Book Review: “Yellowface” by R. F. Kuang

Didn't you think about wearing someone else's shoes? Didn't you pretend to be someone else? Didn't you want to live someone else's life? 

I am sure you did, as did the protagonist of the book, June Hayward….

I read “Yellowface” in 2024, but I wasn't ready to write a review. This book is easy and quick to read, but it triggers and raises provocative questions. 

I like the courage of the author to expose the behind-the-scenes reality of the publishing industry, as well as to reveal the shallow, even primitive values of society. Reading the book, I had always had a question in my head: “How did William Morrow, which is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers in the United States, dare to publish such truth about the publishing business?!?” Even though it is fiction, I am pretty sure that, unfortunately, business in the publishing sphere is almost as the author described it. 

Reading "Yellowface" feels like I was walking through a hall of mirrors - sometimes about society and the crazy world we are living now, but sometimes about myself. 

It’s a story about envy and authorship, about publishing and the creative world in general, about who gets to tell a story and who gets to sell it. But beneath its satire of the publishing industry, it is an intimate story about race, authenticity, and the strange alchemy of belonging.

The novel begins with two writers. Athena Liu, as a brilliant, young, Chinese-American writer, already sensationally famous, dies in a strange accident. Her friend, or perhaps acquaintance, June Hayward, is an American writer, unsuccessful and unfulfilled. After being a part of the accident, she found an unfinished manuscript of her dead friend. June took it, edited it, reshaped it, and published it under a pseudonym.

The novel is sharp and cruelly honest about an industry that trades in identity as much as in words. June is not evil; she’s painfully human - insecure, invisible, desperate for recognition. In her mind, she doesn’t steal Athena's work and identity; she took what she was meant to be. 

The book is so blunt and truthful in its portrayal of today’s reality - where it no longer matters what you have stolen, but whether you are successful, whether you make money and others profit from you - that at times it was painful for me to read. 

The book’s title, “Yellowface,” captures that masquerade of “wearing the right costume” perfectly: the act of performing identity for power, profit, or validation. A woman wearing another woman’s skin, believing that by doing so, she becomes her. It’s a reminder that in the hunger to be seen, we sometimes erase the very people we claim to honor and to be.