On May 16, 2023, author R.F. Kuang visited Brooklyn, NY on her book tour for her new novel, Yellowface. She spoke in conversation with Peng Shepard, author of The Cartographers, about how Kuang’s latest book confronts racism in the publishing industry.

Yellowface tells the story of Juniper “June” Hayward, an author who graduated from Yale along with Athena Liu, an acquaintance she went to school with. When Athena dies before publishing another wildly successful novel, June decides to take her next manuscript, a fictionalization of the work of Chinese laborers during World War I. June, along with her new publishing team, decides to market herself as “Juniper Song” since “Song” is her middle name (and is racially ambigious). June receives praise and hate from fans and organizations, Asian or otherwise. Though June gradually finds out that Athena is not as glimmering as she portrayed herself to be, she chooses to sink lower to preserve her reputation and credibility.

At first glance, using the voice of a white woman to critique the publishing industry sounds odd, but Kuang knew what she was doing. In regard to her choice, she remarked, ”We both know so many Junes, and part of the reason why I had to write this novel is because I’m just fed up with the amount of Junes I’ve met, not just in publishing, but in every professional capacity.” Kuang wrote this novel with the same voice she and many other writers know all too well.

Not only does Yellowface call out the publishing industry, but it also depicts the true workings of social media better than any other novel. Many people in the publishing industry use Twitter as their main platform to promote their writing.

Unfortunately, this means authors typically receive most of their hate comments from Twitter. There are comments in Yellowface that target June’s book, The Last Front, and June herself. While the comments are valid, June calls out the performative nature of some of them. While every action someone takes is performative if it is in the public eye, June notes that some of the comments by both regular Twitter users and relatively known critics seem like they’re begging for attention.

I thought this was an incredible commentary about how we need to have conversations to create positive social change. There is a difference between having a productive conversation and saying something for the sake of saying something. A lot of replies I see to Tweets on social media only stoke more hatred. They fail to address the root causes of social issues.

Of course, no one is looking at a troll on Twitter and expecting them to end racism, but there are higher people in power in the writing and publishing industries who need to do better. It is their responsibility in the first place to take a complete look at the people they are elevating as well as how the actions of those people affect their readers and communities in general. As someone who has followed publishing drama on Twitter for the last year and a half, I can say that we would avoid so many issues if we thought our decisions through a little more before we made them.

One important thing to keep in mind while reading Yellowface is that it is an incredibly well-written satire. While it is delightfully humorous at times, there are also parts that hurt to read simply because of how real they are. I wholeheartedly agree with Kuang’s description of June as “unhinged” throughout the novel, and while reading some chapters felt like slamming into a brick wall, I still loved it. This book receives 4.25/5 stars from me!

R.F. Kuang has also written the Poppy War trilogy and Babel: An Arcane History. She has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford and is currently working on a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale. Buy Yellowface from one of our local bookstores, The Booksmiths Shoppe in Danbury or Byrd’s Books in Bethel.