by Chloe Maron
The state of the American publishing industry is one that fosters a brutal type of competition, self-doubt, and loneliness that makes it hard to dream of even the simplest victories. Spots available to hopeful writers remain limited as the industry cannibalizes itself in the name of profit. Yellowface by R.F. Kuang displays the results of such a system through the character of June Hayward, writing under the pen name Juniper Song. She enters the publishing world only to ultimately, but promptly, get chewed up and spit out. The innocence of believing she can achieve her dream of being a prolific author is quickly shattered when the success of her debut novel isn’t much of a success at all. With no more starry-eyed motivations to protect June from her ego, she uses the sudden, tragic death of her friend Athena, an admired and successful author, to steal Athena’s unfinished manuscript to publish as her own. A rampage through the American publishing industry, Yellowface depicts the way a loss of innocence in one can set the stage for further harm to be caused due to a pervading nature of greed, fragility, and self-importance.
The number of books published per year is staggering. Annually, “the total number of new book titles is around 4 million” (Talbot). The big traditional publishers, such as Penguin Random House, account for ten to twenty percent of new titles (Talbot). Moreover, these numbers exclude the countless number of writers desperately trying to break into the industry. Publishing is absolutely glutted with talent, and that means, however unfortunately, the treatment between authors is varied. A previous marketing vice president from a division of Penguin Random House recalls: “out of the several hundred books that his division would put out per year, “We were only able to fully support thirty titles because of budget and manpower limits”” (Tager & Sharify). The result is some books receiving a small, or nonexistent, marketing budget while others receive countless resources. June Hayward of R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface describes it as: “Publishing picks a winner” (Kuang 5). This winning author is “cool and young” enough to be easily digestible to the general public, and so publishing “lavishes all of its money and resources on them” (Kuang 5). For the nonwinners, dreams are easily shattered and the innocence of believing hard work will garner success is swiftly lost. This unfortunate fact is all too true for June.
While she is lucky enough to gain a literary agent and a modest book deal, June’s debut releases to barely a whisper. She describes her story as “a richly detailed and subtly magical coming-of-age story about grief, loss, and sisterhood” that she poured her childhood dreams into (Kuang 3). Yet her hope of fame and fortune is quickly dashed as her print run is reduced, her blurbs from famous authors fall through, and her book tour turns into a handful of stops in the DMV area (Kuang 4). Though she is assured success only comes from good old-fashioned hard work, she watches her friend, Athena Liu, an Asian-American woman, gain everything on her very first try. Jealousy seeps into June’s life like an ugly disease. She believes “Athena’s star power is so obviously not about the writing. It’s about her. Athena Liu is, simply put, so fucking cool.” (Kuang 5). So when she has the chance to finish Athena’s next manuscript after she unexpectedly dies, she takes it. Feeling scorned by the industry, June feels she’s deserved the success that comes from selling that novel herself, not caring at all if it comes on the backs and the work of others. Her dreams have fallen deflated at her feet, and if June is not going to be offered what she feels she deserves, she is going to take it.
Yet, the actions that were fueled by pain only seek to cause more pain. At every turn, June uses the way publishing caters to privilege and whiteness to her advantage. For example, there is a “belief that the ideal reader—the one the author is addressing—is always white” (Tager & Shariyf). Moreover, there is also the notion that “authors of color inherently have a more limited audience,” suggesting that white readers are the larger, more prominent group and wouldn’t be interested in books by people of color (Tager & Shariyf). With this, June is able to get the best of both worlds: the large white readership that publishers believe they are catering to and the flare of being considered “exotic” and “diverse” because of the subject matter, Chinese American soldiers in World War I, she had “written” about. In an interview, R.F. Kuang herself speaks to the myth that, despite statistics showing that publishing is overwhelmingly white, “there is this strange myth that diversity is what’s selling, and that, in order to get opportunities, especially in hypercompetitive industries like publishing, you have to get your way through the door by pretending to be an ethnic identity that you don’t have” (NPR). This is a myth June fully believes, calling herself “just brown-eyed, brown-haired June Hayward, from Philly” (Kuang 6). This only heightens her willingness to steal what is considered a diverse story as she will get all the benefits of doing so without experiencing all the hardships that come with being a person of color in the publishing industry.
R.F. Kuang speaks to this phenomena in an interview, of how a racial identity that differs from the author’s “can be commodified and turned into something that makes you exotic and special and marketable” (NPR). Kuang also mentions the pigeonholing that many authors of color face, such as an Asian American immigrant not being able to “write anything except about immigrant trauma or the difficulties of being Asian American in the U.S.” (NPR). June is able to write any story she wishes, her debut being about two white sisters and her, albeit stolen, sophomore novel being one about Chinese Americans. Yet, when Athena wanted to branch out into new projects she was told “that Asian was her brand, was what her audience expected. They never let her talk about anything other than being an immigrant” (Kuang 307). While June might have suffered the loss of her innocence in seeing her dreams fail when the system of publishing failed her debut, this spurred her to become one of the cogs in the machine that forces the loss of innocence in so many authors and professionals of color by not seeing or supporting the value in their work nor their stories.
This shown all too clearly as June lets absolutely nobody or any situation get in the way of her burgeoning success. When an editorial assistant, Candice, suggests getting a sensitivity reader, it causes her to balk. Despite Candince bringing up the valid points that “June is not Chinese diaspora, and we run the risk of doing real harm if we don’t check any of the Chinese phrases, naming conventions, or textual recounting of racism with a reader better suited to catch mistakes,” June escalates the matter until Candice is taken off the project, reprimanded, and forced to apologize to June (Kuang 63). June’s original hurt and spurs her on to cause more hurt, marking the beginning Candice’s loss of innocence in her dedication to championing stories into the world as the system, and June, makes their first hit against her.
As a Korean American woman, Candice is part of the small percentage of people of color in publishing. A 2015 survey, that was followed up on in 2019 to little change, found that “76% of publishing is still white. This includes publishing staff, review journal staff, and literary agents” (Cerézo). On top of that, a Workplace Racism Survey conducted by People of Color in Publishing and Latinx in Publishing found that out of the two hundred people of color who participated “72.9 percent said they had experienced microaggressions at work” and “88.6 percent said they felt it was their job to educate coworkers about diversity.” June only perpetuates this issue by not only her act of taking the work of a Chinese American woman and publishing it as her own as a white woman, but in the actions she takes towards Candince as well. People of color in publishing are greatly affected by “passive-aggressive communications” and “fear of stepping over the line and offending their white peers” (Romero & Figueroa). Moreover, it is exceedingly rare that “professionals of color receive rewards for educating their white coworkers on race—an unpaid task that is not unique to the publishing sector but is prevalent there” (Tager & Shariyf). Candice proposes valuable insight and concern into the publication of June’s book, going as far as to offer arranging the sensitivity read for her, but is dismissed in favor of the white author’s comfort. Then, when Candice gives June’s book one star on her personal GoodReads profile, it’s enough to for action to be taken against her. At June’s complaint, Candice loses her job over the incident, fill her with an anger that will urge her down a nefarious path.
While Candice is eventually able to find another editorial job with a much smaller independent publisher, her lost innocence does not allow her experience with June to easily die. In a nighttime confrontation, she tells June when she began her search for another job “no one would even email me back. They said I was toxic” (Kuang 303). The treatment of Candice mimics the way so many people of color in the industry face hostile work environments and get long-lasting repercussions for minor infractions. When Publisher’s Weekly conducted a survey of forty publishing professionals, they “discovered that unconscious bias is an issue in publishing, as it is in most industries” (Deahl et al.) While June was able to brush by many accusations of her plagiarism because “at the end of the day all that really matters is cash flow. Eden’s going to stand with you. You’re pulling in too much money for them to back out now,” Candice is forced to suffer a complete stalling of her career over an attempt to make sure a book was as accurate as it could be (Kuang 218). There is no forgiveness or understanding offered at all, and Candince can’t make rent due an unwillingness to hire her even for positions she was overqualified for (Kuang 303). This solidifies the loss of her innocence in how she views the system she works in, and she feels forced to go about justice in a completely different manner.
Candince’s search for justice includes concocting an entire plot to convince June that Athena is actually alive through the use of carefully placed Instagram pictures, tags, and direct messages, with the end goal of capturing June’s admission that she stole Athena’s work. She believes she can use it write a memoir on the experience as a chance to break into publishing, because “if publishing is rigged, you might as well rig it in your favor” and “it’s how you survive this industry” (Kuang 308). She’s no longer interested in doing the right thing for the right reasons, such as protecting Athena’s legacy. She even goes as far to say: “Fuck Athena. We all hated that bitch. This is for me” (Kuang 308). Candice has been hardened by what had happened to her, becoming cruel and manipulative.
Though, June’s victims and casual disregard for others she views as beneath her does not stop at Candice. Because of the success of her novel, she teaches a workshop for highschool AAPI writers where she sees that “a well-phrased barb right now could irreparably destroy their confidence” (Kuang 241). When the students get wind of the plagiarism accusations that have been leveled against June, their respect for her dips. When deciding how to handle the subject of her controversy, June knows should could take the high road, or she “could make them regret this” (Kuang 246). She viciously rips a student’s pieces to shreds until she’s “convinced most of the class Skylar’s story is terrible” and Skylar “stares out the window, lower lip trembling, fingers twisting the top page of her notebook into tiny pieces” (Kuang 248). Before, Skylar was bold enough to declare “her intentions to be her generation’s Athena Liu,” but the innocence of her youthful ambition is lost, as is the self-assurance in her work. June’s need for her ego to be the largest in the room trumps the wellbeing of the students she agreed to teach. This reflects the consistent reports from non-white people in the publishing world of “incidents and patterns involving exclusion, disrespect, and the expectation that they should do more work than white colleagues” (Tager & Shariyf). June’s whiteness allowed her to get as far as she has, which she then uses against a seventeen-year-old who dared speak unfavorably about her.
This cycle of harm is extremely prevalent throughout the business as publishing is a greedy industry. Like most corporate systems, it wants to profit. As there is so much talent in the countless number of writers who wish to see their work published, the numbers never benefit everybody, and so often lean favorably towards those who are white. The unfortunate unfairness is what leads to June Hayward losing the innocence of her authorhood dreams when success fails to manifest for her debut. Instead dealing with failure in normal, healthy ways, June becomes vicious. This results in the loss of innocence of multiple other, specifically marginalized, characters as their belief in their jobs and their craft is weakened as a result. June uses her whiteness to play the system, becoming a cog in the same machine that so often hurts the people of color who work in it. R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface may be fictional, but it starkly depicts the very real result of the way the publishing industry spins its wheels around and around, causing innocence to be lost in so many with every turn.
Works Cited
Cerézo, Arvyn. “The State of Diversity in the Publishing Industry.” BOOK RIOT, 3 Feb. 2023, bookriot.com/diversity-in-the-publishing-industry-2023/#:~:text=The%20survey%20also%20showed%20that,89%25%20are%20non%2Ddisabled.
Deahl, Rachel, et al. “Why Publishing Is so White.” PublishersWeekly.Com, 11 Mar. 2016, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/69653-why-publishing-is-so-white.html.
Kelly, Mary Louise, et al. “Author R.F. Kuang on Unlikable Narrators and Cultural Appropriation in ‘Yellowface.’” NPR, NPR, 16 May 2023, www.npr.org/2023/05/16/1176508635/author-r-f-kuang-on-unlikable-narrators-and-cultural-appropriation-in-yellowface.
Kuang, R. F. Yellowface: A Novel. First edition. New York, NY, William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2023.
Lee And Low Books. “Where Is the Diversity in Publishing? The 2019 Diversity Baseline Survey Results.” Lee & Low Blog, 14 Mar. 2022, blog.leeandlow.com/2020/01/28/2019diversitybaselinesurvey/.
Romero, Shelly, and Adriana M. Martínez Figueroa. “‘The Unbearable Whiteness of Publishing’ Revisited.” PublishersWeekly.Com, 29 Jan. 2021, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/85450-the-unbearable-whiteness-of-publishing-revisited.html.
Tager, James, and Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf. “Reading between the Lines: Race, Equity, and Book Publishing.” PEN America, 3 Jan. 2023, pen.org/report/race-equity-and-book-publishing/.
Talbot, Dean. “Number Of Books Published Per Year.” WordsRated, 21 Feb. 2023, wordsrated.com/number-of-books-published-per-year-2021/.
“Workplace Racism Survey.” People of Color in Publishing, www.pocinpublishing.com/workplaceracismsurvey. Accessed 2 Oct. 2023.
Category: Featured, Nonfiction, SNHU Student