Review of Rebecca F. Kuang's novel Yellowface.

DrIn terms of cultural policy, this book was the most important American novel of the past year. Written by Rebecca F. Kuang in the year of Covid 2020. Within the confines of social isolation of the time, it became the cry of a successful Chinese-American fiction author against the dictatorship of anti-democratic racist ideology (Critical race theory) of the progressive elite and its militant online soldiers who want to force authors into the narrow corridor of their origins and bodies. Fictional writing is the opposite: it is the attempt to slide empathetically and imaginatively into other social spheres, roles, classes, skins, and to understand and appreciate things other than one's own. This could definitely work.

Incidentally, “cry” is the wrong word for the somewhat quiet Rebecca Kuang, who was born in Guangzhou in 1996 and grew up in Texas. Her style is incisive, structured analysis of a problem, and a keen eye for structure is her trademark. In September 2022, in Episode 71 of the Cows in the Field podcast, I described the fundamental difference between the fictional worlds and the childishness of Potter's world in two minutes based on the use of magic in The Lord of the Rings. “And “Harry Potter.” A year later, she admitted to the English “Guardian” that she watched Christopher Nolan's thriller “Tenet” for the fourth time, with calculator paper and colored pencils in her hand so that she could determine the time periods of the film: “Unfortunately, I have to admit that it was… “Enormous fun.”