Yellowface - Rebecca F Kuang (Book).

Book: 5/52
Yellowface - Rebecca F Kuang
My Rating: 2/5

I thought this year I was going to break my own record by picking books that I won’t be able to rate below 5/5. So far, it was going great till I landed on this highly reviewed book on Goodreads, Fable and our own reading group, and it derailed my plan in the very first month of the year, how sad it is. Surprisingly, it is written by a Chinese writer from the perspective of a white American woman whose motto in life is to prove that “White Lives Matter” too. And it shouldn’t always be the minority or downtrodden who should get all the privileges, as they so much deserve it. But the way it's all done through her story is so jumbled up and unreadable to an extent, but somehow kept ploughing on to finish it to a very predictable ending and not exciting at all. So the story goes like two college friends (Yale graduates), Athena, a Chinese-origin super successful writer, and Juniper, whose (American) first book bombs. Ofcourse Athena has a terrific life, super rich with another upcoming book in the very near future based on the Chinese Labour Corps who fought in the First World War in Europe, and Juniper has no clue what she will be writing next. One fine day, while eating pancakes at Athena’s place for the very first time, she chokes and dies right in front of June. Although she tries to save her and calls emergency services and all, while they come and take away her body, she does steal the draft copy of the book that Athena was writing. What happens next was totally predictable: she edits the story and makes it her own, and gets it published under her name with super success; even a movie deal was on the horizon when horror strikes in the form of a Twitter account to uncover the real story behind the book. 

I expected it to get better once the reality starts coming out, but then it becomes a story of justification from June about how she wasn’t wrong in doing what she did, so on, so forth. It wasn’t even gripping post 100 odd pages as she keeps on fighting with her own ghosts and how she tries to make it worth it to a very predictable finale, as I mentioned, rather I found it to be pretty hilarious. If this is the reality of the publishing world as of today, we would rather stick back to our good old classics, I must say. One thing I totally disliked in this novel is that RFK herself is a Chinese born Author, but the way she presents a white female’s perspective of Chinese people, their writing or for that matter, even their food, was totally in bad taste. I seriously couldn’t believe it to be true in today’s time, especially. I guess it's her own views that she has portrayed through her characters of their own insecurities by being in a country they can’t call it Home or where they feel they are being sidelined or betrayed, or face racism. I found it to be a totally one-sided account and was totally shocked by the treatment of it all. Another thing which didn’t work for me at all in this one is the use of Instagram, Twitter and too much of the internet in the story. I felt like I was watching the real life of aspiring authors rather than actually reading a novel by one of them. The last 50 pages were pretty challenging, and very easily this would have gone on to become my first DNF of the last 5 odd years, I must say. On other thoughts, I believe it's a rant from a Chinese author on the world being full of Chinese products so much that we cannot live without them, yet we still hate China and its people for no reason. 

Do let me know if you have read Yellowface and liked it somehow. I am for sure staying away from her other works in the future.