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At the end of the book, Athena’s original draft is unbearably sanctimonious. Here she leaves the more engaging personal narratives behind to hit the reader over the head with the myriad ways in which the laborers have been forgotten and ignored. The laborers killed in action could not be buried in plots near European soldiers. They were not eligible for military awards because they were purportedly not in combat. And—the part that Athena was angriest about—the Chinese government was still fucked over in the Treaty of Versailles at the conclusion of WWI, with the territory of Shandong ceded from Germany to Japan.

But who’s going to follow all of that? It’s hard to sympathize with the stakes in the absence of a main character. The last forty pages read more like a history paper than a gripping wartime narrative. They feel out of place, like a senior term paper attached haphazardly to the end. Athena did always have such a didactic streak.

— Yellowface by R. F. Kuang (Page 44)

The hardest part is keeping track of all the characters. We change almost a dozen names to reduce confusion. Two different characters have the last name Zhang, and four have the last name Li. Athena differentiates them by giving them different first names, which she only occasionally uses, and other names that I assume are nicknames (A Geng, A Zhu; unless A is a last name and I’m missing something), or Da Liu and Xiao Liu, which throws me for a loop because I thought Liu was a last name, so what are Da and Xiao doing there? Why are so many of the female characters named Xiao as well? And if they’re family names, does that mean everyone is related? Is this a novel about incest? But the easy fix is to give them all distinct monikers, and I spend hours scrolling through pages on Chinese history and baby name sites to find names that will be culturally appropriate.

— Yellowface by R. F. Kuang (Page 42)

I like her editorial style, too. Most of her requested changes are simple clarifications. Are American audiences going to know what this phrase means? Should this flashback be placed in this early chapter when we haven’t met the character in the proper timeline yet? This dialogue exchange is artful, but how does it move the story along?

Honestly, I’m relieved. Finally someone’s calling Athena out on her bullshit, on her deliberately confusing sentence structures and cultural allusions. Athena likes to make her audience “work for it.” On the topic of cultural exposition, she’s written that she doesn’t “see the need to move the text closer to the reader, when the reader has Google, and is perfectly capable of moving closer to the text.” She drops in entire phrases in Chinese without adding any translations—her typewriter doesn’t have Chinese characters, so she left spaces and wrote them out by hand. It took me hours of fiddling with an OCR to search them online, and even then I had to strike out about half of them. She refers to family members in Chinese terms instead of English, so you’re left wondering if a given character is an uncle or a second cousin. (I’ve read dozens of guides to the Chinese kinship nomenclature system by now. It makes no goddamn sense.)

She’s done this in all her other novels. Her fans praise such tactics as brilliant and authentic—a diaspora writer’s necessary intervention against the whiteness of English. But it’s not good craft. It makes the prose frustrating and inaccessible. I am convinced it is all in service of making Athena, and her readers, feel smarter than they are.

— Yellowface by R. F. Kuang (Page 41 - 42)

I’d somehow absorbed all the directness and verve of Athena’s writing. I felt, as Kanye put it, harder, better, faster, and stronger. I felt like the kind of person who now listened to Kanye.

— Yellowface by R. F. Kuang (Page 38)

So of course Athena gets every good thing, because that’s how this industry works. Publishing picks a winner—someone attractive enough, someone cool and young and, oh, we’re all thinking it, let’s just say it, “diverse” enough—and lavishes all its money and resources on them. It’s so fucking arbitrary. Or perhaps not arbitrary, but it hinges on factors that have nothing to do with the strength of one’s prose. Athena—a beautiful, Yale-educated, international, ambiguously queer woman of color—has been chosen by the Powers That Be. Meanwhile, I’m just brown-eyed, brown-haired June Hayward, from Philly—and no matter how hard I work, or how well I write, I’ll never be Athena Liu.

— Yellowface by R. F. Kuang (Page 5)

I wrote my first novel in a fit of inspiration during a year spent bored out of my skull working for Teach for America.

— Yellowface by R. F. Kuang (Page 2)

I used to think that she was simply aloof. Athena is so stupidly, ridiculously successful that it makes sense she wouldn’t want to mingle with mere mortals. Athena, presumably, chats exclusively with blue check holders and fellow bestselling authors who can entertain her with their rarefied observations on modern society. Athena doesn’t have time to make friends with proletarians.

But in recent years, I’ve developed another theory, which is that everyone else finds her as unbearable as I do. It’s hard, after all, to be friends with someone who outshines you at every turn. Probably no one else can stand Athena because they can’t stand constantly failing to measure up to her. Probably I’m here because I’m just that pathetic.

— Yellowface by R. F. Kuang (Page 2)

Unfortunately Wojnicz could not pick up the prompt to criticize this newfangled field, because he knew nothing about it. Nor did he have much to say about impulses, as—to tell the truth—so far he had had little interest in sex. He knew that this interest was bound to appear one day—everyone talked about it and dropped hints—but for some reason he regarded himself as still immature. Sometimes he felt a little excluded from this community of sex, allusions and jokes, as if others had a talent that he lacked.

— The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk (Page 231)