[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Who gets to write about what? What counts as cultural appropriation in literature? Those questions have occupied the publishing world for a while now, coming to focus with the scandals surrounding the novel, American Dirt, a story written by a white woman that critics noted got a lot wrong about Mexican culture.

Critically acclaimed novelist, R.F. Kuang, tackled these issues head-on in her fifth novel, Yellowface. The protagonist is June, a young white author whose debut novel about sisterhood didn't really take off. Meanwhile, her friend from college, Athena, has become a literary superstar, writing novels focused on her own Asian American heritage. June is desperately envious of Athena, so one night when the pair together, Athena chokes to death while eating, and before anyone notices, June steals Athena's latest manuscript. After editing and completing it, passes it off as her own.

The novel within this novel is called The Last Front, a historical epic about Chinese laborers in World War I. June Hayward drops her last name and changes her pen name to Juniper Song and gets a new ethnically ambiguous author photo. The book is a hit, but soon readers begin to question whether June really wrote the novel. When a social media account under the name @Athena'sGhost starts taunting June publicly with a lot of detail, June herself begins to wonder if Athena is really dead after all. Yellowface was our October Get Lit With All Of It Book Club selection. We had a packed house at our sold-out event with our partners at the NYPL, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library Branch. Thanks to everybody who came out. Here's my conversation with R.F. Kuang.

[Music]

Alison Stewart: You wrote this novel during the pandemic in a time that you've referred to as your gremlin phase. What is a gremlin phase and how did it send you down the road to write this novel?

R.F. Kuang: It means a lot of doom scrolling, which I think is a phase I've returned to in this past week. I'm always very inspired by place when I write. I was living in Beijing when I started The Poppy War trilogy, and, obviously, I was in Oxford when I started writing Babel. When I wrote Yellowface, I was in an apartment in nowhere, Florida, around no friends of anything of interest. I think that the space we were all existing in was just online. There was all this weird drama every single day. I feel like on Twitter every day there was new main character that we were all supposed to make fun of.

I also realized during that phase that my attention span was just shot. I went into lockdown thinking, "I'm going to emerge from this so cultured. I'm going to read all of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. I'm going to learn French. I'm going to read Gabriel García Márquez, finally." I realized I just had no attention and no ability to finish any long piece of writing. I only had attention for tweets, basically, which is a very bad mental space to be in. The way that tweets are constructed, the punchline, the 140 character, I don't know what the limit is now. I don't recognize that site now, but I think I was thinking in the mode of what's fast and easy and very rapidly digested and that became the narrative style of the book.

Yellowface is an interesting contrast between style and content, because I'm trying to unpack all these really difficult questions about cultural appropriation and identity and the commodification of marginalization, but I'm using this style that is so sloppy and easy and reductive because that's how discourse happens on Twitter. It's sloppy and easy and reductive, and tweets are fun to read because they don't require a lot of nuance or complicated unpacking. You just immediately pick sides and start making fun of other people, so I wrote a whole book that was picking quick sides and making fun of people, but I was trying to use this reductive mode of narrative to unpack something that should not be so easily reduced.

Alison Stewart: It's like mental junk food. You can't stop eating them with tweets. You can't stop reading them. You can't stop reacting to them.

R.F. Kuang: I wrote my junk food novel, and now I'm back to the carrots and celery.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Whose voice came to you first? June, the plagiarist, or Athena, the literary darling?

R.F. Kuang: Well, the curious thing about Athena is that she doesn't have a voice and that's very intentional. I wanted to create a character that only exists in other people's accounts of her, because I was fascinated by how we do this to people all the time on social media. There are always two selves. Naomi Klein actually unpacks this very well in her new book, Doppelganger. There's this self that exists in person, this genuine authentic self, and then this self that the internet creates this narrative that might have some overlap with who you truly are, but in many cases is a projection of the audience's desires and fantasies and paranoia.

I wanted to create Athena as this empty space where desire and fantasy paranoia intersect to create a version of a person who nobody can really quite pin down. June, on the other hand, I know June. I've met June. I've met so many Junes, and the best part of June is that so much of her voice is my own, too, because it would be so easy to write a two-dimensional, stereotypical awful villain, but so boring to read because those people are very predictable and it's hard to sympathize with them.

When I sent early drafts of Yellowface to my friends, mostly other writers who are women of color, the first response everybody had was this very guilty, "I really like June. I feel like I shouldn't, but I like her." That's when I knew I had succeeded because you're supposed to sympathize with June because June's desires and fears and June's drive and her fraught relationship with writing, that's something that is almost universal in publishing. That's something that we all feel, that burning desire to succeed and also the constant looking over our shoulders at how everybody else is doing. We all have those thoughts and June is just very loud about them.

Alison Stewart: You know what's interesting? When you said Athena doesn't have a voice. I read the book when it first came out, and then I listened to it the second time. The person who reads your audiobook does give Athena a voice because she's reading June's memories of Athena. It actually was a very different experience. It was as interesting but different than reading the book for sure.

R.F. Kuang: Oh, I haven't listened to the audiobook all the way through. I've just listened to excerpts, so I actually don't know how she does Athena's voice. How would you describe it? It doesn't like me, right?

Alison Stewart: No. It doesn't sound like you.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: She gives her the faux-clipped accent that you described.

R.F. Kuang: Oh, yes, that one. When I studied abroad in the UK, I had a lot of American acquaintances who would do this fake British act-- I don't even know how to do it. I study literature and it's like you've been here for two weeks.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: At the center of the book is this idea of taking someone's ideas or words or inspiration from someone. June literally steals Athena's work from her apartment, but we learn that Athena takes people's experiences, including June's own really traumatic experience. What were some of the questions around inspiration that you wanted to interrogate in this novel?

R.F. Kuang: It just so happened that after Yellowface sold, the bad art friend story broke. For the people going through that story, I feel very bad for them, but on the publishing side, we were like, "This is amazing. The story has gone viral. Maybe the book will go viral, too." That opened up a lot of questions about, when is it okay to take an anecdote your friend told you or a letter your friend wrote to or anything based on things, often painful things that have happened to people close to you? If you're going to tell a story about that, then what obligation do you have to dress it up? I think where I fall is that anything is fair game for writers. We shouldn't restrict ourselves. We're writing fiction, but also don't be an ass. I don't think it's the aesthetic question of what should writers be allowed to do. It's really just how do you treat the people in your life.

Alison Stewart: What we know about Athena is from June's point of view, but we also know June is a pretty adept liar and a liar by omission, which makes for somewhat of an unreliable narrator. What is interesting and also what is challenging about writing an unreliable narrator?

R.F. Kuang: The amazing thing about writing an unreliable narrator is that you don't have to keep track of your own story. You don't have to stay consistent. June can just say whatever she wants to say and then you revert to the author cheat code answer of saying, "Well, if it's not apparent in the text, then I don't have to reveal it to you because meaning is a two-way street reader interpretation, whatever." There are all these open questions about, did June mean to let Athena die? Did she secretly not do as much as she could have to save her from those horrible pandan pancakes? Did she murder Athena? Is June being truthful about how she's representing the rest of her friendship, et cetera? Because June just says whatever she wants to, and there's so many different versions of the truth, I don't have to hold onto a singular version of the truth that I then have to defend. The truth is whatever you want it to be.

Alison Stewart: Why did you have Athena choke on a pandan pancake?

R.F. Kuang: There's a great academic answer about voicelessness and silence. Even in her last most painful moments, Athena, she can't even cry for help. She doesn't get to say anything for the rest of the text. She only has words put in her mouth, and this is a great retroactive answer. In the moment, I was just thinking, "What's the crazy way to die? What am I afraid of?" I don't know when this started, but since college, I think, I've been so afraid of choking to death in my own room because sometimes I would eat ramen in my dorm room, and I didn't have a roommate, and I thought, "If I choke right now, nobody will save me."

Because grown adults normally don't have a problem chewing and swallowing their food, but it freaks me out. My fiance and I were in a long-distance relationship for a long time, and we would call each other a lot, and sometimes he would call me while he's eating dinner and I would say, "We can't talk while you're eating because I'm so funny. You're going to laugh and choke to dead." [laughter] I don't know. I just have this irrational fear of choking.

There was a point where I was even Googling, can you text 911 because you can't call 911 if you're choking? I've read all about the Heimlich maneuver and how you can do it to yourself. We all have those irrational fears that we fixate on and choking just happens to be mine. Now, this is going to sound terrible if I choke to death, and this is on air and my words are memorialized forever.

Alison Stewart: We only know Athena through June's perspective. What is a criticism that June has with Athena that is purely out of envy? Then what's one criticism she has, which is probably true?

R.F. Kuang: Again, I won't tell you what's true or what's not, but you also can't separate those because it's supposed to be deliberate in the novel, deliberately ambiguous, whether Athena is as awful and obnoxious and cruel to her friends as June makes her out to be. Or if this is just June's recollection of events. One critique June has of Athena, that is probably true because it's-- It feels weird to say probably about facts that I have complete control over, but it's probably true because it's corroborated by criticisms from other Asian American characters in the text, is that Athena has very bad representation for her own community.

I think a lot of people have read the text and come away with the message that June is awful, poor Athena, but I think not as many people have picked up on the ways in which the text also criticizes figures in the Asian American community, too, and the way that we think about representation, good representation, marginalization, et cetera. Athena's issue is that she's a cultural broker and she really enjoys being a cultural broker. What I mean by this is that she's somebody who has made her reputation and gained her fame, and earned her royalties by essentially explaining Asian people to white readers.

The thing about cultural brokers is that they often go hand in hand with folks who have an intense case of the Highlander Syndrome. If you've never heard of that, it's the term that is used often in marginalized communities to describe the mentality that there can only be one. That if you're the only Asian American woman in the room, for example, and there's another one, rather than joining hands in solidarity and sticking up for each other, you view that person as a threat because now you're no longer special. There's two of you. You're no longer the unique one.

This is a threat to Athena, especially, because if she's the cultural broker and she gets her cultural cachet by speaking up on behalf of all the other Asians, then it is a threat to her to have somebody challenge her version of events. She's quite cruel to members of her own community, and I wanted to include a line about how she actively rejects younger Asian American authors who reach out to her for help and advice because she's used to being the only one. This is a mentality that we've talked a lot about in Asian American communities. I think most people are aware of this and have gone really good about it, but it's good to have at the forefront of your mind.

Alison Stewart: The work in question that June takes and presents as her own is the last front about the Chinese Labor Corps and its importance in World War I. How did you learn about it?

R.F. Kuang: I studied Asian American history, so I knew, but in the process of writing the novel, I found that it was actually very difficult to find secondary source information about it. It's not just a story that's been neglected in fiction, it's a story that's been largely neglected in history proper as well. I think there are other people working on this topic in fiction and nonfiction now.

People have also asked me, "Are you going to write the last front story?" I once toyed with the idea of doing it, but now I think the concept is just ruined for me because it's never good to write a novel with your angriest critics in the back of your head, and if I were working on the last front, all I could think about is June's like, "Oh, this is great. This is just historical trauma porn. This is fantastic for a liberal sob story." The topic is ruined for me.

Alison Stewart: Your book touches on two big conversations in media, who writes what and who owns a story? June is this white woman writing about Chinese laborers and then the Twitterati come down on her because of that, and that argument has been made in real life. We know it has. On the other side, does this mean Latinx people can't write about Black people and Black people can't write about East Indian people?

We had a really thoughtful comment from one of our book club members who wrote to us on Instagram, "I'm Asian and happy to represent my people, of course, but also the recent climate in diversity is making us a bit caged in if all we can do is tell our stories and nothing else. I appreciate clients being a lot more conscious, but I'm also feeling it has gone a bit too far because if we tell our stories only, is it really diversity? I became creative to do a lot more than what I am and what I know by default. In this sense, it was a very interesting read. I assumed June to be a villain, and she is, but she's a lot more complex than just that." What's your reaction to that?

R.F. Kuang: I agree completely with that statement. My line on who gets to write what basically is that I find this discourse around permissions and staying in your own lane and who shouldn't write what sort of identity, incredibly limiting. It was never the right approach to begin with, this question of who's authentic enough? Because then the question also entails a separate question of, who's deciding, who are these gatekeepers? Who are these arbiters of authenticity? When you start using language, who gets to tell what kind of story?

More often than not, it backfires on marginalized voices and create situations where, for instance, Asian American authors are told that they should only write about immigrant trauma, or write novels in the vein of Amy Tan. Some of us just want to write about sexy aliens in space. Not me. I've never written anything sexy or involving aliens, but I believe quite strongly that writers should get to write about whatever we want.

That's the point of fiction, really, to imagine outside of your own perspective, to try to walk in the shoes of another and to broaden your moral horizons. The question should really be disambiguated into two separate approaches when we're thinking about instances like American dirt. I think the two questions are, first, who's getting paid to write about what? Whose voices are being elevated? Who is the industry rewarding? Because that's a very separate question from permissions. Also iif you are writing about a community that is not your own, did you do it well?

Alison Stewart: Did you do a good job?

R.F. Kuang: It's a question of craft. Did you do your research? Are you just uncritically replicating racist trips from the past, or are you in conversation with them? Are you writing fully fleshed-out three-dimensional human beings, or are you writing caricatures? These are issues of craft, not issues of some arbitrary standard of authenticity.

Alison Stewart: You are listening to my conversation with the author, R.F. Kuang, about her novel, Yellowface. It was our October The Get Lit with All of It Bookclub. We'll have more with Rebecca and questions from our audience after a quick break. This is All Of It.

[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC, I'm Alison Stewart. We continue my conversation with R.F. Kuang, author of the new novel, Yellowface. We spent the month reading it for our Get Lit with All Of It Bookclub, and thanks to our partners at the New York Public Library, 10,698 readers were able to check out an e-copy of the novel to read along with us. As usual, our audience had some really great questions for the author. You'll hear that in a moment, but first, here's more of my conversation with R.F. Kuang.

[music]

Alison Stewart: You really pull the curtain back on the publishing industry in this novel. How was that navigating it with your own team and the immediate response from people in the industry?

R.F. Kuang: I don't know if it's just the unique cast of characters who are on my team, but I never felt restricted or censored. I felt like everybody went into goblin mode with me and were just egging me on, like, "Go crazy. I have more gossip for you maybe put this in." It was just a tremendous amount of fun. I think my agent actually had more concerns about putting the book on submission. She was actually very terrified that it was going to burn bridges with exactly the people I need to like me if I'm going to keep publishing books. Once it got to my team at HarperCollins, it was like, "Okay, let's rub our hands together gleefully and just all collectively lose our heads."

Alison Stewart: Social media plays such a big part in the book, but not a lot of TikTok in the book, and book talk has become so huge. How have you seen book talk change the publishing landscape since you've been in it?

R.F. Kuang: When I went to Taiwan over the summer, I couldn't log into TikTok because I couldn't access my US phone number anymore, so I deleted the app, and then when I came back to the States, I just never downloaded the app again. Suddenly, my skin is clear, I have time to run in the morning. I cook nice recipes from The New York Times cooking app. I'm reading so many more novels. I don't know what's going on on book talk, and actually, I don't think I need to.

My stance on book talk and publishing and promotion has always been that's a reader's space and it's fantastic that books go viral, and that readers make recommendations to each other. I think it actually never really goes well when authors try to be too present on book talking, show their own goods. I think especially the younger cohort of readers on TikTok can-- I think they really appreciate genuineness and authenticity.

There's a difference between watching a video of somebody genuinely recommending a book because it made them actually cry. That's something that would make me want to buy a book, but when it's an author doing a dance and trying to seem like 20 years younger than they are, I feel like that's just very off-putting. I feel that I don't need to be on book talk and authors don't need to, and probably in many cases should not be on book talk.

Alison Stewart: Are you on any social media? Is there one that you like? I know we have done some Instagramming.

R.F. Kuang: I get to be on Instagram for 30 minutes a day and the rest of the time my skin is clear and I go on runs and I do my homework.

Alison Stewart: Let's take some questions from the audience. Who's got a question?

Participant 1: Hi. I was wondering, Rebecca, I know that you're a Ph.D. student and you still write books almost every year, and I was wondering what your time management is like, and if you could share any tips for the rest of us who don't do either of that.

Alison Stewart: 30 minutes on Instagram?

R.F. Kuang: No seriously. You don't need to delete all your social media apps, but there's this app I use called Freedom that blocks a lot of apps on your phone for you and you can create block lists and carve out segments of time for yourself when you are allowed to be on Instagram so you don't feel completely detached. That has saved me because there's so many low-energy moments during the day where I'm like, "Oh, let me just watch some TikTok videos," and I literally can't because of my phone settings. Do your future self a favor and think about that app.

The other thing I do is I am very protective of my most productive hours of the day, and for me, that's after I've had my morning run and before lunch. I don't take meetings, I don't take phone calls, I put my phone in another room. It's a bit frustrating for my team in the UK who are five hours ahead and really need to take meetings during the morning, but if you're insistent enough, people will stay up until 10:00 PM to have a meeting with you. I don't know what that looks like for you, but think about when am I able to do my best work and how do I make sure I have access to that time every single day with no distractions?

Alison Stewart: Thank you for the question. Over here, you have a question?

Participant 2: I just wanted to ask because I'm a really huge fan of both Babel and The Poppy Wars, and just to be honest, I'm not a fantasy person, but I fell in love with The Poppy Wars honestly because of the nuances you put around. Usually when you read about fantasy, it's fairies and forests and that's not interesting to me, but for Poppy Wars specifically, like, how did you even come up with the idea to mesh real-world conversations around colorism, racism, classism, the caste system, for example, in The Poppy War. How were you able to come up with the idea to mesh fake world with real world if that makes sense?

Alison Stewart: Sure, that makes sense.

R.F. Kuang: That's a wonderful question. I think a parallel question that people have asked me before is, are you ever going to write a book that is a political and doesn't deal with colonialism, doesn't deal with these painful histories? The answer is that there is, in fact, no completely neutral standpoint from which to write. There is no story that doesn't take a position on race and colonialism and all other intersections of dynamics of power, because we are all embodied people. Typically when somebody makes reference to any a apolitical book, it's like a sword and sorcery fantasy novel set in medieval England with white guys running around with swords.

That comes with its own historical baggage. It's just that we're all so conditioned to think that this is the neutral default of what a normal protagonist looks like that we don't view those stories as political even though they very much are. When I was writing my first novel, I am an Asian American woman, I do have Chinese heritage. The very painful events of China's 20th century deeply impacted my family. They have impacted every Chinese person in Chinese American life. There is no question of skirting around those topics. That's just my lived reality and the topics that I choose to unpack through my fiction.

Rayda: Hi, I'm Rayda. You are such a huge inspiration for other Asian American women of color like myself who want to get into writing. My particular question I wanted to ask, given your studies and history and your general engagement with academia, how does the archiving process when you're collecting ideas for your writing, how do you go about consolidating that exactly when you're archiving ideas, research? Do you have a particular way of organizing your inspiration that we could learn more from?

R.F. Kuang: We don't have hours to do a seminar on the archives. I'll say very quickly, here's one approach that works very well for me. If I'm writing about a historical period like 1830s London, for instance, I don't just do a lot of reading in contemporary histories of Victorian London. I try to read sources from that period, especially I like to read fiction from that period, that's why I was reading so much Dickens that now I feel that Charlie haunts me everywhere I go when I was writing Babel. Because it's one thing to read a text published in 2010 that tells you, like, oh this is the slang they were using, this is the food they were eating, et cetera.

I'm less interested in what we're able to uncover in the present and more in how people in the past saw themselves. How were they talking about each other? In fact, what racial stereotypes were they using? What slang were they using? What is the diction, and the vernacular, and the rhythm of Dickens' sentences? Those informed Babel a lot more than some of the very dry comprehensive histories written in the present.

Alison Stewart: Do we have any other questions? Over here.

Cate: Hi, I'm Cate. I'm also a student in Chinese history so I really loved your works because they're kind of like what I'm such a huge nerd about. I had a question on how you make such traumatic and awful historical events palatable in the way that an audience can read it but not palatable enough that you are reducing how horrible and traumatic these things could be and also maintaining, I guess, the authenticity of-- I'm just asking how you balance being a scholar and also a creative at the same time without being too every [unintelligible 00:29:57] or too scholarly and what not?

R.F. Kuang: That's a great question. I think the first part of the question really asks about historical pain and trauma and how you represent it. It's actually on the forefront of my mind because I'm teaching Asian American history this semester. I had one of my advisors in the ethnicity, race, and migration program sit in on my section to give me teaching feedback. What happened was that we were reading Carlos Bulosan's, Americas In the Heart, which discusses very painful periods of Filipino-American history. I had a student with Filipino heritage who was getting visibly quite worked up and upset, not at anybody in the discussion, but at the history we were discussing.

Afterwards, my professor told me, sometimes it's okay to sit with that pain because studying Asian American history in many cases just is a study of pain and trauma. It's a history of exclusion and discrimination and hate crimes and violence, and these are things you can't look away from. I think recognizing this is a good way to think about how I've been approaching it through my fiction which is not to assume that there is some neutral default standpoint where you don't have to deal with the pain but to recognize the pain is always with you. It's a part of your history. It doesn't do to try to keep it at arm's length because those ghosts pop up when you least expect it, so it's better to face them head-on.

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with author, R.F. Kuang from our October Get Lit with All Of It Bookclub event. We spent the month reading her novel, Yellowface.

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