YELLOWFACE by Rebecca F. Yaung (Harper Collins, 2023)
In the afterword to this bestseller, Rebecca F. Yaung says her novel as “a horror story about loneliness in a fiercely competitive industry.” However, If she meant it to be a cautionary tale, she has failed.
The corrosive consequences of one woman’s desperate pursuit of wealth and recognition are vividly described but not presented as irredeemably evil or wholly negative. Yaung pulls off the quietly subversive trick of gently inviting the reader to empathise with selfish and morally dubious behaviour.
The rudiments of the plot are quite simple but the twists and turns are expertly drawn to maintain a healthy mix of humour and suspense. It is the story of a struggling writer June Hayward who steals a story from the significantly more successful author whose sad fate is revealed in the arresting opening sentence: “The night I watch Athena Liu die, we’re celebrating her TV deal with Netflix.”
June is an opportunist not a killer but no amount of self-justification can make her actions entirely right. That doesn’t stop her trying, and for a significant time she succeeds in pulling the wool over the eyes of publishers and public alike. Suspicions are raised when persistent questions are asked as to how and why a white woman should be interested in the real life drama of exploited Chinese labourers during the First World War.
June is a victim of her own blind ambition but also suffers from the social media ‘s capaicity to create and destroy those in the public eye. To avoid the cancel culture she is forced to stay on “the hamster wheel of relevance.”
Further conflictions over who the guilty party really is arise when we discover Athena Liu’s exploitative and ruthless modus operandi. We learn that “Athena never personally experience suffering. She just got rich from it.”
Yaung cleverly equates questions of over an author’s honesty and authenticity with those that touch on the sensitive issue of the Asian diaspora. June asks the rhetorical question, which is surely Yaung’s own : “Aren’t all the best novels borne from some madness which is borne from truth?” By the end of the book the nature of such truths become significantly blurred.
‘Yellowface’ is a cleverly plotted and highly readable story (I raced through it in a single day). Its main weakness is in the overly sketchy characterizations. I understand why Yaung describes it as a book about loneliness but we never really learn why June in particular has no real friends or lovers. We learn a lot about how actions have consequences but not enough about what drives those actions in the first place. One thing the novel does is to confirm the old adage that fame is a fickle friend.
