This Haunting is Literary
RF Kuang's Yellowface as ghost story
(This is another paper I wrote for a class; we were allowed to incorporate a hybrid creative element, so I included lines inspired by Joan Tierney’s excellent poem “Why Are You Haunted?” to illustrate my points.)
In the end notes of RF Kuang's novel Yellowface, the author refers to her book as a horror story. While Yellowface is most obviously a work of psychological horror, it also follows the plot of a standard ghost story, specifically in its delivery of its moral lesson. June Hayward, the protagonist, is haunted by the ghost of Athena Liu, who dies in the opening scene and yet is present through the entire text, omnipresent in June's thoughts, fears, hallucinations, and dreams. As June says, "Athena’s ghost has wormed its way into my every waking moment. Only the dead can be so constantly present (396)." Furthermore, works of horror are always based in an underlying anxiety, and a ghost is never just a ghost. A literary haunting is always representative of something else. In this case, Athena's pervasive ghostly presence throughout the book also acts as an expression of June's subconscious racist anxieties, which she is equally unable to suppress or confront.
This haunting is societal. It is everywhere around you; it is part of the fabric of the everyday. You cannot avoid being reminded of it. You cannot avoid being frightened of it. You cannot avoid the knowledge that this makes you a bad person. How long do you think you can possibly keep this up?
Have you been confronted in public yet? [Y/N]
Do you see her everywhere you go? [Y/N]
June's haunting manifests in many different ways. Most obvious are her increasingly common hallucinatory glimpses of Athena's 'ghost,' beginning at a book tour event shortly after the publication of The Last Front and escalating as her credibility increasingly begins to fray at the edges. This is the first point at which June's haunting intrudes on the real world. At the end of the book, she assaults Diana Qiu, a visual artist who has been sharply critical of her, after conflating her with Athena. From this climactic event, it can be assumed that the other flashes of Athena, such as at the book signing, are probably also consequences of June superimposing Athena's ghost onto any Asian woman she sees. Even after realizing it's Diana, not Athena, who she's grabbed, June continues to insist that Diana has been specifically targeting her and conspiring against her.
“You can’t pretend,” I insist. “You’re dressed up like her; you’re stalking me—”
“These are my boots,” says Diana. “These are my clothes. And I’m walking by Saxby’s because I fucking live here, you psycho.”
“I’m not a psycho—”
“Not all Asian women look the same,” Diana snarls. (406)
It is clear throughout the book that June views all Asian people who are critiquing her work, in particular Asian women, as arrayed in a sort of conspiracy against her, even as she vehemently denies any accusations of racism. She projects her guilt and fear of being caught for what she's done to Athena onto Asian people at large, giving her haunting a physical omnipresence in the world that amplifies her own anxiety.
This haunting is digital. All eyes are on you. The ghosts clamor in your phone, constantly reminding you that everyone is watching, waiting for your downfall. You better not give away what you did. If you do, they'll all know. Everyone will know.
Have you deleted Twitter yet? [Y/N]
Do you still have notifications on for her, just in case? [Y/N]
Social media acts as the other primary vector for June's haunting. Because she is so desperate to not be seen as racist, platforms like Instagram and especially Twitter, where one's every action is scrutinized and where bandwagons against high-profile users for misdeeds both perceived and real, are where her anxiety over being called out what she's done is most inescapable. The fittingly-named @AthenaLiusGhost account on Twitter accuses her of plagiarism and attempts to extort her. Notably, when choosing her list of suspects for who might be behind the account, June solely suspects Asian women, who she sees as her victimizers. "I have a few theories on who the account is. Adele Sparks-Sato, maybe. Lily Wu and Kimberly Deng are contenders. Or Diana Qiu, that deranged visual artist (248)." It's later revealed that the actual creator of the account is Geoffrey Carlino, a white man, whom she does not remotely suspect until she gets the location of the account's IP; he is above suspicion to her until the evidence points unerringly his way.
Later, shortly before the climax of the book, someone accesses Athena's Instagram, blocks everyone but June, and begins posting photos of her as though she is still alive. June refers to this person as "the ghost." As with her hallucinations, these photos place Athena in the real world, omnipresent and inescapable, threatening.
This haunting is alien. It is something that you cannot possibly understand; you can only approximate it. It is fundamentally different from and hostile to you. The girl whose grave you robbed was not the same as you. She was Other. She was more talented, more beloved, not quite human. Not like you.
Do you know what offering to burn for her ghost? [Y/N]
…Do you really? [Y/N]
Do you actually know what she liked? Do you know what she would have wanted? [Y/N]
By the end of the book, June has comes to believe that she is truly haunted, and begins researching Chinese ghostlore in search of a method of exorcism. Many of the ghosts she reads about were distraught, often exploited young women who died prematurely, just like Athena. "The cultural constructions are clear: so many Chinese ghosts are hungry, angry, voiceless women. In taking Athena’s legacy, I’ve added one to their ranks (399)." It's notable that instead of researching 'exorcisms' generally, she specifically seeks methods to dispel an explicitly racialized Chinese ghost. The general cultural understanding in America (which June surely knows, given her familiarity with The Exorcist) is that ghosts can be dispelled by priests, or, otherwise, with purifying tools such as salt and holy water. However, from June's point of view, Athena is not just any ghost– she is a Chinese ghost, and must therefore require special Chinese magic to banish. When June attempts to make an offering to Athena's ghost, it is with a cheap shallowness that borders on offensive: incense sticks from Amazon, kung pao chicken, images of material things like money and a nice apartment. It betrays a complete lack of familiarity with Athena as a person on June's part. What would she have actually wanted? June has no idea, so she resorts to stereotypically 'Asian' objects, and material comforts that she herself would want. There is desperation in the attempt, but no sincerity.
June's final confrontation with the "ghost" running Athena's Instagram takes place, ironically, at the steps where the ending of The Exorcist was filmed, and she brings not a cross or holy water, but "a string of Chinese firecrackers from a sketchy corner grocery in Chinatown, because I read online that the popping noise can ward off ghosts (441)." Ultimately, what she finds there is not a ghost but Candice Lee, the Korean editorial assistant she got fired for suggesting she should have a sensitivity reader and then for leaving a bad Goodreads review. June doesn't even remember her at first, even though she directly sabotaged Candice's career. Candice is beneath her notice. Candice is no Adele Sparks-Sato with a newspaper column or Diana Qiu who sits on panels– she has no avenue to voice her injustice but this. Candice could, indeed, be aptly described as a 'hungry, angry, voiceless woman.'
This haunting is karmic. It is vengeful. It is well-deserved. You did something very, very wrong. You thought nobody would notice, but she knows you wronged her. She knows exactly what you did. This haunting is vengeful. It will not let you rest because you don't deserve to.
Did you really think it would go away so easily? [Y/N]
Have you been sleeping well? [Y/N]
As is the case with many ghost stories, June's begins with an act of desecration. Ghost stories, from Poltergeist to A Christmas Carol, are often, at their core, morality tales, and Yellowface is no exception. The very night Athena dies, June steals her draft, her last work, from her apartment. The book clearly frames her theft and subsequent rewriting of the text as an act of violation, or even violence. During the book's climactic confrontation, Candice, after playing back a clip of June confessing, says, "Feels bad, doesn’t it? …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 (454).”
In narratives of vengeful ghosts, the haunting is often provoked by some offense to the dead– a corpse left unburied, or a graveyard built over. Here, June's offense to the dead is her plagiarism; that crime is what animates Athena's ghost. When she's investigating Chinese ghost folklore, she says this directly: “I learn about something called jiangshi, which as far as I can tell is like a zombie, a corpse reanimated by a spell written on a slip of paper. Perhaps someone reanimated Athena. Perhaps I composed the spell myself, when I published her words against her will (422).” June's theft and rewriting of Athena's manuscript plays an equivalent narrative role to the American trope of building on the desecrated Indian burial ground, and is equally racially fraught. June builds her success, literally, on the uncredited and adulterated work of her dead Asian peer, and, in doing so, raises a furious ghost.
This haunting is literary. You're a writer; surely you can recognize it. It follows all the old cliches.
Do you deserve this? [Y]
While everything that happens to June is technically explicable as the work of either real people or her own mind spiraling out of control, Yellowface still follows the well-trod narrative path of ghost story as moral lesson. June desecrates the memory of her dead friend, and Athena begins to haunt her as a result, appearing in her dreams, on social media, in the corner of her eye. The omnipresent reminders of Athena reflect and magnify June's guilt over what she's done; the way she responds to them also serves to reflect her underlying racist tendencies. Ultimately, this story’s ghost is embodied in Candice Lee, who exposes June's misdeeds once and for all.
Sources:
Kuang, R. F. Yellowface: A Novel, William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2023.
Tierney, Joan. "Why Are You Haunted?" 2023. Nightmare Magazine, https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/poetry/why-are-you-haunted/. Accessed 4 November 2023.
Wow! You make me want to read this book!
This is so beautifully written <333