I don’t really know what I can say about this book, which I think means it’s worked? I can say that it’s blistering, and brilliant; I can say that it fits the ‘Fiasco‘ square because it’s about someone who “reached for the stars and utterly failed…a disaster created by human actions” and in this case the disaster is a person who finds herself in a nightmare of her own making, but the disaster is also the publishing industry and the surrounding discourse, and also the structures and promises of white privilege (and colonialism, and cultural appropriation, or perhaps cultural cannibalism would be more appropriate here).
My literary critic instinct (this is in this tradition, this fits into these categories, this reinforces/challenges those conventions) is to say that it’s Gothic, or perhaps noir: if Tom Ripley stole not just one man’s identity and the golden-boy status that came with it but the culture and history and exile and oppression of a people–and indeed, the kind of resentment that Ripley feels when Dickie casually squanders the things Ripley feels he deserves is palpable in Yellowface–but–
my sense of tradition and category and convention are Euro-centric, and Anglo-centric, and America-centric, and pretty white, on the whole, notwithstanding attempts to diversify reading and resarch–so should I really be thinking in terms of Gothic doubles or noir paranoia here? does that occlude my understanding of Yellowface on its own terms? am I repeating the problem of the blinkered narrator, who is convinced that all stories are hers, and if they’re not, ought to be remade in her own image? is it self-centered to even be thinking about this? This review is, after all, not about my own epistemological navel-gazing but about Yellowface–which is–
narrated by June Hayward, whose best frenemy/rival/Ivy League classmate is Athena Liu. They’re both writers, but Athena is a lot more successful–a fact that June suspects is due to Athena’s ethnicity rather than talent. June happens to witness Athena’s death (early in the book), and happens to discover the manuscript of what turns out to be Athena’s final novel, about a Chinese labour camp in France in the First World War, and decides, that like all stories, it is hers for the taking, community concerns and sensitivity readers be damned:
Meanwhile, I do my due diligence.
I research. I read every single one of the sources that Athena cited in her draft, until I’m as much of an expert on the Chinese Labour Corps as anyone can be. I even try to teach myself Mandarin, but no matter how hard I try, all the characters look as unrecognisable as chicken scratch, and the different tones feel like an elaborate practical joke, so I give up. (It’s all right, though: I find an old interview where Athena admitted that she didn’t even speak Mandarin fluently herself, and if Athena Liu couldn’t read primary sources, well, then why should I?) (p. 48-49)
June’s choices not only wreck her life but stunt her creative intellect in ways she is too oblivious to realise. June is horrible but compelling–and so is Athena, really–this is not a novel with a ‘good’ victim, which adds to its complexity and richness. There are flaws–the ending is a little too neat, perhaps, and the reveal is mildly predictable. But overall it’s a brilliant, blistering, mindfuck of a novel. I can say I stayed up very late over two nights to finish it.
Title quote: “I feel like this isn’t about me”, from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
(By which I mean that the debates raised and reflected in this book aren’t centred on me, the reader/reviewer)