RFBC #19: Yellowface
Jealousy. Deception. Plagiarism. Racism. And other literary commonplaces. Plus: a podcast.
“May you live in interesting times,” goes the English translation of the old Chinese curse, and these times have certainly been interesting for writers of fiction. The literary scandals of the past few years alone have been more than interesting, and the most interesting of them revolve around the question of who has the right to tell a given story. Can you appropriate a story from another person’s life and call it your own? (See the brouhaha around “Cat Person.”) Is it worse if that other person is a writer you and your other writer friends have been pretending to like but actually mocking behind her back? (See “Who is the Bad Art Friend?”) Can you tell a Mexican immigrant’s story if you’re not Mexican or an immigrant? (See American Dirt.)
And what if your super-successful Chinese-American writer friend dies suddenly and leaves behind a manuscript no one knows about, and you’re a less-accomplished white woman whose real name can be made to sound kind of Asian, and you can take that manuscript—about Chinese immigrants—and polish it up and turn it into a best-seller? Is there anything remotely ok about that?
Of course not—unless you’re R.F. Kuang and you’ve turned it all into Yellowface, one of the most talked-about novels of 2023. That was the topic of our January 2024 meeting of Radio Free Book Club. Be forewarned: There’s plenty to spoil here, and we’ll be doing it below—and on our podcast. So if you haven’t read Yellowface and plan to, please come back at another time. But if you have read it, read on—and give us a listen.
Show notes:
The RFBC crew for our December 2023 show was Indianapolis writer Ken Honeywell; author and accomplished writing teacher Dan Barden; author and accomplished writing teacher Barb Shoup; and author/baker/hiker Traci Cumbay. Our show was recorded at Listen Hear in Indianapolis and produced by our new friend Galileo for 99.1 WQRT-LP.
What does Yellowface have to say about the state of the publishing industry today? A lot. Barb and Dan, both novelists, were impressed by how much it had to say about what writers are going through right now. Dan called it a primer on the publishing industry and writing and jealousy much more.
Dan’s highest praise: “There were a lot of flaws to this novel, and every time I noticed one, I said, ‘I don’t fucking care.’”
June is a terrible person. We all agreed on that. But Dan and Barb seemed to be rooting for her, and Ken and Traci just wanted to see her get her comeuppance.
June says a lot of things. Is she an unreliable narrator? Yes, probably. She doesn’t hide from the bad things she does. But how much should we trust her? When she says she made extensive revisions to the manuscript, should we believe her? Should we question the fact that everything “wrong” with the book was really Athena’s doing?
Was what June did with Athena’s manuscript “plagiarism”? It was certainly bad. It was, we might all agree, a kind of theft. But her extensive further research and rewriting would probably have earned her some kind of co-author credit if she’d let anyone know what had actually happened, and Dan defended the idea of rewriting any story you want and calling it your own. It probably wasn’t plagiarism in the strictest sense—unlike when she stole the opening of her second novel verbatim from Athena. That totally was plagiarism.
In search of an excuse for her appropriation, June made several arguments, among them that Athena had stolen from her (“Cat Person”-style); that publishing the novel as she found it would ruin Athena’s reputation; that she did so much work that it kinda was her novel; and that Athena loved literary games and she—or her ghost—would be into it. Yeah, no. June is a terrible person.
Do publishers choose what books are going to become bestsellers? It certainly appears that June’s book is being positioned for success. But we disagreed on whether we think publishers can manufacture a bestseller. Barb defended authors and great books that never sold well because they weren’t marketed well. Dan noted that he’d seen publishers spend lots of money to promote books that went nowhere. Barb brought up James Patterson. Dan countered that Patterson is playing a different game. All good points. Publishers certainly allocate big promotional dollars to push certain books and little-to-no money for others. Some hugely successful airport fiction is of inferior literary quality. And all the money in the world can’t manufacture a bestseller if no one wants to read it.
Meta question: If it’s not ok for June to write a book whose primary characters are Asian, is it ok for K.F. Kuang to write a novel in which the narrator is white?
Would we recommend it? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. We all greatly enjoyed Yellowface and were happy to recommend it. Barb and Ken both liked it the second time through, too.
Bonus recommendations: Barb noted that she’d been reading a lot of Irish authors lately and recommended How To Build A Boat by Elaine Feeney. Dan said he was getting the overview of William James he always wanted in William James in the Maelstrom of American Modernism by Robert D. Richardson. Traci admitted she was late to the party, but raved about Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, Fun Home, which led Dan to recommend Good Talk by Mira Jacobs and Barb to recommend Glass Town by Isabel Greenberg. Ken recommended The Trees by Percival Everett.
Next month: We get an early-year speculative fiction fix with our discussion of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s novel Chain-Gang All-Stars. We hope you’ll join us.
