★★★★☆ Becoming evil

Yellowface

RF Kuang

Juniper Song Hayward, the first-person protagonist (dare I call her a "hero"?) of R.F. Kuang's Yellowface, is a thief who gets caught. She steals a draft novel from her best friend Athena Liu, who has just choked to death, revises it, and publishes it as her own. It is wildly successful, and June is now wealthy and famous. But then, in a slow-rolling disaster, she gets caught and exposed. (The publisher's blurb lays out the entire plot of Yellowface, so I can write all that without much worry of spoiling.)

It is how June reacts that really makes the story for me. She defies her detractors. She doubles down on defiance. She is not a picture of conventional courage, being fragile and stressed out -- she spends much of the book freaking out -- but to my mind that only underscores her strength of character.

Let there be no mistake -- June is evil. She becomes a horrible person who behaves badly out of indefensible and selfish motives. For instance, this happens

I used to think that mean teachers were a special kind of monster, but it turns out that cruelty comes naturally. Also, it’s fun.

June is NOT a nice person.

It will not have escaped you that the names June Hayward and Athena Liu, suggest a white woman stealing from a Chinese-American one. And the story she steals concerns the Chinese, "an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers to the British and French war efforts during World War I" as the publishers describe it. Indeed, it is clear both from the title Yellowface and from R.F. Kuang's writings about the book (see also here) that in her mind, the racial issue is what Yellowface is ABOUT.

But that was not what interested me most. It was the arguably more universal story of how evil develops. Yellowface is not, by the way, the story of a Manichaean Good vs Evil struggle. No one in this book is especially good. Indeed, almost everyone is awful. (Yellowface doubles as an exposé of the horrors of the publishing industry.) You will form your own opinions of their relative awfulness, and I see no point in parsing my complicated feelings out in this review.

So, an exciting, fast-moving and intriguingly weird horror story of an evil woman. It'll stir you up.

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