Yellowface

This book is about the toxicity of white fragility. It's about white fragility as denial, as egoic defence, as individualistic selfishness. And its genius is that it gets in the head of white readers and shows them a mirror.

As a white reader, Yellowface had me subconsciously constantly comparing myself with Juniper, as if to reassure myself I could see and understand her racism and wasn't as racist a white woman as her. In other words, by writing from a white villian perspective, but a white villain that is JUST relatable enough to lower middle class/working class white “sjws” like myself, the book perfectly situates itself to calibrate your internalised norms and learn what racism looks like from your perspective AS THE PERPETRATOR.

As a child of parents who were essentially neoorientalists who idealised and fetishised Asian cultures, I have spent time trying to unlearn. As I child I would relish attention and validation from others when I was able to astonish them with my understanding of other cultures. This white person's understanding of non-white culutral information became a vehicle for ego gratification. I think I'm doing better now. But as an adult who retains interest in global cinema and literature, as well as being a BTS ARMY, I am in intercultural spaces where I am constantly questioning myself to find what else I need to unlearn.
I have a pretty constant internal dialogue which compares my behaviours to those of weiboos, koreaboos, white Geoffs with yellow fever, anime enthusiasts, white Buddhists, and my parents, to make sure I am nowhere near what they represent. In other words I do what many of us do, I engage in analysis of degrees of racism, problematic behaviour, and political appropriateness in a process that appears infinite. To assume it's not an infinite iterative process is to accept a level of internal failure or harm to others of which you are prepared to be ignorant of, or ignore and tolerate. I guess that's where the white fragility comes in. White fragility assumes there are boundaries to racism, assumes the process of self-reflection is discrete, and that discomfort does not need to be ongoing, does not need to be personal.

I have had to check myself when writing tweets, when I realised my twitter account didn't have any clues to my ethnicity and I was going on antiracist rants in a way that other accounts might assume I was a POC. Context is important. Authorship identity is important. This is the most obvious message of Yellowface. I see my adult desire to do the right thing battling with my childhood desire for validation in a way that is scary sometimes, and also scarily not unlike June's. This gets at the point of Kuang's book, or one of them.

I found the character of Juniper an ugly soul - cold, selfish, oblivious, almost a caricature. Juniper is an objectively terrible person, BUT at the same time she retains elements of familiarity.
I could relate to Juniper's experiences of financial hardship/frustrated envy at the seemingly arbitrary wealth of others, feel the dismissal of powerful people who assume you are boring, physically unattractive white porridge. As a white woman who is not sexually attractive, you have no value. As a well-educated white woman you were used to throwing around your privilege in highschool and university and now as you've aged, you've become invisible.
Juniper is ignorant, and ignores racism, while assuming its boundaries. And this assumption is in the service of a deep reflex of self-preservation against insecurity and anxiety. Juniper is messed up. But her narration contains gems like “My heart's pounding so hard I can feel it in my boobs” and can simultaneously mock references to Barthes and Baudrillard for dated faux-literati schtick. Like I said, Kuang retains that skerrick of relatability in Juniper. Kuang somehow manages to bring Juniper back from the brink of caricature while retaining the horror that will provide the perfect aversive conditioning for its readers to maybe do those subconscious internal calibrations required to undo their own white fragility. I guess this is the power of good satire.

One very effective way Kuang appears to do this is by illustrating the process of Juniper's internal doubts which she then buries and dismisses through excuses and external validation often with the popular self-help self-actualisation girl-boss attitudes and white feminist platitudes common to women in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. The book shows how Juniper is capable of identifying the racism, but buries her knowledge with greed, envy, fear of her own distress and anxiety and incapacity to sit with that anxiety and discomfort. Juniper hates other people because she finds herself lacking and hates herself for it, but lacks the courage to embrace the discomfort of growth. That's white fragility right there.

Aside from its depiction of white fragility, another confirmation this book is targetted at educated white millennials (ie: me): the plot occurs on twitter and Kuang's Juniper refers to the “babies” on tiktok. As an aside, reading this book during the death throes of Twitter (X?) makes it feel like important documentation, a timecapsule if you will, of the zeitgeist of cultural discourse on adult social media for the last 15 years. Seeing this era distilled on the page so accurately is a sure-fire sign the discourse has chewed through the life of a cultural phenomenon, is ready to excrete it out, and get is teeth on the next thing. Although we are witnessing its end as I write this, Twitter is a vivid and dynamic part of the heart of this novel. Kuang aptly understands that to depict the call-out culture of universal culpability, that of “no-one is above accusations of prejudice, racism, homophobia” without Twitter, would be like describing alphabet spaghetti without the soup.

What else about Kuang's choices did I appreciate? The genius double-bluff on queer-baiting.

What did I not like? The brief inclusion of the horrific ghost stories of necrophilia and women sexual slaves. What did it really add? Juniper's perverse fetishistic voyeurism had already been established.

Kuang is fierce and scathing in this book. You can see her taking aim at plenty of real-life literary names if you're at all familiar with literary discourse of the last 20 years. Margaret Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates are the most obvious examples, but you can sense Kuang channeling years of personal experience in the cultural and literary elite as an Athena Liu-esque writer and being self-aware about her own flaws, privileges, and failings. She's received criticism for writing about East Asian history outside her scope of personal experience as an American, as well as coming from a massively financially privileged background. It's meta!
I recommend watching Youtubers WithCindy, The Poptimist, and BooksandBao for a deeper exploration of the above.
This is a FANTASTIC pick for a bookclub and would be amazing on a school or college curriculum because there is just so much to talk about with this book.