Yellowface is a story about theft. But go down a layer and it’s a tale about racial appropriation and authorial ownership. And lying somewhere beyond these surface themes is a palpable anxiety over how the internet shapes public opinion, and the simultaneous necessity and terror of being too online.
The story centers around two frenemies, Juniper (June) Hayward and Athena Liu, a Chinese-American. June goes on to write under the racially misleading name, Juniper Song, justifying it as a personal and emotional decision, dating back to one of her mother’s phases where she would smoke, wander the forest, and add “Song” as the middle name for her child. Both have had similar starts; they attended Yale together, settled in Washington DC, and are authors. But Athena propelled to literary stardom in a way that June never could; she won the big awards, got six-figure advances, and bagged a Netflix deal to adapt her novel. Meanwhile, June’s debut withered into obscurity, and she resorted to teaching SAT prep classes. What follows is bitter jealousy from June, and lonely congeniality at best from Athena.
When Athena suddenly dies in front of June, choking on a pandan pancake, June decides to steal Athena’s unpublished new manuscript, heavily reword it, and then pass it off as her own. The novel, a wartime story about Chinese immigrant laborers titled “The Last Front”, is an immediate success. But June, a white woman writing about Asian experiences, is an internet target ripe for slaughter. As she reels with the death of her friend, sudden recognition, and the ultimate turn of public opinion, June begins to be haunted by Athena’s ghost; a voice she hears as she writes and perfectly applied red lipstick that she catches in flashes.
Floating somewhere in-between the tense plot are real questions of identity, held together by the central problem of Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author, a theory that is rendered literal in the novel. Once Athena has died, does the person attached to the words matter if the public digests them? How does the criticism of the description of Chinese labourers in The Last Front change when “Juniper Song”, “Juniper Hayward”, or “Athena Liu” are attached as authors? And since so much time is spent with June as she is writing, and rewriting parts of The Last Front, can it even belong to a singular author anymore? Especially considering the fact that the story is heavily built on historical research–conducted by other scholars–but most crucially, based on the lives of people neither Athena nor June knew?
Roughly half of the novel is spent cringing, at June’s self-defense in the face of the Internet storm that followed “outing” her identity as white, and her theft of Athena’s work—the contested yet crowned voice of the Asian-American experience. The other—at times disjointed—half lacks some of the other punches Yellowface pulls off. Geoff, Athena’s ex-boyfriend, enters the narrative as a troll account that harasses June, and after a failed blackmail attempt, withers away into a dull yet heartfelt “nice guy” with no meaningful character arc or development. Indeed, Rebecca F Kuang navigates expansive themes with a cast of characters that can occasionally feel more like caricatures, pushed to unrealistic extremes that diminish any social commentary made.
Between the layers of satire, however, are moments of genuine identity confusion, such as the startling clarity of some of Athena’s statements: “I am ethically troubled by the fact that I can only tell this story because my parents and grandparents lived through it.” This is a two-way-loss situation, in which underrepresented groups can only tell underrepresented stories—thereby categorising and boxing them in even further, and on the flip side, privileged groups are rendered culturally irrelevant—yet still flood the market. Yellowface does not attempt to answer these questions, but lays out their complexities through carefully constructed hypotheticals. Ultimately, the point is that these comments and questions that most forcefully arise on the internet are not irrelevant, that for all the shitposting, the internet—and its judgement—are “realer than real life.”