I had this book on hold for a couple of months via Libby. Despite my library purchasing extra copies for the reading app, it took a while for me to get hold of one, and then I've read it as quickly as I can (ie: overnight) because there's something like 12 holds remaining on each of the 4 copies that my library owns. This is to say: the book is very popular and in high demand. Now that I've read it, my thoughts (with some minor spoilers, but free of major plot spoilers):
This is a satire about publishing, and specifically the white world of publishing. The protagonist is a struggling white writer, June Hayward, who has a much more successful Chinese-American friend, Athena Liu (though I'm not convinced "friend" is the right word for the relationship, given June's feelings of envy, resentment and sometimes even hatred towards her "friend".) Athena dies in a tragic accident. June takes the opportunity to steal Athena's latest manuscript about Chinese labourers in World War I, edits it and gets it published as her own work.
So it's clear right from the start that the protagonist is awful, and specifically in the kind of way that some white people are awful when they justify helping themselves to the labour, creativity and culture of people of colour without consent, credit or recompense. I began steeling myself to walk around the inside of this person's head for the rest of the book, and sure enough there were plenty of moments that gave me a full body shudder, even while I was groaning and nodding along - because of course this is how someone like that would think. Of course.
Eg: in the section on June editing Athena's manuscript, you can see the rationale June's deploying to take a piece of work that aims to decenter whiteness, and how she instead pulls it away from anything that might be remotely challenging for a white reader. For instance, June doesn't understand how "Xiao" ("little") and "Da" ("big") are commonly used in Chinese names. She feels that having too many "similar" names will confuse a white audience, so she renames all those Chinese characters instead. ๐
None of this happens in a vaccum of course, which is when the satire about the white world of publishing comes into play. At each step of the process, from editing to publication, to marketing the book, to discussions about the book being optioned for film, we're shown the kind of pressures that can distort a piece of work about a minoritised group in order to make it more palatable to a majoritised audience.
A good satire doesn't necessarily tell you anything you didn't already know about the world. It tells it in such a way though, that your response to what you've already known, experienced, or intuited feels freshly heightened. So a lot of the time my thoughts when reading those parts of the book were:
So that's how the sausage is made!
So that's how the sausage is made!
So that's how the sausage is made!
Etc. Etc. It's not like I didn't know or at least intuit any of that before, but by god, I sure did feel it freshly all over again!
Some of the examples are very on the nose as well, if you've been aware of the kind of discourse that's gone round literary Twitter in the not so distant past. There are what feel like nods to Kate Clanchy stereotyping the students of colour she was writing about (the observations about the use of "almond eyes" as a descriptor, which is something Clanchy was pulled up on.) The bad faith arguments that are used to justify pushing away the concerns of people of colour. (If I made a bingo sheet with the usual "arguments", I think the only one I wouldn't have checked off by the end of that would have been "diversity of thought", and that would only have been because the idea was trotted out anyway, if not the actual nomenclature.) The way the right rallies around white authors who are challenged by authors or readers of colour to do better. The way some white authors rally round their own in those moments, to bad mouth any authors of colour who are speaking up. And so on and so forth. All illustrated in the book.
At moments like that I slowed down a little, because it's impossible not to remember seeing those sorts of things happening in real time, and also getting a sense of the impact on people who spoke up. The writers of colour who were appealing to Clanchy to do better, for instance, were very badly hounded on social media, and in print media for months and months afterwards. For me, that's where the book feels like a horror story, because it's closing in on real life, and that's where truly horrible things happen to people who don't deserve it.
Of course what you get in Yellowface is June's take on things, so much of the time you're dealing with a white protagonist who doesn't understand the depths of what she's doing - occasionally at best glimpses something that makes her uncomfortable, but not enough to just not... Steal Athena's work. There's a lot of self-justification.
And of course the book has some twists and turns. I can't really discuss those without spoiling the plot, so I won't. I will say that I found the start and middle of the book (the set up of the scenario, and seeing how it unfolds) perhaps a bit stronger than the ending (what, if any consequences will there be for the theft?) But when I think about it, I'm not sure a very different ending would be possible anyway.
It's a satire about white entitlement. It's a satire about the publishing industry in general. Those are not things that are likely to change anytime soon in the real world. What was I hoping for by the end of the story? For my bleak feelings to feel less bleak? Is that realistic for a book that's about skewering the present status quo? Maybe the best cartharsis I can get from this book is appreciating how it actuely nails some real world dynamics, or enjoying it on its own terms as a satire. Maybe that's often the best cartharsis currently available in the real world too. It's no substitute for actual change, but there's a kind of bleak comfort in knowing that many other people can also see how the fucking sausage gets made.
