IN her latest novel, Yellowface, released in May 2023, following on from her 2022 Booktok smash hit and bestseller Babel, Marshall scholar, and multi-award-winning author Rebecca F. Kuang exchanges transfixing dark academia for satirical literary fiction soaked in cynicism. A diasporic writer, Kuang launches a scathing critique of a predominately white, performative publishing industry that distils racial and ethnic identities down in the process of commodification. The eye-catchingly yellow book cover, with its artistic rendering of what the Western world has long termed “almond-shaped eyes”, symbolically represents the industry’s commercialisation of Asian diaspora stories; the repackaging of marginalised people’s experiences for consumers – stripping away any individuality. Kuang’s disillusioned floundering writer narrator, white “brown-eyed, brown-haired June Hayward, from Philly”, bitterly asserts that what is deemed “exotic”, ergo marketable, is “in”. In the shadow of her fair-weather friend Athena Liu, an acclaimed, adored Chinese-American writer, June’s ignorance and jealousy festers further. Alongside Athena, described as “a beautiful, Yale-educated, international, ambiguously queer woman of color”, June feels entirely inadequate; unable to compete with a “diverse” writer that the industry “lavishes all its money and resources on”. June believes that Athena’s continual success is a certainty, whereas hers is an impossibility… … or so she believes until Athena unexpectedly dies in a “freak accident”, leaving behind an unpublished manuscript ripe for the taking: a novel about the Chinese Labour Corps’ harrowing experiences of wartime and discrimination on the Allied Front during the First World War. The unfinished project exemplifies “awards bait” that might attract “commercial” and “upmarket” readers. Following an extensive editing process that ensures an “accessible”, “universally relatable story”, then subsequently “going to auction, negotiating deals, fielding calls from potential editors, [and] choosing a publisher”, the newly renamed, ethnically ambiguous Juniper Song (courtesy of her publicity team’s decision to position her as “worldly”) eventually publishes The Last Front to critical acclaim.
