Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

I wonder what June would say about this review.

Are these the signs of a bestseller in the making? I wonder. They must be. Why doesn’t anyone tell you, right off the bat, how important your book is to the publisher? Before Over the Sycamore came out, I worked my ass off doing blog interviews and podcasts, hoping that the more sweat I put into publicity, the more my publisher would reward my efforts. But now, I see, author efforts have nothing to do with a book’s success. Bestsellers are chosen. Nothing you do matters. You just get to enjoy the perks along the way.

Who gets to tell stories? Whose stories get told? Who gets on the best-seller list? The has been having its come to god moment over the past few years, what with surrounding books like American Dirt , , and .

I've been a reviewer for fun for somwhere around a decade at this point, and I've been on the sidelines of, and occasionally party to some of the smaller controversies that have played out here, on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ. And boy, have I learnt a lot. I get it, I know the publishing industry is absolutely brutal. Some books make it, and some just don't. Some authors become literary darlings, and others fade into obscurity. A lot of the time, it isn't about effort, or skill, or talent. It's about circumstances, luck, and telling the right story at the right time. June is right about that. What she's very wrong about though, is that more often than not, the "right" stories are told by white, predominantly cis-, male authors. By that argument, you may say, well, Anu, then isn't June right, that women, even white women, have it hard? Yeah, but also no. White women may have it harder than white men, but it is obviously nothing compared to what authors of colour experience. It's why "own voices" and the stories thus told by these voices are so important.

So of course Athena gets every good thing, because that’s how this industry works. Publishing picks a winner—someone attractive enough, someone cool and young and, oh, we’re all thinking it, let’s just say it, “diverse� enough—and lavishes all its money and resources on them. It’s so fucking arbitrary. Or perhaps not arbitrary, but it hinges on factors that have nothing to do with the strength of one’s prose.

Yellowface is one of those books that is so much fun to read, but also tells crucial, if rather harrowing tale about what I have come to learn is the brutal, solitary world of writing and publishing. After all, Writing is such a solitary activity.

June Hayworth, aka Juniper Song is a failed writer. Her first novel tanked, and her only friend, Athena Liu is the voice of the generation. So, when Athena dies in a freak accident, June decides to take Athena's latest manuscript, the one no one has heard about, and publish it as her own. She makes edits, rewrites whole chapters, and changes her nom-de-plume to Juniper Song--exotic, and ethnically ambiguous for a name if there ever was one. And lo and behold, this latest book becomes a bestseller, and June becomes the literary darling of her dreams.

What starts off as a literary exercise for June ends up becoming her most dangerous, and to some extent best kept secret. As she finds herself wading deeper into Athena's magnum opus about a deeply sensitive topic, June throws caution to the wind, and any semblance of morality she had left out of the window. The more she makes this story "her own", the more she begins to scoff at any disapproval levelled at the book and at her, both within her own head, as well as from her critics, justifying whitewashing the novel, justifying taking advantage of a grieving mother, justifying her choice to rebrand herself and not "come out as White".

For a while, June is able to enjoy her newfound fame. She gets new, professionally taken author headshots. Her editor actually knows her name, and importantly, listens to her and respects her. She ends up making what I like to call fuck-you money. She becomes a literary darling. She makes friends with famous authors. She's part of the zeitgeist. She is the zeitgeist.

Obviously, she isn't without her denigrators. Straight off the bat, some people, especially Asians and Asian Americans are suspicious about the timing of the book, its content, and her relationship with Athena. When asked to consult with sensitivity readers, to ensure that her book isn't offensive to the Chinese, June refuses, and vehemently at that. When the editorial assistant who recommended that she get a sensitivity reader leaves a rather scathing 1 star review of her book on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ (meta, isn't it?), June goes as far as to get the assistant fired.

The juxtaposition of June's internal monologue, her slow descent into madness almost, with the sheer brutality of the publishing world and the toxicity of social media gives the book an almost gothic horror vibe. The lonely, wronged author high up in her ivory tower fobbing off her evil detractors.

The reason Yellowface works is because Kuang is very adept at toeing the line between the satirical and the serious. Where June could have been a caricature, she's a well-fleshed out character. Her backstory, her complicated relationships with her family, her fizzled out ambitions, the stories she wrote as a teenager, even her relationship with Athena add dimension to what would have been an otherwise very one-dimensional character. None of this actually makes June likeable, or even someone I can sympathise with, but it does make you uncomfortably question whether you yourself are capable of doing something like this if pushed too far. In a way, June sees her actions as justified, because Athena did a bad thing first.

For someone who only appears in the first chapter of the entire book, Athena's larger-than-life personality, her actions, and her fame loom over the story like a ghost stuck, unable to move on. Of course, it isn't possible to tell June's story without Athena's. But the reason that this works is because Athena has dimensions too. A prodigy of the publishing world she may be, but Athena had a dirty habit too, one that potentially made her into the star that she was.

Yellowface works because it exists entirely in the grey spaces within the black and white of our world. There's no hero, nor a villain. There's nobody to root for, nobody to label the boogeyman. It is truly excellent in a skin-crawling, uncomfortable sort of way. For the most part, at least. Where Kuang does a really good job of writing a poignant, darkly comical story, she fumbles the ending. It feels forced, trite, and cartoonish. She tries a little too hard to tie up loose ends, and at this, she fails. It feel anticlimactic and unnecessary. I think maybe, just maybe, the book would have worked better if she'd left the ends loose.

What more can we want as writers than such immortality? Don’t ghosts just want to be remembered?