Rebecca F. Kuang's novel Yellowface (2023) follows the story of June Hayward, a young white woman who has faced years of bitter failure while trying to break into publishing as a fiction writer. June's lack of success is contrasted by the achievements of her friend from college, Athena Liu—a Chinese-American novelist who manages to outshine June in almost every way, winning a series of awards, fellowships, and publishing contracts. After Athena dies in a tragic accident, June publishes, under her own name, a version of Athena's last manuscript that she found while at Athena's apartment. The plagiarized novel—a war epic that focuses on the Chinese Labour Corps in World War I—is an enormous success. June is swept up in a flurry of wealth and fame.
However, June's success is short-lived; she soon faces a series of accusations on social media that scrutinize her representation of Chinese culture and history, especially in light of her identity as a white woman. As she tries to keep herself afloat, she must navigate an increasing influx of hate while also preventing the truth from coming out about the novel's origin. Narrated from June's point of view, the novel leans on her unreliability in order to explore the complicated question of who has the "right" to write which stories.
Some critics labeled Yellowface a satire due to its tragicomic representation of the contemporary publishing industry, although its treatment of the contentious topic received mixed reviews. The novel's focus on white authors posing as people of color builds on several real-life instances of the phenomenon, the most notable of which was a 2015 scandal over a poet included in "The Best American Poetry Anthology" of that year. A poem that had been chosen for the anthology, supposedly by a poet named "Yi-Fen Chou" was revealed to, in fact, be by a white man named Michael Derrick Hudson. Hudson had submitted the poem under a Chinese name because he thought it would increase his chances of being included in the anthology. Yellowface takes up this theme of racial-literary appropriation and pushes it to its extreme; what happens when a writer builds their entire career off of appropriating or posing as another race?
Kuang's first foray into literary fiction, Yellowface marked a departure from her previous work in the speculative fiction genre.
