Aliens

Earlier this year, I read a historical fiction about a young brown girl in a British boarding school. The perspective was close third person. The inner life of the protagonist was central to the story. In the opening chapter, the character wakes up, looks at herself in the mirror, and dwells on disparaging thoughts about how “swarthy” and “dusky” and “dingy” her skin is, how different she is from the other girls at school. And then she continues to have these othering thoughts about herself, obsessing over whether or not she is a “true Briton.” I have been a brown person in all-white spaces (hi, rural Newfoundland!) and I’m a sucker for stories set in Victorian England. I should be the ideal reader for this book. Instead, I felt alienated. Whose gaze is that in the mirror? It’s not the gaze of a brown character. It’s the gaze of the white author. A white author who perhaps - let’s be generous - tried their level best to get into the skin of brown character and failed.

I’ve been trying to forget this infuriating book exists but I was reminded of it again when I read Yellowface. In a scene mid-way through the book, the main character June is asked - by a Chinese-American reader - why she thinks she (a white woman) is the right person to write and profit from a novel about indentured Chinese labourers.

Sometimes this issue of identity and imagination is framed as: who has the right to tell a story? It’s the wrong question. Instead, the more crucial questions are why and how? Why am I drawn to this particular point-of-view? And how am I going to ensure the characters and their tales are authentic?

In tandem with Yellowface, I was reading Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades, a first person plural novella that follows a group of girls from the time they are about 10 well into adulthood. It’s Julie Otsuka’s Buddha in the Attic meets Queen’s, New York. The book’s titular girls are Black, Muslim, East and South Asian. They are straight and queer and some of them, it turns out, are not girls. Unlike many of the characters, the author is Filipino. Yet her characters rang true and their experiences and quandaries and thoughts all felt comfortingly, disconcertingly familiar. Palasi Andreades has spoken of setting the novel in her hometown where she was surrounded by girls like the ones in her story. Her expertise shines through in her characters.

White authors can and do write authentic brown characters, characters whose interiority is easy to sink into and whose stories I deeply enjoy. Jacinta Greenwood in Michael Christie’s Greenwood is an excellent example and so is Adam Foole in Steven Price’s By Gaslight.

I’ve gotten quite used to not finding myself in a lot of fiction. So when I see a character who looks a little like me - or my cousin/ father/ grandmother - I sometimes feel apprehensive. Like the only brown girl in an all-white school. How’s this going to go?

The best fiction envelops the reader, makes them feel at one with the characters. But when the author does a shoddy job the result is a poor ventriloquist act, a puppet with a brown face parroting a white writer’s (let’s be generous, again) unconscious bias. And the reader who should identify with the protagonist is, instead, expelled.

Yellow

No more novels about writers writing books, I swore. And then I read Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. Yellowface is the story of two authors. Athena is Asian and hugely successful. (I kept thinking of Zadie Smith, getting that mega publishing deal while she was still at OxBridge. ) June is white and midling. When Athena dies, June takes her unpublished manuscript - about the Chinese Labour Corps in WWI - and passes it off as her own. Spoilers ahead.

This book should be on the curriculum in every publishing house and MFA program because even though it’s a novel, and supposedly fiction, most of what’s on the page are facts.

Exhibits A&B:

“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” (p. 5/6.)

“… the books that become big do so because at some point everyone decided, for no good reason at all, that this would be the title of the moment.” (p. 79)

Some of the most damning parts of the book are the passages where June and her editors hack away at Athena’s draft, making the whole thing more palatable to white readers, squeezing it into the corset of the western narrative tradition, which prizes a straight forward tale of a hero’s journey.

Athena’s manuscript is described as “an echo from the battlefield” (p. 27) layering “disparate narratives and perspectives together to form a moving mosaic… a multiplicity of voices unburying the past” (p. 28). She’s the kind of writer who makes the reader do a little work. One assumes there are no glossaries or italics around the Chinese words. I thought of Madeline Thien’s brilliant Do Not Say We Have Nothing. I thought of so many books by Asian and Indigenous authors that are capacious, allowing a plethora of characters and narrators inviting all their stories into the frame. Someone, I’m sure, has written a dissertation about this… how our stories are communal because our societies are too. Ironic then that exactly what drew June to the book are the very things she excises.

And none of this is fiction. It happens every single day. Editors and agents and well-meaning creative writing instructors, pushing writers-of-colour to whitewash their stories. Include a glossary. Westernize the names. Add explanatory commas. And, when that proves to be a pain, lavishing book deals and bigger advances on white writers whose books cover the same terrain and aren’t so “difficult.” At one point, June’s editor is amazed by how quickly she agrees to make changes, writing “You are so wonderfully easy to work with. Most authors are pickier about killing their darlings” (p. 45). But of course. Why should June be precious about axing what isn’t hers?

Still, though, it’s impossible not to feel bad for June. Because Yellowface is brutally honest about fragile writerly egos too. Even after June hits the NYT best seller list and quickly earns out her massive advance, she is unsatisfied, obsesses over online reviews and commentary, and drives herself up the wall with self-doubt. Her vulnerability is painfully relatable. The reader - who is also a writer - roots against her and identifies with her. Neat trick.

This novel is American Dirt meets Cat Person meets Bad Art Friend meets Lionel Shriver in a sombrero meets the Appropriation Prize. Yellowface is more than just a fun read. Yellowface is catharsis. Here finally is everything we have all experienced and been bitching about (mostly quietly, privately, amongst ourselves) for years. And not just in any novel but in a massively successful, Reese’s Book Club pick, book, one of those chosen few that the publisher (rightly) decided was going to be a hit. Can’t wait until they make it into a movie staring Constance Wu (who blurbed the book!) and ScarJo.

Cozy murder mystery

Shehan Karunatilaka’s 2022 Booker-winning novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is an absurd life-after-death romp about a young man who, against the better judgement of wiser ghosts, goes in search of his killers. It’s a whodunit set in Sri Lanka in the late 80s, during the civil war. It’s irreverent, unsentimental, and uproarious.

At one point I was reading on my deck, laughing uncontrollably. My neighbours were like WHAT is so funny? But here’s the thing… it’s impossible to explain. Part of my glee has to do with language. Karunatilaka sprinkles in Sinhala words here and there - without italics or explanation, hallelujah - and for once I, a famously unilingual person, actually understand. Here’s what I was laughing at: Boru Facts.

Boru means lies and just seeing this word, that I’ve never seen before in print, caused an immediate dopamine hit. It conjured up memories of my mother’s voice. Boru. As children we were forever telling, or being accused of telling, lies. Layered over my mother’s voice are uncles and aunts, shouting and laughing, cutting someone off mid-sentence to exclaim: Boru! Because when the adults got together to reminisce or gossip, the accusations of exaggeration and fabrication flew. Boru means lies but it also means bull shit, I guess. I don’t know. It’s difficult to translate, especially when my Sinhala is at the level of a slow witted six year old. Six is when we moved to Canada and stopped speaking Sinhala in the house. Sin, no men?* 

It’s not only that I understand the novel’s second language, it’s that the Sinhala is imbued with auditory memory, making the book feel familiar and homey. Did I just call a novel about a young man who spends his short life travelling around a war zone, taking photos of men, women, and infants being butchered, only to be killed himself, then chopped into pieces and thrown into a putrid lake, cozy? I did. Yes.

When a book is written for you, it feels like home. And even though the novel helps the reader along - for example, with humorous lists that break down the acronyms and political divisions - a lot is left untranslated and unexplained. It’s one of the great strengths of the book, the author’s confidence, that he trusts the reader to do some of the work.

In an interview, after winning what is arguably the most important literary prize in the western world, Karunatilaka said he had trouble finding an international publisher. “A lot of them passed on it, saying that Sri Lankan politics was quite esoteric and confusing. Some said that the mythology and worldbuilding was impenetrable, and difficult for Western readers.” Boru facts!

*Why do Sri Lankans add the word men to the end of random sentences? Who knows, men.