Cultural Appropriation – Times 2
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*****
June Hayward and Athena Liu are sort-of friends, and definitely rivals. They are in college together and both aspiring writers. After graduating, June’s first book gets published, but is not a big success. Meanwhile, Athena’s first book skyrockets, and gives her all the perks a writer can wish for. Indeed, as the book opens, Athena has just signed a deal with Netflix.
She and June are celebrating when Athena chokes on a pancake, June’s Heimlich maneuver fails, and Athena dies. The death takes place at Athena’s apartment making it ever so easy for June to slip into Athena’s office and walk off with the manuscript Athena had just completed, but not yet shown to her publisher.
As uncomfortable as I was with how unaffected June was by witnessing – and playing a part in Athena’s death – I put it aside because another aspect of Yellowface grabbed me by the collar and pulled me in. As a published but very non-famous author, I loved the validation provided by the author’s description of the publishing process that shows it as an emotional roller coaster.
For instance, the publisher of June’s first book was a small publisher that gave her a small advance but then folded three months before her book went to print. As horrid as that was in itself, her “friend” Athena’s book was picked up by Penguin Random House for a six-figure advance. Given the “unfairness” of this…
I guess it was ok that June borrowed Athena’s manuscript to have a look at it. But when June convinced herself that it was ok to treat Athena’s manuscript as a rough draft that she herself could improve upon and finish, I understood how tempting such a choice might be to a struggling writer, but I sure wished she would have taken the moral high road.
Beyond that, I wondered how she would pass the book off as her own since it was called The Last Front and was about the unsung contributions and experiences of the Chinese Labour Corps in World War I. Why would such a topic be near and dear to June’s heart?
*****
Of course, the topic of cultural appropriation enters the picture here – in duplicate. June is white and telling a Chinese story, while on the grander scale, the author, R. F. Kuang is Asian and writing a first-person narrative from June’s point of view.
Things started to get cringe-worthy immediately. It was at her publisher’s suggestion that June look to her full name – Juniper Song Hayward – and rebrand herself. It is suggested that she publish the new book as Juniper Song. She resists a bit, but then goes along with the plan. And then of her own accord, she takes new author photos that make her ethnicity ambiguous.
When the book is published, it is a huge success. June/Juniper is basking in all the great reviews she is getting on Goodreads. And all is perfect until it is not, until someone gives her a one-star review. And then at a book store event, someone who looks like Athena is sitting in the front row. And then the more popular the book becomes, the more one-star reviews pop up and they are vitriolic. A scathing review by an Asian writer in The Los Angeles Review of Books calls the book an “historical exploitation novel,” defined as “inauthentic stories that use troubled pasts as an entertaining set piece for white entertainment.”
And then an attack on Twitter starts. A tweet from an account named @AthenaLiusGhost calls June/Juniper out not only for cultural appropriation but for theft of Athena’s manuscript. All hell breaks loose from there.
Since this book is written in the first person, the reader is inside June/Juniper’s head the whole time and we see how rattled she is by the social media attack, especially as it increases and gets a large following. In that she is addicted to social media, the situation is made worse.
June/Juniper feels increasingly unhinged as she faces all this and as she continues to cling to her innocence. Often she is defending herself inside her head as opposed to in public, but even so, I lost all respect for her as each attack caused her to twist her rationale to fit the new situation. And as she tells the reader in the end: “The truth is fluid. There is always another way to spin the story, another wrench to throw into the narrative.”
I end where I started. I continued to enjoy this book for its description of the publishing business. And at the same time, I continually did not like June/Juniper and the decisions she made.
*****
Click here to learn more about Yellowface on Amazon.
*****
I loved Jean Hanff Korlitz’s book, The Plot. The basic storyline is the same as Yellowface: one writer steals the intellectual property of a deceased writer and then all hell breaks loose from there.
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