Unsurprisingly, TikTok is also censoring this

#worldcon #hugoawards #hugos #rebeccakuang #xiranjayzhao #tiktok

Anyway this isn't a spoiler. Yellowface is best to go in knowing that while Juniper was an awful person and unreliable narrator, Kuang herself explicitly said that every accusation in the book about what a horrible person Athena Liu was, is all true.

#Yellowface #RebeccaKuang #RFKuang

So for some reasons, I thought Yellowface was partially written with a mirror of major art events, like maybe Juniper was partially inspired by Jeff Dieschburg, and Athena was partially by Kristen Roupenian. Turned out both events only broke after the book was written and before it was published, so that's pretty prophylactic but also, fully expected behaviour in art.

I found Jeff Dieschburg comparison maybe isn't that accurate, because he's so stupid at his theft, and so much more stupid at how he handled it, that his only career choice left over is being a politician like his awful mum.

Meanwhile what's interesting about Kristen Roupenian parallel, is while I can't think of a worse fate than becoming Athena one day, this connection made me realise it could be worse, I suppose we could become Kristen Roupenian. If Athena was a slightly over the top version of people's worst assumption about writers (ha ha we can never be friends because you will just write about what I told you without permission then profit from it), Kristen Roupenian was another level of prolonged stalking, and another level of exploitation for personal gain that may or may not resulted a death. And she's still rewarded for it.

The entire thing about Kristen Roupenian was how her entire work was crafted with the strong understanding on what are the clickbaits and what will make something viral, and while the work isn't even good (like my god a 21 year old's worst like experience was a consensual bad sex, does anyone even know anyone this sheltered), it perfectly fed the particular type of publishers who are quite possibly truly lived such ridiculously easy lives. She took enough of Alexis's life to significantly interrupt Alexis's life, but completely stripping away any of Alexis's agency and just made her into a meme caricature. Almost any other work from Hashtag MeToo would've been better than this woman-exploiting-another-woman-for-self-gain thing, but anything else would be too complex and less marketable than what New Yorker Cultural/Meme leaders could profit from.

So in Yellowface it's pretty much implied that it's already really awful how Athena's entire career strategy was to claim others' suffering, alter them enough to be made into something more memeble and viral, then profit from it. Given Yellowface has quite a strong flavour to that, it's dehumanising to claim one East Asian person can claim for an entire group of people, and it's something I always had huge issues with the white-gazy, western-profitted type of "Asian narratives". It also requires someone as awful as Athena to choose to let herself to be that for personal gain.

Oh man Yellowface is so good Rebecca Kuang my hero.

#Yellowface #RebeccaKuang #RFKuang #CatPerson #KristenRoupenian

Ok fml I just wrote the longest how much I love Yellowface and then Tusky ate the whole thing. So I'm gonna just placeholder this now and keep on editing

Yellowface is solidly my favourite anything of this year, and consider I already named three BOTY so far, it's a lot. It is a unsubtle in your face satire, that's just so on point and so needed as a slice of 2020/2021, I'd say it's a cultural cornerstone of the era.

Rebecca Kuang is meta, not in a Hideo Kojima/House of Leaves kind of meta, but she understands people so well that without attempting to bait anyone, she essentially predicted how defensive people will behave about this book. The one star reviews about it are like the bonus chapters that proved Kuang's point, and because Kuang is such a skilled writer, the reviewers can't use the usual bad writing excuse, so they had to resort to "the Twitter segments are too realistic" or "Kuang just wrote too much about her own life in this". Usually the stuff that white writers get praised and five stars for. After all, white writers are praised for stealing others' lives.

As the title indicated, anti-Asian racism is one of the main theme, just maybe not The Main Theme. I'm surprised how much of it is also spot on about book culture (more superficial, reactive, and way nastier than gamer culture), the in-and-out nature of manufacturing publishing starlets, and the obsession with creating klout-chasing personal-branding elebrities.

The protagonist Juniper was a thoroughly awful person, sure. She's a bit over the top, as in I don't think any one racist narcissistic liberal white woman would be like Juniper, but take any three random users on Jezebel/AITA/Teen Vogue you'd get a completed version Juniper. She loved to be seen as good and progressive, but if she needed more than a tiny bit of effort to keep up this image she just figured going full on racist would be the easier route. Which is interesting because keeping an image is incredibly important to people like this, it's just the societal cost of being openly racist is almost nothing that it's not really a place they want to play-nice at. They just want to be given a gold star and being told how they are flawless and deserve to be centre of universe for voting for Biden and don't use the N word.

Juniper's entire self worth was she's born to be a writer. She's too precious to ever do a mere pleb job while writing on the side, she just had to have the full lifestyle of Champaign sipping next to a green plant on a vintage window sill, but as her entire understanding of real life. Yet just like the kind of people who'd make AI manuscripts and send them to Clarkesworld, she couldn't write for shit so she had to rely on plagiarism. As a wannabe writer, her vocabulary was about three hundred words, and once in a while she'd throw in a big word like "miscegenation" that she learnt from Tumblr tags and somehow believed this made her intelligent. At one point she almost attempted to write something original that's not stolen, and all she managed was an outline of a shittier version of Your Name, a shittier version of House on Fata Morgana, and Bluebeard. Consider she wasn't even thirty and already managed to publish a flop, she's ahead of the game already. Had she put in enough effort in fining her craft it's entirely possible to write something good eventually, pity that she loved the idea of being a writer more than writing.

Even with all Juniper's delusional Protagonist Syndrome, the way social media savaged her was still horrible to read. For every valid "this is racist" criticism she got, she'd receive five "ur ugly"s which gave her the full excuse to claim that the only reason people ever disagreeing with her was because she's a strong woman and others were just misogynistic. I'm sure you've also seen this played out a few times IRL.

That dumpling shop scene was amazing. As I've been in hospo for forever, let's just say that these things really do happen, and they are every bit as cringe as the fictional version.

Athena Liu was a way more interesting kinda-villain. Because the entire book was from Juniper 's narrative and Juniper was committed to smear Athena as much as she could to excuse her exploitation of Athena, almost nothing about Athena was reliable. Except it's still pretty obvious that Athena was incapable of having any Asian friends. Or any friends that's not Juniper. At some point you'd really start to question if it's because this lid can only fit that pot.

From Kuang's interviews, she explicitly stated that Athena was written as internationally the problem not the solution. Athena was the model of the Model Minority: grew up in US to wealthy professor parents, tall, skinny, pretty in a whitegazable way. If at age of nineteen Athena had no say in being used as the China Doll, by the time of Yellowface's main timeline Athena already had plenty of power to use for good. Instead, Athena placed herself in the position of only True Asian Queen, stomped on every other Asian writers as potential rivals, and basically behaved as the billionaire in a cultural trickle down economy. She's a master minmaxer who only cared about herself, and if she had to oppress the other Asians more, Athena sure delighted in it. So what if she's only going to be successful by whitegazing herself, to only write the kind of worker intended to stroke white high culture's ego about how poor Athena was rescued by white knights? Athena's all into it, as long as there's another zero onto her cheque.

I don't know if it's Kuang's intend to also somewhat concentrate on the pathological, nearly puppetshow-like obsession with US centric social justice language. It's not a secret that the only acceptable Asian according to the Internet Branding Progressives are the educated, middle class, wealthy, conventionally attractive, second gen +, entirely westernised, East Asian heritaged, Asian Americans. Per this narrative I don't think Canadians count as Americans, definitely not Central/South Americans. Sometimes offline we talk to each other in this utterly absurd language as an injoke. It still makes my skin crawl.

A lot of the discussion seems to be about "is it ok to write a fiction based on people and cultures other than us", and Yellowface isn't really about this. Kuang said it herself, yes you can and do it compassionately. Just don't be a Juniper Hayward. Or prophetically considering the real events happened after the book was written, don't be a Jeff Dieschburg. If you are going to steal the work of a Korean model shot by a Chinese photographer for a Vietnamese magazine, at least don't claim it's your original work of a Japanese beauty.

And it's absolutely cool to put too much of yourself into your work. That's a good deal better than whatever Kristen Roupenian was doing. As another massive joke of what the state of progressive literary world is, Roupenian succeeded at being a liberal starlet by stalking and violating another woman. So maybe it's really not so much about racism after all. Maybe the art/publishingsphere somehow proven that their racism isn't even their top three problems at this moment.

#Yellowface #Novel #Longpost #RebeccaKuang #RFKuang