Is it literary theft when Harriett Beecher Stowe takes Josiah Henson’s real-life story of escaping enslavement and crafts Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Or, is it literary theft when she does this and does not acknowledge Henson’s inspiration? Is it artistic theft when The Chariot have a riff on “The Deaf Policeman” that directly takes uses the same riff found in Nirvana’s “Tourettes”? Or, is it homage? Is it artistic theft when we hear Marvin Gaye’s “ ‘T’ Stands for Trouble” in Ice Cube’s “Who’s the Mack?”? I think about all of these types of questions as I read June Hayward attempting to justify her stealing Athena Liu’s unpublished manuscript in R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface. I started looking at these questions in the previous post, and today I want to continue looking at them, specifically the ways that June frames her actions and those of others and the ways that Candice Lee addresses “literary theft.”

Throughout Yellowface, June works hard to convince us that what she did doesn’t constitute “literary theft”; however, out of the other side of her mouth, she accuses Athena, just by the mere fact that speaks with a Korean War vet and listens to June’s story, of “literary theft,” of taking the stories of others and turning them into her fiction. As she accuses Athena, she also seeks out her own “interviews” with people as she thinks about the followup to her pilfered text. She wants to be more “authentic,” and as such, she decides to take a trip to Chinatown to observe Chinese and Chinese Americans, hoping to give her work an air of verisimilitude.

Before she even goes to Chinatown, she tells us about a poet friend of hers who would walk around with a notebook, writing down observations she had throughout the day. The friend would write about interactions with people, scenery, smells, and more. The poet told June, “I don’t create as much as I collect.” In this manner, the poet echoes what June accuses Athena of doing, taking people’s lives and putting them into her own work as if they are pieces in a museum. June indicts Athena for “theft” while, based on her own definition, she engages in the same action. This becomes blatantly obvious when she says she feels “Scholarly and Observant” when she writes her notes. Yet, she lacks a key ingredient to the collection, she can’t craft anything from her scribblings, unlike Athena. June’s misplaced anger at Athena really stems from her own inability to craft and create art out of the pieces she collects over the course of her encounters.

June blames Athena for her lack of success. She laments that she misses how she felft before she met Athena She misses the “real pleasure in stringing words and sentences together just to see how they sounded” and the way that writing was “sheer imagination,” serving as a vehicle to take her “somewhere else, or create something that was only for [her].” This all went away when Athena achieved success, when the publishing industry entered into the fray. At this point, June states, “You, not your writing, become the product — your looks, your wit, your quippy clapbacks and factional alighmengts with online beefs that no one in the real world gives a shit about.” It becomes about appearance, about one’s persona, not the work itself. This aspect works to silence both June and Athena.

When Candice Lee, the only Asian member of June’s publicity team and whom June got fired after she pushed for a sensitivity reader for The Last Frontier, confronts June, she highlights the ways that the publishing industry works to silence her and others. Calling June out for stealing Athena’s book, Candice says, “Watching someone warp your image and tell your story however they choose, knowing you have no power to stop it? No voice? That’s how we all felt, watching you. Pretty awful, huh?” Candice points out how June stripped her, Athena, and other Asian women writers of their voice, denying them the ability to even have their voice in the room because, as she asks June, “Do you know what it’s like to pitch a book and be told they already have an Asian writer?” The publisher only has room for one, and if you aren’t the one, then tough luck.

As well, Candice highlights the ways that Athena, as the one, token Asian writer who everyone praised, could not use her own voice and write about anything else other than Chinese or Asian culture. She couldn’t branch out because they demanded of her, as the did of June, she write “ethnic” literature. Candice tells June, “They marked her as the token, exotic Asian. Every time she tried to branch out to new projects, they kept insisting that Asian was her brand, was what her audience expected.” The publisher stifled her, telling her to “keep in your lane.” Through this, they silenced Athena’s voice by denying her the right to use her voice to tell the stories she wanted to tell.

When we pigeonhole artists, we suffocate them. We tell them, “This is what we expect of you. What you’re doing now is wrong.” We police them, and we muzzle them. June feels silenced because she thinks no one wants to read about a white, cisgender, heterosexual girl from Philadelphia. She feels that the publishing industry wants diversity, and she feels she has no culture or diversity. That’s why she allows the marketing team to turn her into Juniper Song, masking her as an ambiguous Asian author. In this manner, she becomes silenced, by own volition, because she feels that she has nothing to say. I would argue, though, that she has something to say, she just didn’t, as she put it when she went to Chinatown, know how to put the pieces together.

Athena and Candice, on the other hand, become trapped in a culture that only allows for one of them to exist, and even the one that exists must succumb to the “rules” in order to survive. Athena must not veer away from what readers “expect,” books and narratives that play up her being an immigrant, “the fact that half her family died in Cambodia, that her dad killed himself on the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen.” The trauma, the racism, the tragedy, as Candice proclaims, “sells.”

The question remains, though, what is “literary theft” in Yellowface? Or, is that the right question? Instead of asking about “literary theft,” should we, instead, ask about silencing? Should we foucs not on June’s actions, as reprehensible as they are, but on the silencing of one’s voice in the book? For me, that is a key issue, and we can even, if we want to, think about that directly in relation to theft, the stealing of one’s voice, because June steals her own voice and Athena’s voice, the publishing industry steals Athena’s voice, and the system denies Candice even the right to let her voice be heard before they can steal it.

There’s so much going on in Yellowface, and it’s a novel that warrants a lot more space than I can give it here. What are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.bsky.social‬.