mainstream books often flatten complex social critiques to make them palatable for white readers. The book also wrestles with some very thorny issues that do not have clear answers, such as who is “allowed” to tell certain stories or the ethics of turning someone else’s trauma into fiction.

However, I think that Kuang missed a couple of opportunities to make the critiques of publishing more engaging. For one, a lot of this book is spent on social media drama instead of the behind-the-scenes publishing industry machinations, which I found more interesting. Other critics who are writers themselves (such as youtuber withcindy) took issue with the book for portraying publishing as largely meritocratic– June and Athena’s manuscript instantly becomes a hit because of its writing quality, even though it’s seemingly from an unsuccessful and relatively unknown author without a publisher or good agent. I also think that the book could have added to the complex dynamic between Athena and June by showing how big of an advantage class is to being an author. 

Additionally, while you are not supposed to agree with June’s assertions that “diversity” is an unfair advantage in publishing, you rarely see anything on page to suggest the contrary until June is confronted by an Asian American character at the very end of the book, who talks about how hard it is to be Asian or nonwhite in publishing. Instead, Kuang could have put moments in the book to show that nonwhiteness or queerness are disadvantages in publishing that the reader can see, but that June herself may downplay or not recognize. Or perhaps because of her racial ambiguity, other people begin to treat her with anti-Asian microaggressions. These would have served as more natural ways to get across the same themes. I also think the book falls into the trap that many (East) Asian American novels get into in hyperfocusing on the disparities between (often middle class to wealthy) East Asians and  whites, without regard for other less privileged Asian Americans or non-Asian minorities. Of course, there’s only a limited amount of issues that one novel can cover, but it would have been interesting to examine the publishing landscape for working class Asians, Asians with darker skin, and/or non Asian minorities, whose issues would likely give some perspective to June’s grievances against Athena.

While I feel that Yellowface missed some opportunities that would take it from merely a good book to a great one, it is still an entertaining, fast-paced ride with complex characters and thorny subjects.