Reading With a Side Of: Yellow Face by RF Kuang

So we start out the book, which is from a first person perspective from one character the whole book, inside the mind of June. She's a semi-failed writer who thinks she deserves to be massive. We also meet her friend/not-friend who is a published and massively successful author, Athena. June is a white woman while Athena is Chinese American. Normally I wouldn't bother putting that into anything, but it's kind of central to the whole plot here. 

June plays nice with Athena partially out of jealousy, lonliness, and as a way to stay in the book zeitgiest. Well skip ahead a bit and the two of them get drunk and Athena decides to make pancakes and stuff her face with them. Well this leads to her choking to death in front of June. June calls 911, steals a few manuscripts, and goes home after the authorities let her go. 

We can probably see where this is going. 

Nirvana - You Know You're Right: I chose Nirvana because it has a grungy and skeezy feel to it. June gets this gross idea in her head and follows through. 

A7X - A Little Piece of Heaven was chosen because June goes full villian here. The lyrics don't match what's happening in the book, but the vibes are there. 

June, with Athena's manuscripts, decides to "salvage" the manuscript and bring this to light. It doesn't hurt that she's going to make six figures from this, but really it's for Athena, her work needs to be shown. 

The main problem is that it's a mostly non-fiction history story about migrant Chinese workers during World War 1. So June immerses herself in history books and learns an insane amount about the history of that time. 

A publisher picks her up and decides to make some edits to make the story more accessible for people. Maybe add a romance plot. Make some white people more heroic than the enemies. Anything so long as the book gets printed. 

Rush - A Passage to Bangkok: This one may be a little on the nose. White people using cultural elements that aren't their own in their art. I love Rush, but this song is a little bit weird. 

Well June changes her pen name to June Song to make her appear more culturally appropriate. Of course June has her own reasons for this which are definitely not about her stealing another culture, it's apart of her. She belongs where she is. 

The book is so well written that despite June doing awful things and stealing books and culture, at some points I found myself cheering her on until my brain caught up and was like 'no, bro'. Other times, I found it so hard to keep reading because of the terrible things that were being done. 

Halsey - Lucky: Fame begets hardships. June, obviously, get's a lot of drama sent in her direction. People think she's Chinese, but she isn't and that makes people unhappy. There's also some people noticing the rather sizeable Athena influence in her writing. 

Everytime some kind of drama comes her way, June will turtle up inside her apartment and basically Door Dash everything. This shows a level of privelage that she has that she is just able to have everything ordered in and she doesn't need to work. She has people on her side fending off attacks, even if they are founded. 

She got what she wants and she still goes down depressive holes because of that way she had to obtain her goal. 

OU - Purge: This one I put in here because there's a blending of cultures. We have the band OU from China which got their album mastered by Devin Townsend (Canada) and they are playing a more modern North American style of prog metal. 

Athena was able to blend her own culture with North American sentimentalities, either to surive and play the game and/or because that was her background. Authentically blending cultures to create a wholly new thing can be brilliant when done earnestly. When it's forced or stolen, maybe it's not so great. OU is a great example of how things are done correctly. 

June was obviously in the wrong here, yet it's also the book and publishing industry that pushed her into being desperate enough to do these horrible things. Much like society itself, when people get desperate that's when shitty things happen. It's always the higher ups making life harder for those of us living beneath them.