Yellowface
by R. F. Kuangcontemporary fiction metafiction
Reviewed on: 5th August 2025.
June Hayward is a liar.
Well, obviously; when her friend and successful Chinese-American writer Athena Liu dies in a freak accident, June steals her unpublished manuscript on the Chinese Labour Corps of World War I, edits it, and publishes it as her own original creation, quickly becoming a rising star in the literature world. But that’s hardly the key event that made her into a liar. June Hayward was a liar well before her venture into plagiarism.
She consistently expresses contradictory beliefs about her life, her and Athena’s work, and the publishing business; she just never really stops to catch her own biases and obvious contradictions. This is not to say her delusions have absolutely no basis in reality; if anything, inconsistency is one easy way to flirt with the truth in one way or another. June is quite explicitly smitten by Athena’s persona and her talent. At the same time, she laments Athena is only successful because of her ethnicity and tokenism more than the quality of her writing. June blames her own lack of success due to not having an appealing background in a business where winners are chosen rather than made. At the same time, she becomes an overnight success when she passes Athena’s work for her own. There are too many examples to list, if only she could see them.
June Hayward is a liar and, aside from rare guilt-induced flashes of honesty, she remains a liar until the bitter end. This is a story about someone you can only pity, then despise, then pity again.
(The plot also contains significant meta commentary on the publishing industry and social media; As someone who knows very little about the former and tries to avoid the latter, I don’t have much to say about that angle.)