When Athena Liu, a bright Asian American literary star suddenly dies after choking on a pancake, her friend June Hayward sees a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
June, a White woman who admires and envies Liu in equal measures, swipes Athena’s latest manuscript and sets out to claim it as her own.
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“Yellowface,” the new literary thriller from R.F. Kuang, is an unusual page-turner, using the theft of a historical novel about Chinese laborers to fuel plot twists that revolve around publishing, marketing and social media. The story builds suspense while exploring ideas about artistic ethics, cultural appropriation, and the way the book world and the American marketplace fetishize the exotic while also trying to whitewash it.
Kuang, who was born in China but came here at age four, shares some autobiographical elements with Athena: She’s just turned 27 but is already on her fifth novel – and her previous one, “Babel,” was an acclaimed best-seller – and she too has had to overcome preconceived notions about ethnicity and gender. For example, her first name is Rebecca, but she says she was told when she selling her fantasy debut, “The Poppy War,” that she should use her initials “so people will think you’re a man.”
“We all know that people have conversations in-house at publishers about how attractive an author is and that affects the size of the advance,” Kuang said in a recent video interview. “You have to sell a story about yourself and that’s uncomfortable because we’re all raced and gendered in very different ways.”
Kuang, who has two masters and is pursuing a Ph.D. at Yale, is definitively not Athena, however, and has a “deep resentment” of audiences psychoanalyzing her or presuming they know her from her writing.
“People think I had Athena’s life but the first few years were more like June’s,” she says. “When “The Poppy War” came out, it didn’t do so well. I’ve done bookstore events where nobody came and the bookstore manager intimated that I should just pack up and go home. It was terribly awkward. So I felt anxiety and worried if I’d get another opportunity.”
Unlike the endlessly needy June, Kuang learned to write solely for herself. “You can’t tie your creative drive to external validation,” she says, though June’s desire for that is what makes her book hard to put down.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. For June, writing is essential to her very being. Is that true for you?
I’ve been writing since I was a child. We started binge-watching the “Star Wars” movies right when I moved to the U.S. and it’s where I learned a lot of English. After the scene “Luke, I am your father,” I was zooming around the house chanting “father, father, father.” A few years later, I would get printing paper from my dad’s office and staple them together and write fan fiction stories where 7-year-old Luke Skywalker and I were zooming around the planets and having adventures.
Writing was about imagining other identities and imagining my way into English. But I didn’t let myself believe being a writer was a possible dream until it happened.
Q. Athena collects people’s stories – about June’s date rape trauma and strangers’ war stories – and turns them into fiction. Is that art or theft?
I don’t think there are clear ethical standards about what it means to steal someone else’s life experience as a writer. I don’t think there is creation without collecting. I overhear dialogue between friends or my dad tells a story about growing up in China and they get saved for a future story or book idea. But Athena does it in a way that makes her particularly an [expletive]. There are things you just don’t do to your friends unless you’re being a jerk. That’s not about creative ethics that’s about how you handle interpersonal relationships.
Q. Your previous books involved fantasy or alternative history. Was this a conscious effort to move away from that?
This idea came to me all at once, but I was also ready to change gears and write a contemporary thriller, especially after “Babel,” which was this big Dickensian epic with all that detail about Victorian history. I had fun mucking around in all that detail but when you have to do hours of research just to type a single sentence about the kind of carriage they were riding, it becomes exhausting. It’s fun to write something where you can draw on the environment you’re already in.
Q. Yet the novel that June steals from Athena is historical fiction. That must have required research, too.
Yes, but the book is mostly about publishing, which I already know about. I did read a lot about practices of yellowface and Asian American literary and film representation, the ways in which race and identity and creativity have intersected over the years, and how that intersects with how art is marketed and capitalized on. So there’s still a lot of scholarship that goes into what I’m writing.
Q. How do you balance that Ph.D. side of you with the desire to write a page-turner?
I’m writing about what I’m studying, but putting it in a commercial novel makes me think very hard about how you make these ideas digestible and how you strip away the jargon and get to the heart of what the problem is. Scholarship should help people rethink things they’ve taken for granted but it should be readable.
Q. Beyond the thievery and the drama that ensues, what did you hope readers glean from June’s rewriting of Athena’s novel, “The Last Front”?
It’s about how historical fiction is marketed to an audience. There is this genre of historical fiction that presents history as a story of suffering but with a happy ending, a feel-good story that convinces readers that things were bad in the past but we’ve gotten over that now. Publishing has less patience for history that proves there’s a persistent problem – they want a book that’s palatable and is predicted to be a best-seller. Those books don’t talk about the present but just indulge in the spectacle of the past.
There are conversations about how to make Athena’s draft more accessible. They take out everything that’s radical or troubling and leave a story about racial tolerance and all sides coming together during World War II, which was not the intention of her original novel.
Q. “Yellowface” is fast-paced and has a frantic energy, like when you’re hitting refresh, hoping for that dopamine rush you get when a new text, email or social media like comes in.
That was very deliberate. Reading the book is supposed to make you feel like you’re having an anxiety attack in the way scrolling through Twitter literally does for me. I don’t think it’s healthy to feel the way the novel makes you feel all the time but I did want to see if I could capture it.
June picks at an open wound on social media and gets a masochistic pleasure from that. I have very firm boundaries about when I go online when I stay offline, what I look at on the internet, what I respond to, what I say and don’t say. I really try to stay calm and to preserve that sense of peace and focus that is necessary to write anything.
