Listening to Rebecca F Kuang talk about her hit novel Yellowface, which explores the darkest corners of professional jealousy, was enough to induce feelings of inadequacy.
The packed event at the Royal Northern College of Music was part of Manchester Literature Festival. It was primarily a chance for Kuang to talk about her Sunday Times bestselling, multi-award-winning novel Yellowface.
It tells the story of a young white novelist who passes off the work of a much-lauded Chinese-American peer as her own.
Not sated, her protagonist proceeds to dive headfirst down a spiralling trajectory of literary, cultural and racial appropriation that skewers the tokenism of diversity in the publishing industry. It’s a rare example of a novel about a young woman unravelling genre in which it isn’t a man – or her attachment to one – pulling the thread.
And it’s brilliant.
Sitting across from the Chair of Manchester City of Literature, Katie Popperwell, Kuang began by explaining that the entire event was almost cancelled when the engine of her train caught fire. She recounted her afternoon – from the flustered driver assuring them they are “not in danger but [should] get the f*** out of the carriage now”; to the question of whether mortal danger is reason enough to abandon her laptop (it’s not), and an afternoon spent stranded in Grindleford, blissfully ignoring her phone while her husband pleaded for a follow-up to “my train is on fire” from across the pond.
The whole thing is perfectly plotted, each beat a new source of (genuine) laughter, and seemingly completely spontaneous. Telling off-the-cuff anecdotes is a craft and I’m already jealous. If this weren’t enough, Kuang is working for a PhD in East Asian languages and literature at Yale.
Research might play a substantial role in her writing, but her thoughtfulness is never at the expense of being very entertaining.
Here are a few of my favourite quips:
On writing from the perspective of Yellowface’s despicable protagonist:
“I just start with all of my own intrusive thoughts.”
On what she found herself reading instead of Nabokov during lockdown:
“A tweet thread about breakfast cereal.”
On what has changed since then:
“I quit Twitter and now my skin is clear.”
On the modern tendency to reduce novels down to their representation of each character’s demographic:
“[Sally Rooney] is writing about skinny white girls in Ireland – I don’t expect a random Asian friend.”
On the second pitch for her historic fantasy novel Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, after the first sounded a bit obscure:
“Dark academia but with murder, more murder… murder on a larger scale than The Secret History.”
On the inescapability of morality in art (rounding up her thoughts on the Seventeen-Year Literature produced by the Chinese socialist government between 1949):
“You can’t spell aesthetic without ethic.”
On coming up with the idea for Yellowface:
“I don’t really believe in random strokes of genius – I believe in picking up the hammer and hacking at the words… but in my case God really did call.
“The whole plot really did plop into my skull.”
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