Oh Yellowface! You have left me speechless but with a burning desire to write something at long last. Dark. Hysterical. Haunting. And a strangely hilarious satire of the publishing and book world. Couldn’t stop listening. Couldn’t make myself listen further.
“Every time she tried to branch out to new projects, they kept insisting that Asian was her brand, was what her audience expected. They never let her talk about anything other than being an immigrant, other than the fact that half her family died in Cambodia, that her dad killed himself on the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen. Racial trauma sells, right? They treated her like a museum”
This audacious story combines so many raging, vivid aspects into one punch-you-in-the-face literary fiction. It comes with two riveting, deeply flawed protagonists with nearly non-existent moral compasses, fighting to win the reader’s sympathy and support. However, as the story goes deeper, things get even more harsh and real until you realise there are no heroes or villains here, only people pitted against each other by nearly every political agenda under the sun, yoked together by unhealed trauma, a penchant for stealing and plagiarising, and being mercilessly accosted and abused by the faceless crowd of social media users. The cancel culture that exists in the media nowadays, the pigeonholing of creators and their contents to satisfy consumer demands and expectations, the blatant racism that continues working under the disguise of “diversity”, and the causal ease with which people argue, get attached to and send threats on social media are the biggest issues explored openly as part of the plot. And then the central theme – the extent of permissible plagiarism.
“Maybe it was Highlander Syndrome—I’ve read about that before, the way members of marginalized groups feel threatened if someone else like them starts finding success.”
There is so much that this I wanted to say when I finished the story, but honestly there is nothing left to say, it describes everything so perfectly. This book is a hundred percent worth the time.
Annie 