Welcome to Week 3 of Lit in One Sentence!
This week, we’re looking at R.F. Kuang’s novel Yellowface, which came out in May 2023.
Last month, it won the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Fiction of the year in a landslide, garnering more votes than the next three titles combined and over a third of the total votes cast across 20 nominees. Other titles on this list were winners or finalists for major literary awards like the National Book Award and the Booker Prize, but these got far less love from the Goodreads Choice voters.
Of course, this reflects the tastes of the demographic most active on Goodreads, which — like BookTok — skews heavily towards younger women readers.
Still, in last week’s comments, we found bestseller status more enticing than literary awards and acclaim. If anyone’s wondering whether one of us could write the next Yellowface, or at least something as popular, a great place to start is by looking at the emotional architecture of this book together.
It’s clearly making readers feel something.
So what, in exactly one sentence, is Yellowface about?
Yellowface in One Sentence
A white author who achieves her only dream of bestsellerdom by stealing her dead Asian friend’s work must defend her right to tell any story or lose everything.
Crafting Emotional Journeys: Dissonance
If you joined our discussion last week about another recent satire of race in the book industry — the movie American Fiction — you might spot a difficulty with this setup. As one reader put it, bestseller status sounds like a “nice-to-have” thing that a main character could nonetheless, like most of us, live fine without.
The creators of American Fiction deepen the film’s emotional landscape by including the protagonist’s need to provide for his family financially, but this isn’t the case for June, the white author in Yellowface.
Kuang herself speaks to this difference between the two stories on her own Substack and in TIME Magazine, where she’s currently writing as a TIME100 Voices honoree.
She contrasts her choice to emphasize the voicelessness of the dead friend Athena — “She and the other Asian-American characters in Yellowface exist as absence; we only ever get June’s interpretations of their positions” — with the narrative possibilities for intricate family drama that American Fiction fills in, as an alternative to the race parody that both works offer that still ultimately centers white people.
Kuang admits of Yellowface, “the conceit runs for 300 pages and that’s it, we’ve run out of things to say. […] From here on out, I’d like to work on filling in the absence.”
So, back to the question: how did she make it work, for even 300 pages?
We can find the answer, at least in part, by looking more carefully at the 28-word “one sentence” capture above.
The first 17 words — “A white author who achieves her only dream of bestsellerdom by stealing her dead Asian friend’s work” — describe the most unique and dramatic things about June, whose head we are in the whole time we are reading Yellowface, relative to the journey she goes on in the book.
It’s a pretty blunt, on-the-nose setup that reads like a metaphor for all of white colonialism and reminds me of improperly acquired Chinese artifacts at the British Museum.
It helps that the story makes clear being a successful author is June’s only dream. We learn right away that she and Athena have “both known we wanted to be writers since we were sentient.” Even after she’s been dragged through multiple Twitter storms of backlash that do nothing good for her mental health, she emphasizes that the world of fellow authors is “the only world I have any interest in being a part of.”
It’s faintly silly, but also feels true enough about many writers, and we can connect with June a bit over her singular passion. We’ve all been passionate about some dream for ourselves, or belonging to some particular group, at some point, probably.
Athena dying and June stealing her manuscript and achieving bestsellerdom all happen within the first 100 or so pages of Yellowface. To know how Kuang pulled off the next 200 pages, it helps to describe — in a general sense that I hope doesn’t give too much away — what June is doing for the rest of the novel.
That’s what the rest of the “one sentence” above captures: she’s defending her right to tell any story. This would be a very different book, and much less of a satire, if the sentence went something like: “A white author who achieves her only dreams of bestsellerdom by stealing her dead Asian friend’s work must confront the harm she’s done and make amends to the Asian American community.”
But Kuang sustains the satire by pairing her very on-the-nose premise with the best arguments she can put behind June to justify her behavior.
In doing so, she strikes at the heart of a dissonance — or inconsistency in our own beliefs — that many of us readers are likely to feel around all of this: the question of who gets to tell which stories.
On the one hand, the whole point of fiction is to work our way into other people’s heads. Anyone should be able to write about anything. Stories can’t always be populated entirely by characters who share the author’s identity.
On the other hand, there are huge historical power imbalances in American publishing. As Kuang herself points out, “the percentage of novels published by non-white writers has barely budged since the 70s.” About 95% of books published between 1950 and 2018, for which the author’s race could be identified, were written by white people.
It’s complicated!
And Kuang keeps complicating things as much as possible to drill into our dissonance around this, which I think is the emotional core of this story. Whenever June gets the message that she shouldn’t be doing something, she finds a way to come back around and explain why she should be, and we don’t always disagree with her.
When I interviewed Kuang for a live event the week of the book’s release, I asked how often she felt aligned with June and, if memory serves, her answer was: most of the time. She personally agreed with many of the arguments June made throughout the book. Meanwhile, she mentioned there and elsewhere that “Athena is my worst nightmare. She’s all the things I hope will never be true about myself.”
The result — as Crazy Rich Asians actress Constance Wu, who blurbed the book, put it — feels “like being inside a wild, brutal, psychological knife fight with a deranged clown.” And as The Other Black Girl author Zakiya Dalila Harris points out in another blurb, Kuang leaves it “open for readers themselves to decide where to draw the line.”
A takeaway for story creators: One key to making satire work is to give your target fair points that you yourself believe.
A Question for You
Is there a particular book that informs or complicates your thoughts about authors writing across identities?
My answer is below the fold and I hope you’ll add yours to the comments, which are only visible to paying subscribers of Lit in One Sentence, not the whole internet.