R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface, the Asian Conglomerate and the Commercialisation of Diasporic Identity
In 2018, when Crazy Rich Asians was first released to cinemas, a small outcry of criticism emerged amid the applause for the ostensible Asian representation the film was marketed as. I suppose the very phrasing of ‘Asian representation’ divulges the problematic zeitgeist within which the film was developed; despite the pluralistic nature of modern Asia, home to more than two thousand ethnicities and linguistic groups, the actor eventually selected as the male lead was the biracial, half-English Henry Golding. Moreover, the Malay and Indian populations of Singapore, which constitute the second and third largest ethnic groups domestically, were entirely unrepresented. Fatima Bhutto of the Guardian viciously disparaged the film as ‘lumping together 48 countries with distinct cultures, languages, and histories’, and she couldn’t be more right.
This construction of an Asian conglomerate, or the viewing of Asian communities as a singular entity, devoid of cultural variation and ethnic differentiation, was recently exposed through Rebecca F. Kuang’s metafictive, satirical novel Yellowface, published in 2023. After all, the extensive media coverage of Crazy Rich Asians and Hollywood in general provides a limited capacity for accountability and media repercussions when considering bad casting decisions. Still, the significantly more opaque publishing industry has more skeletons in the closet that have gone unconfessed. Kuang’s scathing critique of the pernicious practices that publishing harnesses to alienate diasporic authors who defy the box of cultural trauma that they are supposed to inhabit is at once liberating and pertinent, but how?
Homogenising Asian Experience in Yellowface
Yellowface is a rare piece of fiction in that it is able to participate in literary discourse extremely pragmatically and directly. Diegetically, the ease with which Athena Liu, the universally adored foil character to the narrator of June Hayward, a struggling White author who attended Yale alongside Athena, can monopolise Asian-American storytelling is a testament to the way publishing views one Asian author as a justifiable, satisfactory representation of all. That, Kuang insinuates, is the reason that June’s literary yellowface and insertion into this niche after Athena’s death is so effortless; to your everyday reader (and publishing giant, it seems), Juniper Song is the same as her best friend who just passed from choking on a pandan pancake, a thought as terrifying as it is laughable. They are both Asian; what difference could there possibly be between them?
Interestingly, Athena, before her death at least, is portrayed as both a beneficiary and victim of this homogenisation of Asian identity. Through June’s admittedly unreliable veil of green-eyed jealousy, Athena both ‘steals’ stories from Korean war veterans and is constrained from writing about anything else other than her ethnicity and topics concerning her history; ‘every time she tried to branch out to new projects, they kept insisting that Asian was her brand, was what her audience expected.’ The legacy of this ethnic oversimplification, then, is a dispassionate commodification of Asian experiences. It echoes back to colonial fetishisation of ‘Orientalism’, where these stories, whether of suffering or happiness, hardship or celebration, are systemically othered, exclusively marketed as ‘exotic’ to appeal to mainstream audiences.
Manipulating the Asian Author
What this does to the Asian writer putting these stories to the page is therefore a tragic self-alienation; they, most likely a privileged individual generations removed from historical hardship, are profiting off a story that they are no more connected to than Western narratives. Arguably, they could be more estranged from their familial background than from the nationality that they have embraced. This perversion of identity politics galvanises the psychological self-fragmentation of the diasporic writer; they are at once Asian, but they are not, and they write about Asian experiences as if they were lived. Indeed, Athena, throughout Yellowface, is described as being caught in this mousetrap of imposter syndrome, unable to escape, even in death.
The ambiguity of whether Athena benefits or is subjugated by the publishing industry is the crux of why its commercial exploitation of Asian voices is so successful. Kuang satirises Athena's perception that ‘This industry is built on silencing us, stomping us into the ground, and hurling money at white people to produce racist stereotypes of us’, considering Athena’s self-alienation and general dislikeability, ironically because of her unsympathetic, unattainable success. Kuang thus diegetically manipulates the grotesque disproportion between Athena’s victories and her comparative effort; sure, literature is often a game of luck, not merely talent, due to its oversaturation, but Athena’s privileges very clearly overreach from the much-romanticized view of a writer being stumbled upon by a literary agent astonished at their good luck for plucking such an unblemished flower from a wide, grassy field. Perhaps there is a valid explanation of how June so easily rationalises and spins ‘that narrative of personal resentment and disillusionment with a paranoid narrative about other people who are getting opportunities that you think should belong to you’ (Kuang). It is easy to blame others, as race is an easy culprit.
The Diaspora’s Dissonant Figurehead
Indeed, every detective’s clue leads back to the publishing industry and its insidious hegemonies having selected Athena as their poster child for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and there's nothing much anyone can do about it, June especially. Of course, that is not to say that Athena is undeserving; unlike the pervasive misconceptions surrounding affirmative action and corporate inclusion strategies, it is a dangerous false dichotomy to believe that she would either be an incompetent writer only aided by DEI or a genius author of her own accord, in the same way that a female politician gaining a seat through parliamentary quotas would never be inept at her profession. However cliched, that bipartition of writers into such categories subscribes to the myth of meritocracy persistent in the literary spaces of the status quo.
Therefore, I merely comment that there certainly exists a damning tradeoff for Asian literary authenticity. If your work is appreciated not in isolation but as a representation of your entire heritage, that would undeniably pressure you to fit some sort of sculpture’s mold, to adapt to preconceived notions of ‘Asian-ness’ so that your commercial legacy can be secured. If Athena’s employer, which is essentially what publishing companies are for writers, ‘treated her like a museum’, there is very little she can do to fight it, a real experience ubiquitous for Asian authors as Kuang criticises. Only those that ignore the systems that set Asian writers up for failure can believe that the latter possess total culpability for succumbing to such immense pressures. Defiance and subversion are hard at the top, when Everest’s gales can so effortlessly blow you down.
Where The Culpability Leads
Thus, it is counterproductive and unintuitive to blame the Asian authors that do exploit their identity poetics to win within a machinery conflated with systemic, racial exclusion. This self-commercialisation can be universalised as well, and is not limited to Asian writing; Monica Arac de Nyeko, the first Ugandan to win the Caine Prize for African Writing, remarks that ‘As an African writer, if you are not writing about things like war and famine your authenticity is questioned.’
In the same way, if it is true that ‘They never let [Athena] talk about anything other than being an immigrant, other than the fact that half her family died in Cambodia, that her dad killed himself on the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen’, then commercialising all of that history is inevitable collateral damage. June herself queries Juvenalianly, ‘Racial trauma sells, right?’ Indeed, June, indeed it does, just like how Crazy Rich Asians is engorging itself at the unrepentant box office, turning away from its cultural indiscretions.
Written by: Alice Feng
