With Yellowface hitting the shelves last year, the world got to experience a bite of the delicious story RF Kuang sought to tell. Yellowface tells the story of June, a frustrated writer, and friend of Athena Liu, a prodigious and well-off Asian writer who is known for writing Asian narratives. It isn’t her debut novel.
However, her work has constantly attracted attention with its fun themes and complex protagonists.
Who Is RF Kuang?
Before we debunk the themes in her work, we need to study who the author is. RF Kuang is Rebecca F. Kuang. She published her first novel before graduating from university, during a gap year that she spent coaching debate. In 2019, Kuang earned her MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from University College, Oxford while during the previous year, she attended Magdalene College, Cambridge as a recipient of a 2018 Marshall Scholarship.
Right now, Kuang is taking PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Her life, when not writing, is dominated by academia.
Her life growing up, though, had many influences that stayed with her, even when she was crafting her novels. Bleach and Naruto, she has admitted in an interview, were influences that stayed with her, alongside Avatar: The Last Airbender. These influences are felt most in her novel, The Poppy War.
A scholar at heart, Kuang is not the type we can see playing online bingo Philippines. However, we feel her scholarly and epic love for tales whenever we read her writing. Her academia experience is best felt in Babel.
Themes in Her Work
Colonialism and Colonization
Kuang pens her first series with The Poppy War and follows it up as a trilogy. The premise and setting of The Poppy War takes a lot from the Sino-Japanese War and has a reference to the Rape of Nanking. Her first series is notably heavy due to the violence portrayed by colonialism and colonization.
On the other hand, she produced Babel in a more Western setting. It’s a fictionalized world of England in the 1830s where magical silver bars are used to evoke what is “lost in translation.” In Babel, colonialism and colonization are presented on the nose with the characters and setting. The book details how colonial structures need to indoctrinate the people that they oppress – to make people believe getting to the top is possible within the system.
The revelation to Robin is that if he wanted to lessen the influence and power of the Tower, he has to upturn and destroy the system.
In his group of friends, Letitia “Letty” Wright is the only white person. What Hermes represents is senseless violence. Despite the sexism she experiences, she cannot understand Victoire’s experiences of racism or Robin’s connection to his land. So when things go downhill, she feels threatened by the violence that her friends want and breathes the propaganda and illusion that even the oppressed can reach the top.
Complicated Characters
Kuang is a master at writing characters who are very, very flawed and imperfect. When it comes to narratives about race and identity, two characters hit the spot: June from Yellowface and Letitia Wright from Babel: The Necessity of Violence.
June is nasty, with tons of racist sentiments about Asians. She sputters a lot of microaggressions throughout the book. However, what makes June compelling is her fear of failure coupled with this desperation to make it big as an author, no matter the cost, even if her relationships are fractured. Her madness colors the book, and although it might seem exaggerated, her despair and anxiety are authentic.
Letty on the other hand, is a tight character. She loves Ramy, although he does not return her feelings. She is white, and he has Indian ancestry, and she finds it hard to relate to the sentiments of her friends when they talk about going against the Empire. Although she resonates and experiences sexism a lot, she finds it hard to fathom the struggles of colonialism her friends experience and eventually betray them. She’s a complicated character.
Lastly, there’s Athena Liu, the deceased author from Yellowface. Despite being the darling of the literary community, she tended to steal narratives.
Identity
Her writing also has her characters struggling with their identity. Robin has a slight debt of gratitude towards Oxford and Professor Lovell but eventually spurns that to destroy the Empire. In her The Poppy War series, the characters undergo journeys that change and challenge their identities, worldviews, etc.
Wrapping Up
Kuang remains one of the most promising young writers in the 2020s. Although she is young, she holds a lot of potential. Her next book is Katabasis, a journey to Hell. We’re excited to see what she’ll do next!