The Role Reversal of R.F. Kuang’s 'Yellowface'

The Asian American literary canon has always consisted of works about Asian authors’ insecurities around white people. The Joy Luck Club author and Asian American literature’s fairy godmother Amy Tan once wrote a nonfiction story titled “Fish Cheeks.” In it, she describes how her 14-year-old self was embarrassed over her parents’ Chinese cultural traditions and food when her crush, a boy that was “as white as Mary in the manger,” came over for Christmas dinner. “Fish Cheeks” describes a desire to become white or be accepted by white people, a desire that summed up the sentiment of many minority authors in America during that era. But those tropes have faded away.

In comes R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface, a novel about a white author who feels insecure over Asian women and tries to be one. The narrator, novelist June Hayward, is a liberal white woman, the likes of which dominate the literary world. However, she is unsuccessful in the industry, unlike her best friend, acclaimed author and Kuang’s self-insert Athena Liu, who is quoted in a fictional New York Times article as being a “worthy successor to the likes of Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston.”

June, on the other hand, laments early on that she is “just brown-eyed, brown-haired June Hayward, from Philly—and no matter how hard I work, or how well I write, I’ll never be Athena Liu.” This is obviously a reversal of the trope of Asian women feeling insecure about white women. But after Liu dies from choking on a Chinese-style pancake (at the age of 27 like other famed celebrities), June steals Athena’s near-finished novel and publishes it as her own, rebranding herself under the Chinese-sounding name Juniper Song and finally making it big in the literary world. 

Every character in this book is either white or Asian. The book would not pass a reverse Bechdel test: the conflicts are all between women, while men play secondary roles in the plot and are defined in relation to women. This allows Kuang to focus on the passive-aggressive fights between white and Asian women.

The obvious role reversal is the metafictional one: that an Asian author is writing from the perspective of a white author who pretends to be Asian. But the book also discusses role reversals in how Asian and white authors have been viewed by each other, told through the lens of various literary controversies.

The controversy that undergirds the book is the case of white poet Michael Derrick Hudson, who used the pen name “Yi-fen Chou” in order to improve his chances of being published. The entire plot of Yellowface revolves around such a scenario. Kuang writes June as a blundering character that often makes clueless comments about Chinese culture and dabbles in casual racism while leaning on her gender to deflect any accusations of bigotry, a phenomenon that many on the social justice spectrum would call “white feminism.” Kuang takes the white feminism trope to extreme levels of parody, where dozens of quips from June serve as comically clueless rants designed to elicit chuckles from liberal nonwhite readers. 

There is a flashback to an earlier literary controversy Athena experienced where an online group of “Asian Men’s Rights Activists” called her a sellout for dating a white man, complete with tweets bashing white-male-Asian-female (WMAF) relationships. This is a direct reference to a 2018 controversy where author Celeste Ng wrote about the hate mail she received online from some Asian men for marrying a white man and tweeting about not finding Asian men attractive. 

Issues involving race, gender, and romance have always been controversial, and tossing all three into the culture-war blender reveals much about our most personal desires. The author Frank Chin has long feuded with Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston’s portrayals of Asian men in their books, arguing that they were selling a stereotype of “Asian male patriarchy” in order to appeal to liberal white readers and to justify the authors’ own reasons for marrying white men. Jenny Han’s To All The Boys series was criticized for including no Asian male love interests. And intraracial gender tensions were explicitly aired out in Min Jin Lee’s Free Food For Millionaires.

Here is where Kuang takes the entire discourse and reverses it: instead of Asian women writing themselves into romances with white men, she has June take Athena’s story and write in an Asian-man-white-woman romance. June fantasizes about walking hand-in-hand with whichever handsome Asian actor will be cast to play the male lead of her book’s film adaptation, while ducking allegations on Twitter that she is fetishizing Asian men. This trope calls back to another literary controversy involving white female author Rainbow Rowell’s book Eleanor and Park, a YA novel about a socially awkward white girl who falls in love with an Asian boy who is a fellow misfit. While Eleanor and Park was a commercial success, many Asian women mocked Rowell’s portrayal of the Asian male character, claiming that Rowell wrote him in a racist manner. 

The discourse between Asian and white women arguing over men, plus the highly informal style Kuang takes with the narrative, gives the whole book the petty vibe of high school drama and vindictiveness. Kuang takes allegations of white-male fetishization by Asian women and projects them onto a white female character who allegedly fetishizes Asian men. Kuang’s message of sweet revenge is simple. Middle-class Asian women growing up in mostly-white environments, like R.F. Kuang herself, often feel inadequate to white women and their features. But Kuang writes June in a way where June feels insecure to Asian women, from describing herself as just a plain white brunette to a scene where she stares into Athena’s eyes (eye shape being a common motif in East Asian narratives of feeling othered) and wonders what it’s like to be so successful. June not only engages in metaphorical yellowface, but literally wants to have a yellow face. Gone are the sob-stories of yore penned by Asian women about how insecure they felt compared to white women. Kuang is a fantasy writer by trade, and this book serves as another fantasy, where Asian women replace white women as the new American “it girls.” 

There are further references to many more literary controversies, and Kuang name-drops The Help and American Dirt as two books where the authors became embroiled in identity-based controversy. But ultimately, Yellowface is a gendered polemic about how Asian and white women of a certain social class feel about each other. In the publishing world, white women rule the roost, but Asian women are increasingly coming for the throne. 

Apart from this drama, the book reads quite incoherently. The novel is filled with pop culture references: BTS, Bling Empire, Crazy Rich Asians. The references make the book feel like a work of nonfiction, yet the lack of certain events that should be in a nonfiction book ends up creating a jarring effect for the reader. One event is stated as taking place in March 2020, yet Covid is never mentioned, despite the impact the pandemic has had on drawing attention to racism against Asian Americans. Summer 2020’s “racial reckoning” changed many industries’ racial outlooks, yet that is also absent. The only consistent narrative is Kuang’s desire to see white women get taken down a notch, written as the story of a white woman that wants to take Asian women down a notch. In an age where Asian cultures are more popular than ever, where white girls on Tiktok engage in literal yellowface via “Asianfishing,” and where Asian women in elite liberal circles date white men at high rates, Kuang takes the old trope of Asian insecurity and gives it a white face.

Sheluyang Peng is a writer living in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.