‘I’ve never seen so many white people being really anxious about being racist’

This story is part of the February 3 edition of Good WeekendSee all 14 stories.

Three years before Rebecca. F. Kuang’s Yellowface became a global literary phenomenon – ubiquitous floor-to-ceiling bookstore displays; a The New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller – the world was melting down around her.

It was May 2020, so the world was melting down for everyone. Kuang had been studying for a Master’s in Contemporary Chinese Studies at Oxford, which had recently ordered students to evacuate. COVID-19 was like something out of the historical alternative-universe fiction that Kuang writes, except this was real life.

Dazed, she flew to Florida. Kuang is American, but had never lived in America’s Sunshine State, where her boyfriend was bunkering down with family. Cramped in a house not designed for this many people, Kuang hoped the lockdown would be short. Temporary. A one-off. “It’s going to be two to three weeks,” she remembers thinking. “We’ll be over this soon.”

At the time, she was finishing the manuscript of her doorstopper novel Babel, a quasi-steampunk fantasy set in an imagined version of Oxford. All of Kuang’s fiction draws from on-the-ground research and her immediate surrounds. Her 2018 debut The Poppy War – the first of a trilogy in a fantastical version of China, reimagining Mao Zedong’s life as a teenage girl – came out of a year in Beijing, where she immersed herself in Chinese culture, history and mythology.

Florida was … less inspiring. (Kuang’s assessment of her neighbourhood: “The most boring, sunniest, mosquito-infested place I’d ever lived in.”) Given her work had always drawn upon a firm sense of place, what could she possibly write about next? Where was there even to go?

To mentally teleport herself, Kuang did what most of us did in lockdown. She went online; in her case, to Twitter. This was before Elon Musk murdered the platform and fittingly renamed its zombie corpse “X”. Back then it felt as if everyone was there, from your best friend to Gigi Hadid, National Public Radio to your high-school nemesis. World-changing social movements happened there. On Twitter, Black Lives Matter – which began as an American reckoning on anti-black police brutality – had spurred myriad critiques of racist power disparities everywhere, including in the books and publishing industry.

For writers like Kuang, Twitter was also a handy pitstop for book news and gossip. Who’d scored a deal? How big was the advance? Did you read the latest annihilating review? It could be a factory for snark and envy. Kuang is the first to admit she wasn’t immune to such matters. But now – with social media no longer complementing real-life interactions, but replacing them entirely – Kuang noticed things were becoming intense. “Everyone started getting a lot louder,” she says. “Every single day there was a new main character.”

Which is a polite way of saying everyone was losing their minds and piling on a fresh target. Often, it was warranted. However, the scale of fury and scorn would feel similar, whether the target was an alleged sex criminal who had abused a position of power or a celebrity guilty of low-stakes hypocrisy or a misguided public brain-fart. Kuang watched, fascinated and repelled.

“It seemed like blood sport,” she says. “At the end of the day, it would just be this big polarising mess where people took easy sides and launched insults at one another. There was no serious consideration for what really had been done, who had been harmed and [whether this was] a proportionate response. Everyone completely lost any sense of reality. We got so disconnected from each other.“

At least Kuang now knew the location for her next book. It would take place in the hellscape of social media and its fast and furious meltdowns. It would centre on the toxic jealousy that authors feel towards each other and, in this era of racial justice, drag vexed online debates about racism and cultural theft to their most extreme conclusions and worst-case scenarios. Such as: what if, say, a white author – oh, I don’t know – stole their recently deceased Asian friend’s manuscript and passed it off as their own? What would happen if Kuang – an Asian-American woman – wrote this story about racial theft … in the voice of that white author? And what if, in the process, she also dragged the modern-day publishing industry – the one responsible for her career to date – to hell?

As Kuang says, smiling modestly, “I wanted to get weird.”

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Speaking with Rebecca F. Kuang on Zoom is the opposite of weird. Normal baby-pink V-neck; normal neutral white home office; normal framed black and-white photos: nothing to suggest any recent psychological horror as depicted in her novel. Kuang is in her home base of Boston, from where she commutes to New Haven, Connecticut, to teach as an academic Mondays to Wednesdays, and is also finishing off Yellowface’s successor.

She’s inviting and warm, and talks with the reassuring intelligence of a person who has been saturated in academia but retained the ability to speak like a regular person. She has bangs cut with laser precision and flawless skin, possibly because of a great skincare regimen, but more likely because – despite being a global bestselling author with more than 100,000 sales in Australia alone – she is only 27 years old.

Kuang started writing early. After her family (she’s the middle child of three) emigrated from Guangzhou to Dallas in the mid-2000s, she read and wrote compulsively – mainly diary entries and fan fiction before she’d even heard of the term “fan fiction”. Kuang’s father was a big influence: a man who came to the US as a graduate student and improved his English by reading the classics. As a result, Kuang says he still carries unusually crisp diction. (“He talks like he’s Mr Bennet from Pride and Prejudice.“)

The Kuangs weren’t snobs, though. They devoured American popular culture. Growing up, Kuang was obsessed with the make-believe worlds of sci-fi and fantasy blockbusters. She also noticed certain absences. “There were no [major] Asian characters in Star Wars; certainly no Asian characters I would want to identify with in Harry Potter,” she says. “And The Lord of the Rings was just so steeped in English mythology and in an English aesthetic, I didn’t see a place for myself. That’s what led to writing. To force myself into those worlds.”

In Yellowface, Kuang’s unreliable narrator also feels excluded because of her race. The difference is that she’s white. When we meet June Hayward on the page, she is a struggling author, her jealousy metastasising. June has published a debut novel, but it received a modest advance, middling praise and was quickly forgotten. Meanwhile, her frenemy, Athena Liu, is an Asian-American blockbuster literary phenomenon. Worse still: Athena is beautiful and ethnically exotic, whereas June is “just brown-eyed, brown-haired June Hayward”.

That’s right: June is not afraid to say the quiet part out loud. Because, surely – surely – Athena’s success has something to do with her race. How could it not? As June seethes in Yellowface’s opening pages:

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 […] and no matter how hard I work, or how well I’ll write, I’ll never be Athena Liu.

When June is invited to hang out and read Athena’s latest unpublished manuscript, it’s a bitter pill. It’s obvious that Athena’s historical novel – about Chinese workers in the British Army during World War I – will be a masterpiece and her biggest hit. But then (this isn’t a spoiler; it happens in the first chapter), a freak accident happens. Athena dies in front of June. In the confusion, June steals the only copy of Athena’s manuscript in existence – yoink – adopts the ethnically ambiguous pen name Juniper Song and claims the novel as her own. Chaos ensues.

“It’s never fun to admit that you feel such intense jealousy towards others.”

Rebecca Kuang

Yellowface is a frequently ridiculous book. (Readers must suspend disbelief and buy that a bestselling author is dense or insufferable enough to only write on a typewriter and not have a digital backup.) It is also hilarious, moreish and thrillingly nasty. For many racial minorities – especially Asian readers – Yellowface has also been deeply cathartic to read. “It’s one of those books that’s like a dessert,” says the ABC Radio National broadcaster Beverley Wang, who covers race and popular culture. “You’re just licking up every little scrap. It’s so horrifically delicious and relentless in skewering this kind of white-woman victim mentality.”

It’s a mentality familiar to any outsider: women in male-dominated workplaces; queer people in all-straight environments; disabled people outnumbered by able-bodied peers. It’s the assumption – whispered behind your back and occasionally said to your face – that you’ve only where you are because of your outsider status rather than in spite of it. After all, if the natural order of things has been for you to be historically excluded … well, how did you get here exactly?

“There’s a trap that comes with success,” Wang observes. “To see it laid out and articulated so clearly in fiction – and to have [Yellowface’s] narrator
justifying, doubling down, always coming up with another delusion, in complete constant denial of doing a fundamental wrong … you’ve ripped open a Band-Aid. It’s a horrible wound, but you can’t look away.

Kuang finds this kind of downward-envy odd. “Why is it that some white creatives feel like there’s a cultural capital – or advantage, or even a cheat code – associated with appearing anything other than white?” she asks. Yellowface begs the question. Perhaps it needs to be settled. Do racial minorities have some sort of advantage in the world of books or publishing? Or, depending on who’s reading this, do we?

Yellowface is a work of fiction, but modern examples of literary yellowface – white people pretending to be Asian – abound in modern publishing. Kuang can reel examples off the top of her head. In the early 2000s, Marvel comic writer and editor C.B. Cebulski produced work under the Japanese pen name Akira Yoshida. In the mid 2010s, poet Michael Derrick Hudson used the pen name Yi-Fen Chou and was published in The Best American Poetry (after owning up to the deception), triggering furious debates about apparent Chinese female advantage and anti-white male discrimination in poetry.

Marvel’s C. B. Cebulski used Akira Yoshida as a pen name.

Some people take things further. Late last year, speculative fiction author Cait Corrain used eight fake Goodreads accounts to repeatedly give fellow authors – primarily racial minorities, some Asian – scathing one-star reviews of their books, while giving her own work glowing reviews. Perversely, Corrain – who is white – gave one account an Asian name. (When Asian-Canadian author Xiran Jay Zhao exposed Corrain in December via a series of TikTok posts, publishing her research online, Corrain’s US and UK publishers dropped Corrain, as did her agent. In a tweet viewed 6.9 million times, she said she’d gamed the review system while in the grip of depression, alcoholism and substance abuse and taking a new medication. “No one wants to be judged by their worst actions,” she wrote, “but that’s not always up to us.”)

Why would anyone do any of this unless being Asian came with a certain cachet and status? And if Asians and other minorities do have an unfair advantage in publishing, isn’t that … well, another form of racism? In the last few years, respected titans in publishing have sounded that exact alarm, insisting calls for diversity and inclusion have gone too far. It is white writers who are disadvantaged now, they argue.

In 2022, literary heavyweight Joyce Carol Oates shared a grim anecdote on Twitter. “A friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers,” she tweeted. “No matter how good; they are just not interested.” In the same year, bestselling author James Patterson told The Sunday Times that it was increasingly difficult for white male writers to get jobs in film, theatre, TV or book publishing. It’s “just another form of racism”, he said, adding, “You don’t meet many 52-year-old white males” in such industries. Of course, we all want diversity and inclusion, the wider argument went. But whatever happened to merit?

Unimpressed by Penguin Random House’s plan to foster diversity “to reflect UK society by 2025”, We Need to Talk About Kevin author Lionel Shriver predicted in 2018 in The Spectator that, “If an agent submits a manuscript written by a gay transgender Caribbean who dropped out of school at seven and powers around town on a mobility scooter, it will be published, whether or not said manuscript is an incoherent, tedious, meandering and insensible pile of mixed-paper recycling.”

In 2020, American academic and author Richard Jean So and journalist Gus Wezerek spearheaded a New York Times report bluntly titled Just How White Is the Book Industry? So and Wezerek collected the figures from scratch, using a dataset of 7124 widely read novels whose author’s race could be identified, published by America’s biggest imprints between 1950 and 2018.

Author Cait Corrain admitted to using a fake Asian identity to review fellow writers online.

Across all surveyed decades and titles, 95 per cent of published American authors were white. Even in 2018 – the final year of the survey – 89 per cent of authors were white, despite non-Hispanic white Americans accounting for roughly 60 per cent of the US population that year.

The report shook the publishing world. Using the hashtag #PublishingPaidMe, published authors – white and non-, American and otherwise – were already sharing their advances publicly, exposing stark racial pay disparities where white authors were often paid significantly larger sums for comparable work.

Similarly in Australia, a 2022 Victoria University study found that of 1531 Australian books published in 2018 – spanning fiction, non-fiction, poetry, young adult and picture books – only 7 per cent were written by authors fitting the OECD definition of People of Colour. Roughly 25 per cent of Australians are from non-European backgrounds. Who, exactly, is supposed to be getting an advantage again?

When R. F. Kuang isn’t studying or writing books, she teaches Asian-American history. Recently, she spent a semester teaching America’s history of anti-Chinese labour movements and the Chinese Exclusion Act – histories that mirror Australia’s own anti-Asian past and the White Australia Policy.

Though she is careful not to draw clear-cut parallels between modern-day publishing and histories of extreme racist discrimination (“One is a case of pretty bourgeois frivolous concerns; the other is a case of violence”), Kuang still sees echoes. “All of this [historical anti-Asian] violence on the [US] West Coast, and legislation to limit immigration and labourers from Asian countries, came back to this trope,” she says. “That people of colour are taking opportunities meant for white people.”

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Given its racial politics – not to mention its premise and title – readers might be forgiven for hoping Yellowface has some definitive take on cultural appropriation. For years, Australians have been arguing over all sorts of racial flashpoints in culture, from Hey Hey It’s Saturday’s history of blackface to comedy performer Chris Lilley’s – rather prolific – forays into yellowface (Ricky Wong), brownface (Jonah Takalua) and blackface (S.mouse).

Chris Lilley performing in yellowface as Ricky Wong.

We’ve had our own ethnic-switcheroo literary scandals: Serbian-Australian writer Streten Bozic allowed readers to believe he was an Aboriginal man called B. Wongar for years; Helen Darville cosplayed a fictional Ukrainian-Australian author named Helen Demidenko and won literary prizes. Yet, the question lingers: is it ever okay to tell stories about characters from perspectives and backgrounds that aren’t ours?

“I’m nervous about people thinking that the positions advanced by any of the characters [in Yellowface] are manifestos.”

Rebecca Kuang

Kuang has said that she isn’t particularly interested in these culture wars. For her, that seemingly eternal question – Who has permission to tell which stories, and under which circumstances? – is the wrong one to ask. Questions – plural – she finds far more interesting and helpful are: Is the author subverting stereotypes or duplicating them? What is their relationship and knowledge of these people? Is it interesting? Is it any good?

“I’m nervous about people thinking that the positions advanced by any of the characters [in Yellowface] are manifestos for how I think the world should operate,” Kuang says. “I don’t have all the answers. The worst thing imaginable would be for the reader to walk away thinking, ‘Oh well, that’s cultural appropriation solved!’ Or, ‘These characters are right; these characters are wrong.’ ”

Yes, June’s acts of racial plagiarism and literary yellowface are so bad, they border on cartoonish villainy. Yes, she is intolerably defensive, opportunistic and deluded. But Kuang complicates Yellowface’s narrator, too. As the ABC’s Beverley Wang observed when reading the novel, “At a certain point, Juniper does become an expert in Chinese history. She’s had to reverse-engineer her knowledge in order to make it seem credible that she would have come up with [Athena’s novel]. That expertise [becomes] genuine.”

Still, becoming an expert in the field does not automatically prevent storytellers – like June – from also being exploitative, cynical, extractive and entitled. “She carries this contempt for Chinese culture, has no connection with Chinese history and still hates Chinese food,” Wang adds. “Here is someone literally feasting on the stories and histories of Chinese people, but when it comes to just a basic fundamental aspect of Chinese culture – food – she finds it revolting, disgusting, greasy. This is somebody who has genuinely zero respect and connection with Chinese people, Asian people, culture, history. But she’s still very happy to mine the stories and histories for her profit and benefit.”

Still, readers may be disconcerted to find themselves pitying – or even relating to – June. That is entirely intentional: Kuang says she herself sympathises with her novel’s toxic white narrator. In fact, she empathises with her. Kuang says she has even been June. Come again?

“It’s never fun to admit that you feel such intense jealousy towards others,” she says, “but we all should get better at talking about jealousy because we all feel it.” Kuang admits to times she has developed “completely unwarranted and unfair” loathing for other writers, especially fellow Asian-Americans for hitting goals to which she has aspired. “I was so frustrated and upset!” she says, cringing at herself now. “I would fantasise in my head: if I saw them at a convention, I’d give them the cold shoulder. Or if somebody asked me about their work in an interview, I’d say some catty thing.“

Partly, those feelings can be chalked up to Kuang’s time spent doom scrolling. (“Bad COVID vibes”, she says.) But part of it was also just good old-fashioned insecurity and isolation. “The most dangerous thing was that it prevented me from forging connections with those people, making friendships and feeling a real sense of community,” she says. “When you’ve built up this idea of somebody you’re jealous of, you find all the reasons why. They’re not that talented. They’re not a good person. They’re problematic. As a young person on the internet, I had bought into a lot of the toxic framing June fully believes.”

As Kuang writes in the acknowledgments: “Yellowface is, in large part, a horror story about loneliness in a fiercely competitive industry.” She counts herself lucky: she has a community of friends with whom she can safely vent ugly feelings, and who prevent her from acting on them. “June doesn’t have that kind of community,” she says. “And it’s unfair to expect young people not to go through those thought processes, [given that] social media is designed to make you feel bad about yourself and to make us hate one another.”

Still, isn’t it Athena Liu who is the real self-referential meta stand-in for R. F. Kuang? A bit of a wink-wink, nudge-nudge to the reader? The similarities are
blatant: Athena is a young, conventionally attractive, bestselling Asian-American zeitgeist author (tick) whose work has been critically acclaimed in The New York Times (tick) and has won Nebula and World Fantasy Awards (Kuang has been nominated for both and won a Nebula for Babel).

When I ask Kuang to make her case for why she’s not Athena Liu, she laughs in protest. “I shouldn’t have to make my case!” she says before, quite helpfully, making her case. For starters, she says, Athena is an overnight success and she was not. “I didn’t have that Cinderella story; I had a very moderate version of publishing success.” (This argument is only semi-persuasive: it is true Kuang didn’t shoot to immediate stratospheric fame; it is also true she had a three-book deal sold at auction on the day she turned 20.)

A more convincing argument: Kuang seems like a decent person, while Athena – sorry to speak ill of the dead – is kind of a jerk. June might have post-humously stolen Athena’s work, but we later learn it is likely that early in their friendship, Athena took June’s experience of being sexually assaulted and published it as her own thinly veiled short story.

Athena also cruelly ignores other young Asian-American authors seeking her help, and is protective of her status of being “the only one” on the scene: the only woman; the only Asian. She guards her uniqueness fiercely, and is possibly only friends with June because this ordinary white woman doesn’t represent a threat. “She’s that monster,” Kuang says.

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In Yellowface, Kuang uses Athena to represent another vexing phenomenon in the book industry: how it champions a handful of racial minorities to much fanfare (“Look, we have this really successful Asian author, so we’re doing something right!“) while failing to address any structural problems with race inside it. Alongside the myth of white disadvantage, Kuang says, tokenism is the other nefarious racial tripwire in publishing. As Wang observes of Yellowface, “The real villain is the structure of commercial publishing and how it operates.”

Reese Witherspoon. In Yellowface, one character wants her to option their debut novel.

Still, some critics of Yellowface are suss. Hasn’t this book become the very thing it purports to satirise? In Yellowface, June yearns for her debut novel to be optioned by Reese Witherspoon. After June steals Athena’s book, it makes it on to all sorts of zeitgeist lists, is chosen for buzzy national book clubs and has its own tote bag. In real life, Yellowface has featured on every other Best of 2023 book list, is a Reese Witherspoon Book Club recommendation and, yes, has its own tote bag.

“It’s a complicated book,” says Leah Jing McIntosh, the founder and editor of Asian-Australian-focused literary journal Liminal. McIntosh says she admires the novel’s anger and appreciates how “Yellowface opens up more conversations about what it means to be a racialised person within the publishing industry”. On the other hand, McIntosh says, “The double bind of Yellowface is that it’s published within the same industry, methods and rubric of racial capitalism that it critiques.”

One particularly caustic review of Yellowface in Cleveland Review of Books by Terry Nguyen argued the same, cuttingly concluding, “Yellowface has, in effect, become what it sought to critique: a bestselling literary phenomenon, its success ‘hinge[d] on factors that have nothing to do with the strength of its prose’. Supposing that a novel’s style and substance fail to matter, one might as well, as one character remarks, ‘ride the diversity elevator all the way to the top’. “

It’s a harsh accusation, essentially comparing Kuang to Athena Liu at her worst. Either way, you get the sense that Kuang – one step ahead – was anticipating all this. At one point in Yellowface, we learn of the time a notorious Asian-American critic savaged Athena Liu’s debut novel, too. “Here, Liu falls into the novice trap of mistaking a lyrical, self-othering sentence for a profound observation,” the fictional critic writes. “My read? Athena Liu needs to get over her own yellow fever.”

Which is to say, whatever you think of R. F. Kuang’s work, when she writes a satire, no one escapes her attention. Not the authors and publishers. Not the critics. Possibly not even herself.

Kuang has had a lot of surreal moments since Yellowface’s publication. Stephen King fanboyed the book on Twitter. Kuang made Time magazine’s Time100 Next list. Not to mention all the big-city billboards; so many billboards. One of the funniest things was right before the novel came out when designers were tasked to pitch cover concepts for this slippery novel featuring myriad booby traps about race and publishing. People were anxious.

“I’ve never been in a room with so many white people being really anxious about being racist,” Kuang says happily. “Everybody wanted [the cover] to be
controversial and provocative; to get right up to the line of being racist, but never cross it. It’s just … nobody really knows how to do that without just accidentally being racist.”

There were several false starts. One design featured one of those waving Chinese cats you see on the counters of Chinese restaurants (“Why?” Kuang asked. “There’s no cat in the book.”) Then HarperCollins UK’s deputy art director came up with the book’s now-iconic jacket. “I’m really happy with it,” Kuang says. “It’s striking and plays on racist tropes without just crossing the line and being racist itself.”

The final result is a complete edge-to-edge block of yellow, from which a pair of Asian eyes appears, Mulligrubs-style. The expression is pure side-eye, but everything else is a Rorschach test. Are the eyes delighted or duplicitous? Playful or paranoid? Asian … or a white person pretending to play Asian? June or Athena? The closer you look, the more questions it raises. Fitting for a book that – like Kuang – prefers to ask a whole lot of new questions rather than wheeling out the ones we’ve already heard.

“I do feel like a lot of people I know are sick of how we’ve processed the world and each other and are searching for alternatives.”

Rebecca Kuang

For what it’s worth, Kuang is still online but – like many of us – has abandoned Twitter (X, if we really have to call it that) altogether. If there is any grief over the platform’s self-annihilation, it’s that Twitter’s unmatched ability to start and organise urgent activism for social change is now lost. “That makes me very sad,” she says. “I am relieved not to see all the horrible tweets about everything else, though.”

It’s no coincidence that Yellowface has surged in popularity at a time where we’ve emerged from an intense era of digital noise from Twitter – some valid; some necessary; some pointlessly destructive – trying to make sense of what we’ve just lived through. “It was the right time for a book that pokes fun at the thoughtless way in which we’ve been building up images of other people, making assumptions about people’s reputations and inner selves, and how we’ve had so much fun tearing them down,” she says. “Maybe I’m being over optimistic, but I do feel like a lot of people I know are sick of how we’ve processed the world and each other and are searching for alternatives.”

You get the sense that book clubs – currently delighting in, raking over and arguing about Yellowface – might not be a bad place to start.

Rebecca Kuang will appear at All About Women at the Sydney Opera House on March 10, the Brisbane Writers’ Festival on March 11 and at the Wheeler Centre, Melbourne on March 12.

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