Yellowface, a hypocrite reversed?

immorally entertaining

The technical accomplishment of this book is to use a narrator who isn’t a very good writer and still to make a compelling read. She repeats herself, with several instances of things being compared to coals; she capitalises important words in her opening, something she later drags one of the other characters for doing, calling it pretentious; and when she bullies a student for writing “I let go of a breath I didn’t know I was holding” it’s impossible to forget that she herself had said the same thing earlier on. The “banal exposition” that the Cleveland Review complained about is part of the same technique.

There’s a satiric element to this: we talk about even the most original books in the most mundane way, and often the most celebrated writers are part of a fashion. There’s also a satire of the publishing industry. But what is a little overlooked is that while the story is about a literary novel, Yellowface is a genre novel, purportedly written by the main character about her own life. The final satire is on the fictionalised-memoir form.

June, the protagonist narrator, steals her dead frenemy Athena’s manuscript, rewrites it, and passes it off as her own. This involves her being accused of cultural appropriation, which eventually gets to her and causes a breakdown. She is praised and rewarded for her book but simultaneously lonely and disguised. June is a traveller in a strange land, and her plain, cliched descriptions are a way of highlighting both the absurdity of how culture works—not just publishers, but reviewers, social media book culture, authors, the whole deal.

The moral is made clear but that shouldn’t be a basis for criticism. June is an anti-hero—she steals, she’s racist, she’s self-obsessed—but she’s entirely enabled by the people around her and, as Kuang says, this novel is partly a horror story about loneliness in a fiercely competitive industry. June doesn’t accept responsibility: neither does anyone else.

The NYT review said this,

all its genre fluidity is in service of the same blunt frankness. Perhaps the ultimate irony of the book is what it has in common with its protagonist: Like June herself, “Yellowface” seems desperate to not be misunderstood.

No! June very much does want to be misunderstood. She has a desperation to be a recognised writer and lies about her work. She seems like she wants the reader to understand her, but she is happy to string them along too. The second plagiarism comes as a surprise.

June dislikes Athena Liu’s hypocrisy—this allows her to justify the plagiarism to herself. But many critical reviews think June is too obviously a hypocrite. That she’s not unreliable enough. A hypocrite pretends to have higher standards or beliefs than they really do. That’s not quite what happens with June.

It has been said of Jonathan Swift that he hated hypocrisy so much that he became a hypocrite reversed. Swift, in David Noakes words, preferred to seem a monster than a hypocrite, such was his honesty and humanity. Something of that dynamic is at play in Yellowface. June is so desperate to be seen in the right way, to be praised, that she writes Yellowface, which casts her as the villain.

Surrounded by phoney publishers, fawning reviewers, Athena’s undeserved legacy and so on, June does the only honest thing and makes herself the cliched anti-hero of her own confession. In a world of hypocrites, she becomes a hypocrite reversed. But she doesn’t mean it. This satire is not meant to improve anyone, not to offer moral instruction, not to make amends. She still wants the fame and the attention.

And no-one notices. There is no justice or comeuppance. That’s the unreliable aspect of the narration. It seems like a confession. In fact, it’s another turn on the merry-go-round. The final paragraphs sounds almost deranged, like a manic attempt to save herself with a half-baked plot about a come back book.

But that’s the book you just finished reading. Suddenly the hypocrite is reversed—but all in the service of tricking you, once again, into letting your compulsion with the narrative, the discourse, the latest thing, the scandal, the brazenness of it all, distract you from the real truth. We don’t care about hypocrisy, Kuang is saying, we want to be immorally entertained.