R. F. Kuang’s novel Yellowface is about a young white writer who steals a dead Asian writer’s manuscript

R. F. Kuang made a name for herself with fantasy novels steeped with history.

Her Poppy War trilogy was a number one New York Times bestseller as was her novel Babel: An Arcane History, which she just released last year. Now, Kuang is back with a new book, Yellowface, set in the contemporary world of publishing.

The story follows June Hayward, a disgruntled young white author who’s jealous of her Asian former Yale classmate, Athena Liu, who’s the darling of the publishing world. When Athena dies in a freak accident, June steals her new manuscript and tries to publish it as her own.

“June, in a lot of ways, feels like she’s been failed by the publishing industry,” Kuang told Q‘s Tom Power in an interview. “It’s funny because she’s clearly such an unhinged, pretty deeply racist character, but she’s right about how the world works, at least 50 per cent of the time.

“When she says these ridiculous things — like, ‘Publishing only wants token diverse authors. Athena is only where she is because she checks all those boxes’ — it’s coming from a place of deep resentment. But she’s also correct in the way that publishing works. Performatively, it does do this nasty trick of commodifying race, making authors seem exotic, choosing tokens and investing in them so that publishers can claim, ‘No, we’re diverse. We have a single Asian author on our list.’ So June thinks that the game is already so messed up that she’s well within her rights to do whatever it takes to get ahead.”

June’s publishers recommend she change her publishing name from June Hayward to Juniper Song (her actual first and middle name), which comes across as a way to sound Asian. Kuang said she’s actually seen instances like this in the industry.

“I mean, I’ve seen worse,” she said. “It’s really funny that we’ve been marketing Yellowface as this ridiculous, absurd satire when really it’s not even on the level of social realism compared to what is actually happening in publishing. And there’ve been many cases of literary yellowface. There have been white authors who adopted Asian-sounding names because they thought their work wouldn’t be published otherwise. And there’s a famous case of a white poet who was pretending to be Chinese because that was the only way he felt he could have his work accepted and deemed good enough.”

I really believe that anybody should be able to write about anybody they want. But the question of which voices are then platformed … that’s a separate question.– R. F. Kuang

When it comes to discussing cultural appropriation, particularly as it relates to storytelling, Kuang thinks there’s room for improvement.

“I think we’re very bad at talking about cultural appropriation or naming precisely the harms thereof,” she said. “It usually is reduced down to, ‘White people can’t do that. She’s not of that race, so she can’t do that,’ which is such basic and unhelpful language. 

“Better questions that we ought to be asking are, first, on a textual level, what is the story doing? Is it well-told? Is it well-written? Is it interesting? How’s it engaging with tropes or representations of the community that it’s about that have been used in the past? … And then who has the right to write what? Because then that’s a question of, you know, according to whom? Do we just start censoring people now? I really believe that anybody should be able to write about anybody they want. But the question of which voices are then platformed — who gets an opportunity, who gets book deals, whose stories are deemed good and worthy of being read — that’s a separate question then rights and permissions.”

The full interview with R. F. Kuang is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with R. F. Kuang produced by Ben Edwards.