Biting the hand: Rebecca F. Kuang on racism, AI and censorship in publishing

Ivy League. Award-winning. Mid-20s literary sensation. R. F. Kuang has become synonymous with best-seller lists and a literary scandal. And it’s boring to her.

Rebecca Kuang, author of Yellowface, is coming to Australia.

Peek into any bookstore in the country, and you’ll see the canary-yellow calling card of the must-read book of the season: Yellowface (HarperCollins Australia) a satire on the publishing industry as it grapples with a scandal underpinned by some well-documented idiosyncrasies.

The novel follows the meteoric rise of a white author June Hayward, who is paper-backing to stardom off dead literary darling Athena Liu’s manuscript. Liu had, before her sudden, accidental death, written about Chinese labourers. Hayward is passing the book off as her own, and she’s not correcting anyone who thinks that she may also be Chinese.

It’s an aptly-timed tale of cultural appropriation, with the drama unspooling in the court of public opinion, the Twittersphere, and during tumultuous (and often hilarious) business meetings.

Yellowface by Rebecca Kuang is the one of the hottest books of the year.

Behind the bestseller is Rebecca F. Kuang, a Boston-based writer, born in China but raised in the West, now biting the hand that feeds her, one delectable, cynical quip at a time.

Kuang’s profile as a novelist was rising before she even graduated from Georgetown University, with her debut fantasy trilogy The Poppy War, a retelling of 20th century Chinese military history, in which she imagines Mao Zedong as a teenage girl. She is also the author of Babel, which is historical fiction; she has studied Chinese Studies at Cambridge, Contemporary Chinese Studies at Oxford; and she’s pursing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale.

This month, she will visit Australia for the first time, joining a string of literary panels. She arrives fresh from the latest imbroglio to engulf the literary world: why was she, and at least one other Chinese-American writer, were absent from the 2023 Hugo Awards.

These awards, which are the premier awards for sci-fi, were hosted in China for the first time last year. Kuang received enough votes from the World Science Fiction Society to be shortlisted for Babel, and yet she wasn’t.

In Kuang’s book, a writer rips off her dead friend’s manuscript.

She addressed the scandal in a succinct statement on Instagram to her 145,000 strong audience, noting two major points: “I did not decline a nomination, as no nomination was offered,” and, “That’s all from me. I have books to write.”

Kuang tells The Australian in an interview over Zoom that she doesn’t love talking about being the Ivy-league not-quite-so-overnight sensation, since “that’s just a really easy way to become the most annoying person in the room”.

Kuang does want to talk about Yellowface, a book that almost didn’t make it to shelves. Born out of her own boredom, having just turned in Babel, the writer and academic sought out a new challenge.

“I’d never published contemporary literary fiction before – it was a style I liked reading, but never really wrote,” she shares.

“[My agent] said she didn’t think there was really a market for Yellowface at the time.”

The book debuted in the wake of a New York Times investigation into the racial dynamics of major publishing houses, which found that just five per cent of the 7124 novels published in 2019 – the year Kuang debuted – were not penned by white authors.

Drawing parallels between Kuang’s beliefs and her characters’ voices, however, would be “very artistically lazy” in her opinion.

“There’s always so many layers that stand in between the author as a person – the kinds of opinions I would express, and the kinds of opinions that a character expresses, even if they’re concerned with the same topics,” she says.

“[Yellowface] did feel just as constructed and deliberately distanced from myself as my fantasy works do.”

Kuang doesn’t shy away from her own critiques of the industry, though, labelling publishing’s push to be more inclusive as a “shallow performance” at “the most superficial level”.

“When publishers realised that they could cash in on performative lip service to anti-racism, they did, and then all interest dried up and everybody dropped the question. I think we’re seeing the tail end of those promises that weren’t kept, which is quite disappointing,” she says. “We’re kidding ourselves if we thought that was the watershed moment.”

The spectacle of plagiarism, while central to Kuang’s work, also remains close to her consciousness, speaking to the perceived threat to the craft of writing more broadly.

Where Yellowface concerns itself with the actual intelligence of human beings, Kuang says the threat of Artificial Intelligence remains a point of hysteria for emerging authors. But, she says, “I can’t think of a single example of AI generated prose that makes you want to read it more.”

Kuang doesn’t believe that AI has written anything anyone would yet want to read.

The problem is not with a lack of content Kuang asserts. “The harder thing is producing a work of high enough quality that resonates with enough readers. A machine that can generate a thousand novels in several minutes isn’t really going to replace that,” she says.

In Yellowface, Kuang has her main character June Hayward carefully curate her online profiles to assume a Capote-esque celebrity status. She seeks out a nicer apartment off the back of her royalties and manufactures a writing space to appease aesthetic-driven Instagram onlookers.

Speaking from her tea-stained desk overflowing with books, Kuang says the pressure to be online, a literary it-girl of sorts, exists in the real world. “There’s an immense pressure to be visible, to go viral, to make sure everybody knows who you are, because it feels like you can’t get a book off the ground otherwise,” she shares.

“I know some authors who literally have social media clauses in their contacts … but it’s still not very clear how much of a difference an author promoting themselves online makes for moving the needle on sales.”

With her sixth novel, Katabsis, now complete (it’s set for release in 2025), Kuang is working on two new projects, as well as a Poppy Wars-related surprise slated to be revealed in November.

“It’s nice to be a writer and not a celebrity,” she laughs, noting it helps get the work done. As she said, she “has books to write.”

Bianca Farmakis is a writer, video editor and short filmmaker who has worked in Tokyo and Sydney. Rebecca F. Kuang will speak at the All About Women Festival (Sydney, March 10), the Brisbane Writers Festival (March 11) and at Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre (Melbourne,  
March 12).