Text and the City: In ‘Yellowface,’ who gets to tell the story (and get away with it)?
R.F. Kuang’s “Yellowface” reads like a slow, relentless spiral — the kind where you keep telling yourself, “this can’t get worse,” and then it does, because the point is that it absolutely can. It is a satire, yes, but it’s also a horror story about publishing, whiteness, envy and how easily theft disguises itself as opportunity when the right person is doing it. “Yellowface” is about what happens when someone else steals the pen and insists they deserve it more.
Kuang’s 2023 satire centers on June Hayward, a struggling white author who witnesses the accidental death of her wildly successful Asian American friend (and fellow author) Athena Liu. June does not plan to steal Athena’s unfinished manuscript… until she does. June tells herself she’s honoring Athena. She tells herself she’s fixing the book. She tells herself that publishing is unfair anyway. In June’s words, “The truth is fluid. There is always another way to spin the story.” This sentence could be the epigraph for the entire novel because “Yellowface” is less interested in a single lie than it is in the ecosystem that allows lies to thrive.
Kuang is merciless in her portrayal of jealousy. That’s part of what makes the book so unsettling. June doesn’t hate Athena because Athena is cruel or undeserving — she hates her because she is brilliant, beloved and successful.
“It’s hard, after all, to be friends with someone who outshines you at every turn,” June admits, a sentiment that lands with uncomfortable honesty. This isn’t cartoon villainy. It’s envy that festers quietly in workshops, in group chats, in Twitter timelines. Before Athena’s death, June tracks her friend’s success obsessively: “Jealousy is the spike in my heart rate when I glimpse news of Athena’s success on Twitter — another book contract, awards nominations, special editions, foreign rights deals.” Here, Kuang captures something painfully familiar: how social media turns other people’s wins into a personal referendum on your worth.
But “Yellowface” isn’t just about one jealous woman. It’s also about systems — publishing, academia, media — that reward theft when it comes wrapped in the right body. One of the most devastating parts of the novel is how Athena herself is treated while she’s alive. June reflects on how Athena’s publishers boxed her in for her racial identity.
“Every time she tried to branch out to new projects, they kept insisting that Asian was her brand, was what her audience expected,” June narrates. Athena’s trauma was commodified, flattened, turned into spectacle. “Racial trauma sells, right? They treated her like a museum.” Kuang skewers the industry’s hunger for pain — especially pain that can be marketed as authentic, educational, consumable.
And then there’s the grotesque irony: Athena is constrained, surveilled and reduced, while June — rebranded with an ambiguously Asian-sounding author photo and a carefully curated narrative — is celebrated for telling “her” story.
The final act of “Yellowface” plunges headfirst into online discourse, where Kuang’s satire sharpens into something closer to prophecy. June becomes both persecuted and protected by the internet, where outrage is entertainment and truth is optional. “These people love to have a target, and they’ll tear apart anything you put in front of them,” Kuang writes. It’s a brutal indictment of callout culture’s emptiness, not because harm isn’t real, but because spectacle so often replaces justice.
What makes “Yellowface” so effective, and so uncomfortable, is that Kuang never lets June fully collapse into caricature. June is awful, but she is also disturbingly realistic. She is what happens when entitlement meets insecurity, when ambition meets structural inequality, when someone believes that proximity to marginalized stories entitles them to ownership. Kuang doesn’t ask us to forgive June. She asks us to recognize her.
Kuang’s “Yellowface” is viciously funny, deeply unsettling and impossible to ignore. It asks a question that every reader, and especially every writer, must sit with. When you tell a story, whose voice are you amplifying, and whose are you erasing? And more importantly: If the system rewards you for doing harm, are you brave enough to stop?
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