R.F. KUANG ON WHY BOOKS WON’T SAVE US

by Siona Ahuja

When is literature not “meta”? Most books I have finished were didactic magnifying glasses into the lives of their authors. I know this because I’ve been guilty of reading author Wikipedia pages, interviews, GoodReads reviews, even their Instagram captions to confirm which parts of the book echoed their real life. It was a reward, and for a long time, deluded me into thinking it was a necessary act to conduct deeper literary analysis. So when R.F. Kuang took the stage last week at Carnegie Music Hall to talk about Yellowface, it felt like the ultimate reward. 

Yellowface, a mega-famous satire on race, publishing and the online world, is in equal parts funny and unnerving to anyone who identifies as a Person on the Internet. Its protagonist, a white woman, finds meteoric literary success after stealing a manuscript from her dead Asian friend and passing it off as her own and making up an ambiguous Chinese identity. Rivalry, internet trolls and repeated cultural appropriation sit at the heart of this book. Yet, I find “meta” to be a lazy misnomer for it when, in fact, it’s a book that is so painfully self-aware it ends up being mean. 

Kuang began by quoting a piece of criticism Yellowface had received in The Nation, something she felt was unceremonious in the world of literature, but was refreshing when everything is criticism and nothing is “critique.” In the Nation article, the author indirectly praised Yellowface but mostly used it to make her point: publishing is cannibalistic. A moral wasteland with an endless appetite, so much so that it will publish stories about its own wrongdoings. Kuang seemed to agree and made no fuss about feeding the industry’s racially motivated, profit-driven machinery. 

“It turns out, biting the hand really pays off,” she said. “It only feeds you more.” 

The applause is almost mechanical. When Kuang jokes about “gaming the system,” everyone nods and claps a few seconds too early, like it was scripted. They laugh as if they were in on the joke. 

Kuang collapsed her identities as a PhD candidate and a very online person to deliver the next part of this lecture. She wrote the book in the summer of 2021— an unusual “bubble” of time we all lived through. Pandemic restrictions had kept us in the purgatory-like space between online and offline existence for more than a year. And much of the outrage that the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests had generated was being flattened into nitpicky social media discourse and surface-level corporate messaging. She cited actual research—true to her academic soul—to show how Twitter had devolved from a Black-led grassroots organizing platform in early 2020 to a hotbed of think pieces and cancellations.

Somewhere, literature got lost in this whirlwind and books became the totem for signaling ideological purity.  “Your book club is not radical. Your reading list is not decolonial,” said Kuang, a deadpan look on her face that made her scarily more convincing. I looked around to see the audience wasn’t nodding anymore. Okay, we’re going off script. 

Of course the woman who wrote a satire on the publishing world would also mock its readers: the hashtag obsessed, black square-posting users. The genius of Yellowface was less in its takedown of the corporate higher-ups but more in how it also implicated its fans. Kuang wasn’t just pointing fingers at the industry for its performativity, she was also talking to us. 

By now, the sporadic claps had slowed down. I knew I should have felt patronized—most of the audience probably was. We had come to listen to her creative process, ask questions about her muses, dish on her new book and marvel at the fact that this 28-year old had written seven books in under a decade. We got a sermon instead. It would have annoyed me much more if I didn’t think she was absolutely right. 

I’m reminded of Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay, The Death of the Author, where he talks about liberating literature from its author. “The birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.” Barthes said that infinite interpretations of a book existed and all of them were right. It took away the onus of a “correct” interpretation from the creator and left it up to the readers. It also left the author’s identity firmly in the past and opened readers to a more subjective idea of meaning-making. 

Much to Barthes’ horror (if only he could see a Twitter thread), the death of the author has had a chilling effect such that it now makes the readers want to bury the author back out from their grave. Public engagement with literature has imploded on the internet because of the moralistic and—let’s be honest—semi-performative lens it’s under. Authors are more likely to get published if they have a “brand” and a loyal customer base in the guise of followers. More importantly, authors like Kuang are being endlessly chased down by their readers to clarify and rewrite their work, ending up canceled, or worse, irrelevant, the second they are not palatable. 

I should note that Kuang (and even Barthes, I hope) wasn’t telling us to blindly worship a work of art and overlook their sins. This wasn’t a recycled plea to separate the art from the artist. 

Her diatribe was more or less aimed toward the typically younger, more chronically online audience, the ones who think internet noise is the ultimate form of righteousness; that reading a book equals praxis. The ones who whittle down the ambiguities and nuance of an identity into a stereotype. As an Indian woman, I have naturally been asked: so you probably really relate to Rupi Kaur, right? I had never wanted to melt into the floor more. 

Yellowface, published in 2023, was also caught in such a crossfire. Many of its 100,000 or so GoodReads reviews read more like Kuang’s biographies instead of literary analysis. One YouTuber called it mediocre because the plot was so plausible that it didn’t entirely fit the “satire” genre. I couldn’t help but think how many people in the audience were driven to read it because of its outsized online popularity. It’s difficult to imagine consuming books without the algorithm anymore, but I question what snark threads and clickbait video rundowns achieve? How will artmaking evolve when the artist is hyper-aware of the public opinion? And when we, the readers, are done wielding our swords in the comments section, what have we truly gained? 

It is amusing to see how much misplaced faith is held in literature. This is especially true among writers of color who are expected to write and represent. They become the ethnographers of their culture, because their identity is qualification enough for them to do so. Who writes literature and who writes representation? Are they the one and the same? 

Kuang got to the final portion of her lecture. “When people talk to me about Yellowface, they’re hopeful to know whether things have improved,” she said. “But it feels like too large a question to be answered by one person.” 

Today, it felt like the wrong question entirely. Probably because the five-year long bubble she mentioned—of corporate pledges to diversity—has burst. Case in point: Lisa Lucas, a Black publisher hired at Penguin Random House in 2020 to champion diverse voices in writing, was abruptly let go less than a year ago. Her departure followed the exodus of several Black executives in publishing around the same time. The tides have turned as DEI initiatives are monumentally receding, and diversity (or the illusion of it) isn’t trending anymore. Kuang recognized this, she spoke about it because she watched it happen from the inside. 

While writing this, “TOP AAPI AUTHORS for #AAPIMONTH” flashes on a magazine listicle as another wave of cognitive dissonance takes over me. 

The end of the lecture was followed by a rushed Q&A, as we were already ten minutes over time. Only four questions had been asked so far, one of them being the obligatory “how do you do it all?” (She runs. She stays off her phone. She presumably doesn’t check Reddit threads about her) The last question comes from the moderator trying to end on an earnest note: How do you think the industry is going to change after this, he asks. Everyone is expectant. Kuang gives a long pause and a sigh, eventually giving a response so procedural I cannot manage to retrieve it now. I just kept wishing that the pause would be the answer.

R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface is available for purchase from HarperCollins.

Siona Ahuja is a journalist and writer whose work has spanned environmental reporting, internet culture, and local contemporary art. She brings a research-driven lens to her subjects, which she likes to write about with an introspective passion. Keep up with her on her Substack. 

For more meta-textual analysis of important issues, May is your last chance to see The Frick Pittsburgh’s Kara Walker: Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War. The Frick has generously supported this month’s articles from Petrichor and continues to be an uplifting source for art writing across the city. Get your tickets to Kara Walker here.