There’s something weirdly psychological going on. You can always tell when a book is someone’s pandemic novel. But really, Yellowface is my pandemic novel. So it’s that classic story of wanting to represent everything about me, my heritage, my culture, my history, in a novel.
I started writing that as an undergrad, just starting to reconnect with my extended family for the first time, learning Chinese history, and learning to speak Chinese. My first trilogy, The Poppy War trilogy, was inspired heavily by my parents and grandparents’ experiences over the very tumultuous period of 20th-century Chinese history.
But yeah, I mostly published fantasy novels before I started writing Yellowface. I don’t think it’s the kind of book I could have written as a debut novel either, because I hadn’t worked in a publishing house, and it took those five years of frustration, toil, and a lot of tears in the publishing industry on the author’s side to accumulate the experiences that when into it. I’d never really written literary fiction before. KUANG: Yellowface is a big gear shift for me. This character, June, is so complicated, and I don’t like her, but I really like her, and I love reading about this journey that she’s falling down. I loved your book, and for me the biggest indicator of when I’m reading or watching something compelling is, I keep telling my husband every single thing that’s happening. I feel like our books are related, like sisters. When I told my friend I was going to talk to you, she didn’t believe it. One of my closest friends and I started reading The Other Black Girl the moment it came out in 2021, and we screamed and chatted about it for weeks. I need to get all my fangirling out of the way before we start. ZAKIYA DALILA HARRIS: It’s so nice to meet you. It’s a satirical story about the pitfalls of identity politics that for both writers, is a little too familiar. Kuang’s latest novel, follows a young white woman, June, as her life blossoms-then unravels-after plagiarizing a book written by her Asian-American “bestie,” Athena. Kuang had never spoken to writer Zakiya Dalila Harris before this interview, but the best-selling novelists-who have both written about the publishing industry’s thirst to capitalize off of race and identity-were ready to get into it.
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