Yellowface


 
 
 
 Dedication
 To Eric and Janette
 
 
 Contents
 Cover
 Title Page
 Dedication
 One
 Two
 Three
 Four
 Five
 Six
 Seven
 Eight
 Nine
 Ten
 Eleven
 Twelve
 Thirteen
 Fourteen
 Fifteen
 Sixteen
 Seventeen
 Eighteen
 Nineteen
 Twenty
 Twenty-One
 Twenty-Two
 Twenty-Three
 Twenty-Four
 Acknowledgments
 About the Author
 Also by R. F. Kuang
 Copyright
 About the Publisher
 
 
 One
 THE NIGHT I WATCH ATHENA LIU DIE, WE’RE CELEBRATING HER TV deal with Netflix.
 Off the bat, for this story to make sense, you should know two things about Athena:
 First, she has everything: a multibook deal straight out of college at a major publishing house, an MFA from the one writing workshop everyone’s heard of, a résumé of prestigious artist residencies, and a history of awards nominations longer than my grocery list. At twenty-seven, she’s published three novels, each one a successively bigger hit. For Athena, the Netflix deal was not a life-changing event, just another feather in her cap, one of the side perks of the road to literary stardom she’s been hurtling down since graduation.
 Second, perhaps as a consequence of the first, she has almost no friends. Writers our age—young, ambitious up-and-comers just this side of thirty—tend to run in packs. You’ll find evidence of cliques all over social media—writers gushing over excerpts of one another’s unpublished manuscripts (LOSING MY HEAD OVER THIS WIP!), squealing over cover reveals (THIS IS SO GORGEOUS I WILL DIE!!!), and posting selfies of group hangs at literary meet-ups across the globe. But Athena’s Instagram photos feature no one else. She regularly tweets career updates and quirky jokes to her seventy thousand followers, but she rarely @s other people. She doesn’t name-drop, doesn’t blurb or recommend her colleagues’ books, and doesn’t publicly rub shoulders in that ostentatious, desperate way early career writers do. In the entire time I’ve known her, I’ve never heard her reference any close friends but me.
 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.
 So that night it’s only Athena and me at a loud, overpriced rooftop bar in Georgetown. She’s flinging back cocktails like she has a duty to prove she’s having a good time, and I’m drinking to dull the bitch in me that wishes she were dead.
 ATHENA AND I ONLY BECAME FRIENDS BY CIRCUMSTANCE. WE LIVED on the same floor at Yale our freshman year, and because we’ve both known we wanted to be writers since we were sentient, we ended up in all the same undergraduate writing seminars. We both published short stories in the same literary magazines early on in our careers and, a few years after graduation, moved to the same city—Athena for a prestigious fellowship at Georgetown, whose faculty, according to rumor, were so impressed by a guest lecture she gave at American University that its English department inaugurated a creative writing post just for her, and I because my mother’s cousin owned a condo in Rosslyn that she would rent to me for the cost of utilities if I remembered to water her plants. We’d never experienced anything like kindred spirit recognition, or some deep, bonding trauma—we were just always in the same place, doing the same things, so it was convenient to be friendly.
 But although we started out in the same place—Professor Natalia Gaines’s Introduction to Short Fiction—our careers spiraled in wildly different directions after graduation.
 I wrote my first novel in a fit of inspiration during a year spent bored out of my skull working for Teach for America. I’d come home after work every day to meticulously draft the story I’d wanted to tell since my childhood: a richly detailed and subtly magical coming-of-age story about grief, loss, and sisterhood titled Over the Sycamore. After I’d queried nearly fifty literary agents without luck, the book was picked up by a small press named Evermore during an open call for submissions. The advance seemed like an absurd amount of money to me at the time—ten thousand dollars up front, with royalties to come once I’d earned out—but that was before I learned Athena had gotten six figures for her debut novel at Penguin Random House.
 Evermore folded three months before my book went to print. My rights reverted back to me. Miraculously, my literary agent—who had signed me after Evermore’s initial offer—resold the rights to one of the Big Five publishing houses for a twenty-thousand-dollar advance—a “nice deal,” read the Publishers Marketplace announcement. It seemed like I had finally Made It, that all my dreams of fame and success were about to come true, until my launch day drew closer, and my first print run was reduced from ten thousand to five thousand copies, my six-city book tour was reduced to three stops in the DMV area, and the promised quotes from famous writers failed to materialize. I never got a second printing. I sold two, maybe three thousand copies total. My editor was fired during one of those publishing squeezes that happen every time the economy dips, and I got passed along to some guy named Garrett who has so far shown so little interest in supporting the novel that I often wonder whether he’s forgotten about me entirely.
 But that’s par for the course, everyone told me. Everyone has a shitty debut experience. Publishers are Just Like That. It’s always chaos in New York, all