As part of her Yellowface 2024 Tour, Rebecca F Kuang is thrown into the spotlight at Royal Northern Music of College with her book Yellowface, delivering a blistering, if not unsurprising, reveal of the publishing industry’s deathly desire for diversity. As anyone who is racialised in the UK knows and detests (hopefully), there are staggering heights of tokenism and cultural and racial appropriation that occur in, probably, sadly, every sector in the UK.
Published last year, Yellowface is seen as a departure from her previous, fantasy, high-concept novels, according to the chair, Katie Popperwell, which Kuang didn’t agree with re seeing as a departure.
The event starts a bit late and we are riveted by a story of Rebecca’s journey to Manchester from Norwich with the star obstacle being a train on fire. She comes across excited and humorous and drops plotlines from Yellowface into her story of travel, namely death by eating pancakes.
Rebecca explores the titular character of Yellowface, Juniper Song, explaining that the fears, anxieties and jealousies that are in writers trying to forge their path are taken to ultimate heights in Juniper, whose jealously and desire for acknowledgement, unlike other writers, makes Juniper jump into the deep-end of racism in her desire for glory.
Rebecca explains that these are tendencies that are common but unspoken in writers, as when Rebecca first distributed the first manuscript, her writer friends saw part of themselves in June. This common, but unspoken, emotion is key in Yellowface, in showing how friendships become competitive and linger and fester because of these unsettling feelings.
On this idea of why the publishing world seems hard to break, as real-life writers and Juniper Song can attest to, Rebecca offers the idea that all the parts of publishing that were usually not played out in front of audiences, e.g. auctioning, advance payment numbers, amount of special edition copies, now are made very visible.
This makes writers compete over numerous benchmarks with each other as a measure of success. Whereas before writing as a career was in conjunction with other professions, there is now a pressure to succeed as a writer first and foremost and become a writer actively, in whatever else a writer pursues too.
The writing style, Rebecca says, is inspired by internet social media culture, where Rebecca, during covid lockdowns, would be online more than usual and she saw how sharp and succinct sentences would go viral. Crafting this tone and sharpness into a book-length is no mean feat.
That’s not to say the book reads like a Twitter (I mean X) post but that it resembles the tone of online cultures for that “aha” moment. Contracting not just words but entire feelings and sentences down in order to create virality, ‘likes’, reactions.
Manchester Literature Festival (MLF) hosted Rebecca F Kuang, with Katie Popperwell. Unfortunately, it didn’t feel that there was much conversation or engagement by Katie with Rebecca. There was a script of questions rigidly stuck to and no real use of Rebecca’s words to explore more interesting ideas, such as whether you can be ethical and competitive when mentioning the benchmarks of publishing success.
It’s a shame that Poperwell did not engage this way; not doing so stilted the conversation between the two. Rebecca spoke about her work but also publishing in ways that didn’t need scripted questions. She responded well to all questions, regardless, and the Q&A section revealed another book to be released next year.
Manchester Literature Festival runs until November 8.
Photo: Thu Ngan Ngo
JADAR 