"Yellowface"

Would a novel be more likely to be a bestseller today during the “racial reckoning” if it were actually written by a white but stolen by a nonwhite, or vice-versa?

The former, obviously.

But when 2023’s Yellowface by R.F. Kuang fantasized about a talentless white stealing a novel by an East Asian and making the bestseller lists due to white privilege, few dared point out how implausible its premise was (although some observers seemed to get the joke, even if they couldn’t write it out loud).

From the New York Times last year:

She Wrote a Blistering Satire About Publishing. The Publishing Industry Loves It.

In “Yellowface,” R.F. Kuang draws on her own experiences to tackle issues like cultural appropriation and representation. …

By Alexandra Alter

Published May 12, 2023

Everything about R.F. Kuang’s novel “Yellowface” feels engineered to make readers uncomfortable. There’s the title, which is awkward to say out loud, and the cover, which features a garish racial stereotype — cartoonish slanted eyes imposed on a block of yellow.

Then there’s the story itself. In the opening chapters, a white author steals a manuscript from the home of a Chinese American novelist who has died in a bizarre accident, and plots to pass it off as her own. What follows is a twisty thriller and a scorching indictment of the publishing industry’s pervasive whiteness and racial blind spots.

If people in the literary world bristle at Kuang’s withering depiction of the book business — or cringe in recognition — well, that’s exactly the point, she said.

“Reading about racism should not be a feel-good experience,” she said. “I do want people to be uncomfortable with the way that they’re trained to write about and market and sell books, and be uncomfortable with who’s in the room, and how they’re talking about who’s in the room.

“And it’s also functioning on a different level for writers of color,” she added, “to think about how we are moving through those spaces, and the traps that are set for us.”

Kuang, a best-selling fantasy writer and doctoral student in East Asian languages and literatures at Yale, said this while sitting in a sunny office at the headquarters of her publisher, HarperCollins. It was late April, and she had just signed 2,000 copies of “Yellowface” — which William Morrow, a HarperCollins imprint, will release on Tuesday — to ship to 250 independent bookstores. The location was oddly fitting for a conversation in which Kuang pondered how her novel might be received within the industry she brutally satirizes.

Judging from the largely ecstatic early responses to the novel, the literary world seems to enjoy being skewered. HarperCollins bought the book for a mid-six-figure sum, and is sending Kuang on a 10-city North American tour. Barnes & Noble is releasing a special edition of the novel, with an essay about Asian American representation in literature by Kuang. Independent booksellers have chosen it as their top “Indie Next” pick for June.

The novel has drawn praise from industry outlets like Booklist, Publishers Weekly and Kirkus, which lauded Kuang’s unflinching accuracy: “Yes, publishing is like this; finally someone has written it out.”

“I laughed out loud and also groaned,” said Zakiya Dalila Harris, who drew on her own experience as a Black woman working in publishing for her novel, “The Other Black Girl.” “It felt so real and triggering.” …

Kuang had just turned in the manuscript for “Babel” when she got the idea for “Yellowface” in early 2021. It was a few months after protests had erupted following the police killing of George Floyd, and publishing, along with other industries, was wrestling with issues of diversity and representation. …

It was easy for Kuang to conjure the caustic, blithely racist voice of her narrator, June Hayward — a struggling novelist who is consumed by bitterness toward her former classmate Athena Liu, an industry darling who writes best-selling novels that draw on Chinese culture and history. In June’s warped view, Athena only succeeded because publishers wanted an Asian American author on their list.

In reality, of course, rather than a book by a nonwhite author selling better if it is promoted as if by a white writer, lots of whites have profited by fulfilling the white audience’s hunger for articulate nonwhites, as the constant scandals about leftist academic white women discovered to be pretending to be American Indians (“Pretendians”) demonstrates.

And in fact, as my commenter Yet Another Anon pointed out, there was indeed a 1990s scandal in which a South Asian named Indrani Aikath Gyaltsen stole, almost word-for-word, a novel published in the 1950s by the English authoress Elizabeth Goudge (1900-1984) and won strong reviews in the New York Times and by Amy Tan in Publishers’ Weekly by moving the setting from England to India. (Goudge eventually came back into fashion after J.K. Rowling cited her in the early 2000s as one of the handful of authors she would acknowledge as an influence on Harry Potter.)

In general, modern Indian literature tends to be rather twee and immensely influenced by colonial era British literature. For example, when I first got on the Internet in 1992, I got involved in helping set up the Usenet group for fans of P.G. Wodehouse. Eventually, I asked why about half of the Wodehouse enthusiasts participating were South Asians? As far as I can recall, the best answer was along the lines of, “We just like the way Bertie Wooster talks.”

That’s a good reason for doing anything literary.