How far would you go to achieve your dream?

How much would you lie in order to publish your book?

Athena Liu has it all: a successful debut novel with one of the ‘Big Five’ publishers, accelerating sales, multiple book and TV deals, the admiration of thousands of readers, a gorgeous apartment, and a great life. She also has a friend – a not-so-successful writer to say the least – June Hayward. June does not have it all. Instead, she has a debut novel that flopped and could not even get a paperback print, an unfulfilling job, and an overall unsatisfactory life. But she too has a friend to whom blame it all on: Athena.

One night, the two friends find themselves in Athena’s apartment celebrating her latest deal with Netflix, when she tragically and unexpectedly dies after a pancake-eating contest. June is left behind as a witness; not just as the witness of the accident, but as the only witness of an unpublished, freshly finished manuscript that Athena had never revealed to anyone but her.

June decides to take that manuscript and to take back everything Athena has allegedly stolen from her. Athena’s novel is about the history of the Chinese labour and its role in the First World War. And while this would never have been one of June’s ideas for a book, she decides to polish the manuscript and make it acceptable for publishing under her name. I found many moments surprised asking myself: How is she going to pull this off? This was only the first one.  

June finds herself drawn into this manuscript, as she tells us, putting in countless hours to edit, write, rewrite, and delete parts, in order to make it her own. June now becomes the co-owner of it. After some thought and consideration of Athena’s memory, June convinces herself to send the edited manuscript to her publisher. Suddenly, she finds herself at the centre of publishing industry attention, between bidding wars, advance deals, and publicity hype. June publishes the manuscript as her own, titled The Last Front, and finds her way out of the margins and in the spotlight as a successful writer.

From the beginning of the novel, June’s goal is to convince us, but mostly herself, how unfairly she has been treated as a white writer. And this is where my suspicions on June’s untrustworthiness took shape. She habitually attributes Athena’s success to her Asian background. There are moments where she recognises Athena’s talent for writing, but still to June it is because of Athena’s background that her stories have something different to say, something that makes them stand out, something that all publishers are looking for: yes, you guessed it, diversity. June’s maniacal obsession with blaming her failures on her friend makes her not just questionable as a person, but unreliable as a narrator. Similarly, June’s conviction that reverse racial profiling is one of the main reasons she is failing is frustrating to follow. But on that note, it made me look forward to her downfall.

It is revealed to us that Athena is pigeonholed into writing stories based on trauma and focused entirely on her Asian background, even though she proves multiple times that she is capable to write a variety of stories. Athena is wanted by the publishing world only as long as she fulfils the role of a ‘diverse’ writer.

Yellowface unmasks how the publishing industry seems to change the meaning of diversity almost daily. While Athena would likely have been praised for her courage to share traumatic stories of a marginalised culture, June is told to edit the manuscript into something more fitting for a wider audience. June tells us that “the new version [of the manuscript] is universally more relatable, a story that anyone can see themselves in.” But the editing the manuscript to claim more relatability and to fit a wider audience overtakes the historical significance of the battle she decides to write her novel on.

The contradictory impulses of the publishing industry, in combination with June’s desperation to be recognised, and not to remain in the shadows as a white writer with nothing new to say, makes her constantly justify her actions, in hopes that readers will understand her and support her. And while literature students continue to ponder and debate over the question ‘if the author should be separated from their work’, the publishing industry squarely depends on the identity of the authors, calculating how they will push their story in the name of ‘diversity’ (sales).

As a reader, I found myself constantly questioning June’s ethics behind her decisions. However, her thriller-esque narration made it impossible for me to predict what will follow next. During certain moments, I would also catch myself hoping for her manuscript to be a huge success. But more often than not, I found myself hoping to get what she deserves – backlash. The paradoxical but also fascinating element of this novel is the unlikability of the protagonist. Not because of her insecurities – this is probably the only thing that humanises her – but because of her obliviousness in the face of ‘what wouldn’t I do to be published.’ A big part of publishing is marketing and branding, and Kuang makes sure that we get a taste of how this works and how it affects writers.

When June is asked by the marketing team about her background, she becomes defensive, since she believes that everyone should have the ability to write any story they want. Otherwise, it would be censorship. “They can trust the words on the page” she says. However, in less than a page, June’s mindset takes a whole different turn. The marketing team is concerned about how she is “positioned” as a writer of a book that talks about Chinese Labour and World War I. And from an indifferent– as June is convinced for herself – white woman she becomes “wordly.” She is encouraged to use her full first name, which would make the readers interested in her and would “highlight all the different places” she has lived, adding to her profile as a writer. Thus, Juniper is born. It gets better. Juniper is also advised to publish under her middle name, Song, instead of her last name, Hayward. In one page, Kuang, underlines the double-edged knife of ‘branding’ in the publishing industry, especially as ‘ethnically ambiguous.’ Juniper’s teams both want to make her background transparent to the readers, while on the other hand they commend the ambiguous ‘uniqueness’ of her name that helps check off ‘diversity’ on their to-do list. 

After this meeting, we have to listen to Juniper telling us – almost confessing to us – that what she did is not a type of “fraud;” she never lied about her name. Only, now it also has become her brand. This will give her the opportunity that the last name Hayward was unable to deliver. That is, until the next obstacle appears for her. When editorial assistant Candice Lee suggests hiring a sensitivity reader to avoid future scrutiny, Juniper once more jumps to the conclusion that there are people questioning her authenticity for no valid reason.

Juniper insists that “[hiring a sensitivity reader] is a nice way to avoid getting dragged on Twitter.” The role of sensitivity readers is actually to monitor racism, conscious or unconscious, but still, it does not take long for the editor to remove Candice from the project after Juniper expresses her strong disagreement. Through this example, the author depicts how easy it is to ignore reasonable requests of checking the quality of representation in novels. Candice become one more point to check off their to-do list to make the journey to publishing The Last Front as smooth as ever.

After Athena is gone, and then Candice, Juniper now turns blame for her writing career onto the Internet. One cannot forget the importance of social media in the process of publishing a book, and Kuang does not either. “Reputations in publishing are built and destroyed, constantly, online” Juniper declares. From defending the quality of her work, Juniper believes that the comments online, the reviews, the bullying, cancel culture, and hype culture are now the defining elements of the quality of her book. She becomes the self-fulfilled version of a victim to online threats and Twitter leeching. Social media becomes Juniper’s new obsession and justification as to why she cannot flourish as a writer, while trying to convince us of her choices and the ‘morality’ behind them.

Yellowface successfully manages to reveal the problematic aspects behind the publishing industry and how ignorantly it can grapple with diversity. It simultaneously depicts a character who is willingly blind to immoral nature of her actions, blaming all the misery on being overlooked as a writer because of her background, the overshadowing success of her friend, the different facets of identity politics in publishing that keep her down. Although it is a work of fiction, Yellowface, frames the reality of publishing and its pitfalls, while still underlining how we would do anything to be a part of it.