The dark book taking aim at the cutthroat world of publishing

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FICTION
Yellowface
Rebecca F. Kuang
HarperCollins, $32.99

On the day Athena Liu scores a Netflix deal for an adaptation of her wildly successful debut novel, she chokes on some home-made pandan pancakes and dies. The only witness is her friend, June Hayward, a plain-faced writer of mediocre talent who has been viciously jealous of her friend since their college days.

While June’s debut novel flunked into obscurity, Athena’s “rich, pretty and successful” life soared into a writer’s wet dream: six-figure book deal straight out of college, prestigious residencies, literary awards, screen adaptations.

Rebecca Kuang asks for the reader’s moral judgment about her protagonist’s behaviour.Credit: John Packman

Such injustice – “it’s unfair”, June repeatedly whines – leads her to turn Athena’s death into an opportunity for herself. She steals the first draft of Athena’s next book, a manuscript about the mistreatment of Chinese labourers in World War I, and passes it off as her own.

Suddenly, all her creative stars align. “Breathless” at her own audacity, June reinvents herself online – that means IRL – publishing the book under a new name, Juniper Song, defending herself against the cultural appropriation invigilators by revealing that Song is her middle name. She takes her author headshot during sundown’s golden hour because it makes her look “sort of racially ambiguous”.

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After four successful genre fantasy books, Rebecca F. Kuang’s fifth novel, Yellowface, is a mystery thriller that shocks, delights, and not-so-subtly weaves a scalpel through today’s commercial publishing industry. It’s a book about a woman who, through sheer confidence in her own ability to deceive, convinces herself and the world that a crime she committed was not really a crime at all.

When the Twitterati launch their attacks on June, suspecting something nefarious has occurred, she doubles down on her self-deception: “I mostly believe the lie myself – that it was my efforts that made [the book] a success. I’ve contoured the truth into such ways that I can, in fact, make peace with it.”

She cultivates an artificial “digitally perceived” identity, retweeting hot takes about bubble tea, BTS, and “some martial arts drama series”. Meanwhile, she admits she has no idea what a soup dumpling is, “but it sounds gross,” and that “Chinese food makes my stomach roil”.

Now, she is struggling to write a second book. “I need to write about things that white people don’t see on a daily basis.” This is perhaps the most enlightening line in Kuang’s book — exposing a character who wants all the cultural benefits of being a minority while retaining her privileges as a white person.

The most insidious moment sees June travels to Washington DC’s Chinatown for “inspiration” to “find some good narrative potential” at a Chinese restaurant, accosting an innocent waiter and demanding he tell her something interesting about himself. Utterly oblivious to her imperial, colonialist mindset, this scene made my brain writhe in disgust, perhaps because it speaks so close to reality.

Kuang delivers extraordinarily accurate insights into the world of publishing and what it means to be a young author today. She extrapolates with extreme precision the granular agonies and anxieties of being online, exacting the creeping sense of terror as a phantom account of Athena begins trolling June online.

Kuang unravels layers of our characters’ histories, complicating the narrative and forcing us to ask: “Who can claim literary authorship over our story?”

Yellowface asks us to morally adjudicate the reprehensible behaviour of June. It is a Young Person Novel – one that insists readers know exactly what it’s trying to do. There is no subtlety here and is mesmerisingly ruthless in this insistence. But the intensity of this effort is exactly what makes this book so engrossing, so utterly addictive.

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