R.F. Kuang's Yellowface Makes a Mocktail of the Literary World

Plus a beverage suggestion to toast the late Athena Liu

The Booktender’s January Provocation challenges readers to spend time with a book that hinges on someone pretending to be something they’re not. There are a lot of ways to approach this—I’ll be responding to it by focusing on novels that revolve around racial wannabes, mixed with some longform non-fiction that increased my own understanding of why they do it and how they get away with it.

R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface centers on Juniper “June” Hayward, author of a saccharine flop of a first novel, and her envied college classmate, bestselling author Athena Liu. June wagers her credibility in the first twenty pages: as sole witness of Athena’s (undignified, pandan-scented) death, she seizes the moment to steal her frenemy’s just-completed manuscript.

The premise for this satirical caper/thriller escalates as June passes off the novel about Chinese laborers conscripted to serve on the allied front lines in World War I as her own, whitewashing the traumatic narrative. At her publisher’s urging, …