Yellowface Study Guide

Born in China to parents whose families had suffered through much of the turbulence of 20th century Chinese history, including the Japanese occupation and the Chinese Communist Party takeover, Rebecca Kuang immigrated to the United States with her parents when she was just four years old. They settled in Texas, where she completed her primary education. Kuang received her BA in history from Georgetown University in Washington, DC, after which she completed a master’s degree in Chinese Studies from Magdalene College, Cambridge; a master’s in contemporary Chinese Studies from University College, Oxford; and embarked on a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Kuang wrote and signed a contract for her first novel, The Poppy Wars, while she was still an undergraduate. Published in 2018, it was the first in a trilogy of fantasy works loosely based on 20th century Chinese history. Kuang is self-consciously playful with genre in her work and embraces new artistic challenges. Her next novel after the Poppy War trilogy, Babel, or the Necessity of Violence, is a work of historical fiction written in the style of Charles Dickens, and her fifth book, Yellowface, is a satire of the publishing industry that draws on 21st century psychological thrillers. Kuang’s work has been both critically and commercially successful. Babel debuted at the top spot on the New York Times’ Bestseller List and Yellowface also made that list. Kuang’s work has, furthermore, been nominated for the Goodreads Choice, Hugo, and British and World Fantasy Awards, among many others and has received a Nebula and no fewer than 12 other regional and genre-specific awards.

The Last Front, the novel which Athena drafts and June steals, centers on the experiences of the Chinese Labour Corps. During WWI, Allied forces recruited workers from many places (but typically from British colonies like Egypt, India, and the West Indies) to fill crucial non-combat roles on and near the front. When China joined the war on the side of the Allies in 1917, they allowed the British and French to recruit young men, most of whom came from the poorest parts of China on the promise of good wages. Some 140,000 men performed menial labor in the CLC during the course of the war, with estimates of casualties ranging from 2,000 to 20,000 (mainly due to harsh conditions and the 1918 Flu Pandemic). Yellowface itself confronts the issue of plagiarism. Published in the early 2020s, it capitalized on an ongoing conversation about these issues driven by several high-profile cases that rocked the literary world around that time. Two which involved short stories drawing on the experiences of a friend or acquaintance—“The Kindest,” by Sonya Larson and “Cat Person” by Kristen Roupenian—achieved viral fame on the internet with juicy writeups in The New York Times Magazine and Slate. Finally, in having its White protagonist pose as a Chinese American woman, Yellowface also recalls two very public cases of White women (both political activists and academics) passing as Black women: Rachel Dolezal, who was outed in 2015, and Jessica Krug, who revealed herself and resigned her teaching post in 2020. 

Yellowface presents readers with a deeply jaded satire about the insular, hypercompetitive world of American publishing and the self-serving ways in which it polices, benefits from, and suppresses marginalized voices. Several other works of contemporary American fiction also explore this topic, including Percival Everett’s 2001 Erasure, in which a well-educated Black academic finally writes a bestseller when he abandons erudite retellings of Greek mythology for a heavily stereotypical and racialized caricature of Black experience; and Zakiya Davis’s 2021 The Black Girl. This latter novel interrogates the racial politics of the publishing industry through the experiences of its Black protagonist, Nella, after she gets a job as an editorial assistant at a midsized publishing company. Another novel satirizing the pressures of the publishing industry without such an emphasis on race is Julia Bartz’s The Writing Retreat, published in 2023. Athena’s ghost haunts Yellowface in much the same way that the ghostly memory of her husband’s first wife haunts the unnamed protagonist and narrator of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 gothic horror classic Rebecca. And finally, with its unreliable and mentally unstable narrator (who also happens to be relatively privileged, White, and narcissistic) and plentiful twists and turns, Yellowface skillfully deploys the conventions of psychological thrillers such as Gillian Flynn’s 2012 Gone Girl, Paula Hawkins’ 2014 The Girl on the Train, or A. J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window (2018).