Oh man if you thought Yellowface was a vicious takedown of racism in publishing, wait until you read Disorientation, which does the same thing to academics but multiplies it by ten. The main character, Ingrid Yang, is in the middle of a dissertation she hates, a deep dive into the works of famous poet Xiao-Wen Chou. One day, a chance find in the archives sends her into a deep dive into Chou’s history and a bombshell of a discovery that upends everything Ingrid thinks she knows, including about her own conception of herself, her race, and her relationships. Neurotic, self-doubting Ingrid is contrasted against her confident best friend Eunice Kim, as well as her rage-filled rival Vivian Vo; the way the three women choose to conceive of, and express, their Asian-Americanness provides an undercurrent of identity exploration to the race-related ripples caused in the larger society around them by Ingrid’s discovery. The satire in this book is incredibly heavy-handed but the zingers keep landing, so you keep reading.
Tag: genre-satire
Yellowface, by R.F. Kuang
When star author Athena Liu dies suddenly, June Hayward pockets her latest manuscript, about Chinese laborers, and then rewrites it and releases it under the name “Juniper Song” (her first and middle names). When the book becomes a smash success, June is accused of misleading people into thinking she might have Chinese ancestry, and finds herself haunted by Athena’s ghost wherever she turns. The book raises questions about racism in the publishing industry, diversity as performance, and ownership in art, but immerses it all in June’s inescapable trainwreck of an unreliable first-person narrative. There is barely a single likeable character in this book but it moves along incredibly well.