BOOK REVIEW: Yellowface – RF Kuang: Many Shades of Womanhood

I’m hitting some excellent books this year. I don’t know if it’s the bounty after a long period of being unable to read (due to mental health issues). Or if better books are just swimming my way. But I’m hungry for it all. Race issues, feminist tangles, narrator you love to hate – it’s all badass women. From STEMinism to Greek mythology retellings to ‘Yellowface’, my library is having it all and enjoying it. I think the last time I felt this kind of literary exhilaration was with Gone Girl (mind you, the book first and then the movie only).

I think the best books are the ones that make us feel realised. Not necessarily understood because how boring would that be, right? Realised as in seen, responded to, felt about. That’s the only mark we leave in life, don’t we? That others’ lives were impacted in different ways – good, bad and everything in between. Our obituaries are literally curations of these impacts.

I’m coming to believe that feminist literature has to encompass all of these. I don’t want stories of brave heroines, I know the burdens of fame and ‘respect’. I don’t need to hear fantasies of perfect women; that’s just cis het male fantasy. I don’t want to be treated ‘the same’ by my oppressors; it always means that I have to shoulder their punishments along with my own wounds. I also do not want to be pedestalised because it relegates me to an object. A worship object rather than a sex object; still an object.

So give me
the narcissistic Scarlett O’Haras (Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell),
the murderous Klytemnestras (Daughters of Sparta – Claire Heywood),
the sociopathic Amazing Amys (Gone Girl – Gillian Flynn),
the passive-aggressive Asyas (The Bastard of Istanbul – Elif Shafak),
the scandalous ‘Ailment’ Aliyas (Salt Saffron – Kamila Shamsie)
the desperate Shah Rukh seekers (Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh – Shrayana Bhattacharya)
the angry Misses Militancy (Miss Militancy – Meena Kandasamy)

I hate them, I fear them, I mistrust them and I want them all. Patriarchy won’t let me express those feelings for human beings; literature is a good stand-in. I thoroughly enjoyed that ‘Yellowface’ became a woman-eat-woman saga (in a violent way, not a sexual one). It exposes the shallowness of truisms like ‘women should hold up women’ and explores the more nuanced complexities we face in navigating each other.

I suppose ‘Yellowface’ went down easier for me since I’m neither Chinese nor American/white. So I can see the parallels in my own colonial-occupied legacy without much of the painful emotion blurring my eyes while reading. I can read it. The writing is also very entertaining, which is practically a necessity now for awareness and sensitivity. Nobody wants to hear lectures about slavery and misogyny. It’s just too hard. But serve it up threaded artfully through a fast-paced story and the thoughts will come seeping into minds along with the superficial heady chase of the plot.

It’s an easy cop-out to blame it all on a book. After all, it’s just words between pages, right? Yet, the central themes of Yellowface are how powerful words are and just how easily humans closest to them – writers, editors, publishers, readers, and social commenters can be in their thrall. And that’s why even an unlikeable set of characters like June, Athena and the others feel sympathetic. They remind us of our most shameful selves.

I rather admired the author for creating that degree of sympathy for June. Just for her writing ability and not getting carried away with emotion. It was also an interesting choice to create unlikeable Asian-American characters. To me, it reads as a criticism of the pedestals that oppressor groups put marginalised communities on, in hopes of easy redemption. Perhaps Kuang may be seen as disloyal to her Chinese origins and as a white apologist. Interestingly, the central Chinese-American character also navigates the very same issues of the privileged diaspora.

People are complex and driven by very personal feelings, rather than grand causes. It’s hard to be a hero. It’s hard to be a flagbearer. And nobody wants to be the token anybody. That’s a fair stance but doesn’t sell books or popularity.

I saw some reviews that had a problem with the ending. But I finished in a kind of grim, ugly-smiling satisfaction. It was the same kind of feeling I had after Gone Girl, another unreliable narrator-protagonist. Go on, you bitches, games well played!

*If you prefer audiobooks, you can listen to YELLOWFACE by Rebecca F.Kuang on Audiobooks here.