Hi, everyone. Welcome to the third edition of Susurrus. I’m Nandini Krishnan, and today I’m going to talk about a novel that’s been one of the bestsellers of 2023–Yellowface. It spent weeks on the top selling lists on several newspapers, was the Amazon Book of the Year, the Foyles fiction Book of the year, shortlisted for the same honour on Waterstones, and won the Goodreads Choice award for best fiction.

The book itself hasn’t won a whole lot of literary honours, and apparently the author’s agent tried to convince her it wouldn’t be a good idea to write quite so openly about the publishing industry. But it did get me thinking about several things, not necessarily what the author wanted to put in the heads of her readers perhaps, but I’ll get to that in a bit. 

First, a little bit about the book for those who don’t really know.

Written by fantasy novelist Rebecca F.  Kuang, it is not quite fantasy. It was one of the most talked-about books of 2023, and the writer's first venture into literary fiction. It has been called metafiction on social media and a satire on the publishing industry. The story follows Juniper a.k.a. June Hayward, a middling writer who has seen moderate success, pitched into the glamorous world of top echelon publishing when she steals a novel from Athena Liu, a writer who suddenly dies before the world sees her final manuscript. To be honest, I found the premise a little jarring - either you believe the author is a creation of the publishing industry and therefore anything she writes is considered wonderful; or you believe she is a brilliant writer and a book by her will be considered wonderful even if it were published under another name. For decades, famous writers have been trying to prove how hypocritical the publishing industry is by approaching agents and their own publishers with their manuscripts under the names of beginners. 

J K Rowling was among those who said that was her intention when she wrote as Robert Galbraith, but then the fact that she was Galbraith was–perhaps usefully for the publishers–leaked before the book got to the stands, so we’ll never really know.

But then, Athena Liu was of Chinese origin, and the book follows a group of Chinese soldiers who served in the first world war–well, they were not so much soldiers as labourers forced to be soldiers. You might argue that an American woman of Chinese origin born in the new millennium in the United States had about as little to do with the Chinese soldiers of the First World War as an American woman of Irish or German or English or Dutch origin—a Caucasian woman–born in the same country around the same time. Yet, the publishing industry tries to present June Hayward as vaguely Asian. Usefully, her middle name is ‘Song’ thanks to her mother having gone through a hippie phase. So, the book is presented as having been written by ‘Juniper Song’. And then a publishing executive of Asian origin suggests a sensitivity read–which might not have been the case if the book had been written by Athena Liu.

Which was what got me thinking about the question I want to discuss here: Who has the right to write about what? I must say here that this is not really a strong theme in Yellowface, which reads more like a mystery than literary fiction. To me, the book quite literally loses the plot at some point, and I liked it mainly for its snide digs at the publishing industry which I as an author can relate to. 

One of the things it alludes to is the discussion about diversity in publishing. And it’s almost like there’s an algorithm, isn’t it? There are prizes and grants especially for women of colour, and if you look at the winners of awards, particularly in translation, it tends to be a race for the bottom of the pyramid of privilege. Ideally, the author and-or-or the protagonist, preferably both, should be the most underprivileged they can be in terms of race, class, caste if relevant, creed if not, education…every parameter of socioeconomic identity. 

Perhaps the classic example of this would be the Booker Prize winner of 2008, White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. It was considered authentic, perhaps for being an Indian story by an Indian writer, although the protagonist and the writer have perhaps about as much in common as the protagonist and writer of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi—another Booker Prize winner, another novel about India, although not by an Indian author. 

Some years ago, there was something of a social media standoff between Aatish Taseer and Patrick French following the publication of their two articles in the Hindustan Times. Patrick French had written an interesting piece which looked at both the wariness of Indians in having non-Indians write about them and the almost apologetic stance of “firangis” as French called them, praising raags and dastangoi and joking about other firangis to show they are not the bad ones. He called it a state of polite apology. Aatish Taseer spoke about how no one would object to serious writers such as Katherine Boo and Patrick French writing about India, but how “a little xenophobia was not a bad thing”. We might also consider how V S Naipaul, who could not really be considered Indian or perhaps even non-British in any way or form, was and often remains at the receiving end of hatred for his series of books that called out everything that is repulsive about India, starting with the filth on the roads and the tendency of people to use public spaces as public toilets. India perhaps likes to be exoticised in the eyes of non-Indians.

And perhaps that is what the world wants too. How many books about an India that is not coming out of partition misery, or that does not have caste and class and religion as its central focus, how many books that might have been set in any part of the world without being particularly different, have been published outside India? 

Do Indian writers get to tell the regular stories of families and lives in India? Or are they still expected to portray a particular kind of India, an India with problems? An India that suits the eye of the west, which is where the money in publishing is? And can we think of a future in which it will be all right to write about the lives of people who meet at a bookshop in India, as it is with South Korea now? 

But one also wonders whether at this point in time, Yann Martel could have got away with Life of Pi without being criticised for being a white man writing about people who were not white, never mind that he was holidaying in Pondicherry some time before he wrote that novel? Or would an Indian writer at any point of time have got away with writing about a French family in Paris after holidaying there for a while? Kazuo Ishiguro is arguably the one writer of Asian origin who writes consistently about characters who aren’t Asian. Of course, Vikram Seth wrote An Equal Music, but it is nowhere near as popular as his A Suitable Boy. Amit Chaudhuri has consistently written about ordinary lives in Indian families, stories that as I said could have taken place anywhere in the world with some modifications, as does Jeet Thayil, whose latest book—Names of the Women—does not even vaguely intersect with India in any way. 

And then, there are other considerations in a world that is “woke”–social media terminology for politically correct, albeit grammatically incorrect–can a man write in the voice of a woman, as long as he is writing about the country which he represents, because that is an important thing for publishers to cross diversity off their checklist, isn’t it, representation? And can a straight man write in the voice of a gay man? I’ve personally been trolled and have had to deal with calls for deplatforming because I wrote a book on trans men, while being a cis woman. 

To come back to Yellowface, what if we were to uncomplicate the plot a little bit? What if the manuscript were not stolen, but were based on solid research by a Caucasian woman into the lives of Chinese soldiers during the first world war? Would it have been accepted by the publishing industry? In the story, for as long as they don’t know it has been plagiarised, the publishing industry is quite thrilled with it. But what if the writer were not white? Would a person of another race be published if he or she were writing about, let’s say, a group of Confederate soldiers in the American civil war? Perhaps not, and if that is the case, it is something on which the publishing industry needs to reflect. Who, then, has the right to write about what and how much does one's race and face have to do with it?

Do let me know what you think. You can write in to me at feedback@fountainink.in, that is f-e-e-d-b-a-c-k at f-o-u-n-t-a-i-n-i-n-k dot i-n. I’ll be back with another episode in a couple of weeks. Bye for now.