Yellowface, Beautiful Ugly, How Translation Works (Book Title Edition)
I might have just finished the best book I'll read all year 🤩
Hello, and happy Sunday!
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang: A Provocative Satire on Cultural Appropriation
This week, I finished what might be the best book I will read this year, Yellowface by R. F. Kuang!
The book has caught my eye since it first came out. Its cover is quite in-your-face—pun intended—yet the caricatured eyes made me think it’s a playful book, maybe a chick flick.
I didn’t pick it up immediately for some reason; I tend to do that with overly marketed books, some weird form of rebellion against what bookstores think I should buy now, or my life would be incomplete. We have another book of Kuang’s on our list for this year, scheduled for May, Babel, which comes highly recommended by anyone who has read it. Maybe that’s why my subconscious brain navigated towards Yellowface.
Yellowface, by R.F. Kuang, is her latest novel, released on May 16, 2023. It’s a razor-sharp satire that touches on the complex issues of cultural appropriation, racism, and the publishing industry's inner workings. The book sparked debate and conversations beyond the cultural appropriation discussions that spawned from American Dirt, which we talked about in 2021.
Yellowface follows the exploits of jaded novelist June Hayward, a white writer who is failing to thrive at her chosen career. But when a freak accident kills literary “rising star” (and her nemesis) Athena Liu, June steals her manuscript and ethnicity, eager to have the fame she believes she’s always deserved.
June publishes the book under the pseudonym Juniper Song, allowing readers to assume she has Asian heritage. As the stolen work becomes a bestseller, June becomes entangled in lies and faces online cancellation from the public and cyberbullying.
Beyond the bold and revealing topic, especially on the publishing industry and its cutthroat nature, I appreciated the pacing and incisiveness of the narrative. Every sentence is deliberate, the sentences pointed and charged, making it hard to put down. The book offers a valid question about culture appropriation as it’s been banded around for a while now, and the rights authors have to write about cultures and nationalities other than their own.
“The truth is fluid, there is always another way to spin the story.”
― R.F. Kuang, Yellowface
At the same time, while we’re still fighting the good fight against discrimination and racism, the publishing industry is astute in acknowledging what sells, so they’re overplaying the minority card with the authors they choose to publish. June, the white cis female character above, was encouraged by her publisher to call herself Song, thus bringing ambiguity and sowing the potential of Asian descent in her identity. While it’s a cheap trick and a foul thing to do, I can see this plausibly happening.
The question becomes, ‘Is a writer entitled to write from a character’s point of view that belongs to a different culture, race, environment altogether?’ What is writing, if not an exercise in imagination, living in someone else’s shoes, empathising with their world experience?
As with any first-person narration, the intent is clear: unreliability, sowing doubt in the reader’s mind, and forcing us to question our own bias and judgment. The author did a great job of navigating complex issues with nuance while maintaining a light and funny tone throughout.
I am leaving some quotes below to give you a taste of the writing.
“Reading lets us live in someone else’s shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller.”
“Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic. Writing is creating something out of nothing, is opening doors to other lands.
Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much. To stop writing would kill me. I'd never be able to walk through a bookstore without fingering the spines with longing, wondering at the lengthy editorial process that got these titles on shelves and reminiscing about my own. And I'd spend the rest of life curdling with jealousy every time someone like Emmy Cho gets a book deal, every time I learn that some young up-and-comer is living the life I should be living.
“Reading should be an enjoyable experience, not a chore.”
“What more can we want as writers than such immortality? Don't ghosts just want to be remembered?”
“This industry is built on silencing us, stomping us into the ground, and hurling money at white people to produce racist stereotypes of us.”
“Awards don’t matter—at least, I am told this constantly by the people who regularly win them.”
“For the first time since I submitted the manuscript, I feel a deep wash of shame. This isn’t my history, my heritage. This isn’t my community. I am an outsider, basking in their love under false pretenses. It should be Athena sitting here, smiling with these people, signing books and listening to the stories of her elders.”
“But Twitter is real life; it's realer than real life, because that is the realm that the social economy of publishing exists on, because the industry has no alternative.”
― R.F. Kuang, Yellowface
Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney: A (Predictable) Psychological Thriller
Since we touched on the ethics of storytelling, here is another book with a stuck writer coming across the temptation of appropriating another author’s manuscript and passing it for their own. This one, however, is a psychological thriller mainly set on a fictional island in Scotland. This is enough for it to be catalogued as tartan noir, which, if you haven’t been paying attention, sells!
Wikipedia says, on tartan noir:
William McIlvanney (whose own work has been considered a precursor to Tartan Noir)[3] has said that the whole genre is "ersatz".[4] Charles Taylor has stated that the term has an "inescapably condescending tinge", noting "it's a touristy phrase, suggesting that there's something quaint about hard-boiled crime fiction that comes from the land of kilts and haggis".[5]
Moving past its label, this is the second crime fiction book in the past three months set on a fictional island in Scotland, and I can’t help but judge this as lazy writing. The first one was Paula Hawkins’s The Blue Hour. Writers prefer to invent a remote island in Scotland with barely any inhabitants because they can control the community, their peculiarities, and the weather phenomena, which they can get away with by merely approximating how it would be.
The alternative to inventing and controlling their fictitious Scottish islands would be for the writers to research and potentially visit the actual places, which not only takes time and money but might also interfere with their plot. They might find that Scottish people are not as unwelcoming, incisive, and hateful as they need them to be for their crime novel!
The remote island of Amberley is described with such clarity it places the reader there with Grady. With its remoteness and inaccessibility there’s a real sense of claustrophobia that adds to the threatening atmosphere. Swirling mists, inexplicable sounds, oppressive trees, strange inhabitants and unusual occurrences have you looking over your shoulder every bit as much as Grady does.
My Weekly review
Beautiful Ugly was the top recommended newly published book for January, and its cover drew me in.
The story follows Grady Green, an author whose life takes a devastating turn when his wife, Abby, mysteriously disappears while he is on the phone with her. A year after this traumatic event, Grady finds himself struggling both financially and creatively. In an attempt to reset his life and overcome his writer's block, he accepts an offer to stay on a remote Scottish island called Amberly.
However, what begins as a potential respite (he finds a secret manuscript under the floorboards) quickly devolves into a nightmarish experience. The island's atmosphere is unsettling, with strange residents, odd business hours, and an inexplicable absence of birds - an explanation is given, actually. There is a backstory as to why, but I admit I had an issue with it, and I wondered whether that is plausible and realistic. Grady's stay becomes increasingly eerie as he discovers unsettling items in his cabin and hears mysterious music in the woods. Most disturbingly, he begins to see a woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to his missing wife.
Beyond the things I took with a large pinch of salt, Alice Feeney is effective at crafting an atmosphere of suspense and unease, blurring the lines between reality and imagination. The story unfolds through dual narratives – Grady's present-day experiences on the island and flashbacks from Abby's perspective before her disappearance. This structure adds depth to the characters and keeps readers questioning the reliability of Grady as a narrator.
The novel’s big themes are marriage, revenge, and the fine line between isolation and loneliness. My favourite thing about the entire book was the chapter names: a list of oxymorons scattered throughout the text that made me sit upright whenever I found them, following the same tone as the book title. After a few chapters, it becomes like an easter egg hunt! (examples: Minor Miracle, Old News, Clearly Confused). This quirky and clever use of oxymorons in chapter titles reflects the contradictions at the heart of the story.
Other hints, such as the protagonist quipping to himself, “Sometimes I think we are all the unreliable narrators of our own lives”, should set the reader up just right for the type of story this is.
By the time we reached the end, I started to see what the conclusion would be, but that didn’t take away my enjoyment of the reveal.
My favourite quote from the book:
“I keep my thoughts to myself because silence cannot be misquoted.”
― Alice Feeney, Beautiful Ugly
How Translation Works, Book Title Edition
As any translator will tell you, translating a piece of fiction isn’t about simply transcribing words one-to-one from one language to another. It’s about capturing a vibe — making sure the tone and intent of the piece come through in words when a mere transliteration would fail. Common phrases in one language don’t exist in another; cultural references in one country mean nothing elsewhere, and so on. This is why a computerized translation is fine for a bland business email but will utterly fail for a novel.
This article reveals how translation works and why merely approximating words in the target language is not enough, particularly in literature.
