YELLOWFACE BOOK CLUB KIT
REBECCA F. KUANG
#1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
DEAR READERS,
Thank you so much for your support of Yellowface and for selecting it for your book club. I hope that reading it makes you laugh and cringe and groan all at once.
Yellowface has a lot to say about whiteness, cultural appropriation, diaspora anxieties, and who has the right to tell what stories. It probes what happens when marginalization and trauma are captured and repurposed as marketing copy; when we turn pain into profit. At its heart, though, it is a story about friendship, jealousy, and rivalries gone terribly wrong. I hope you enjoy discussing it.
I’m also excited to give an exclusive peek into my next novel, Katabasis. Out in August 2025, it follows two academic rivals from Cambridge who must travel to hell to rescue the soul of their advisor after he dies in a freak magical accident. It couldn’t be more different from Yellowface. It’s a satire of the bizarre, closed world of academia – of its power dynamics, relationships and abuse – but it’s also my first love story. I hope you’ll fall for Alice and Peter like I did.
Love, Rebecca
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. What were your first impressions of the book, based on its title and cover?
2. Did the novel meet your expectations, or did it surprise you? If so, how?
3. Yellowface explores the question of who has the right to tell which stories. Can we ever argue that someone does or doesn’t have the right to tell a certain story?
4. June and Athena’s relationship was complicated. Do you think they were ever really friends?
5. Everything we learn about Athena, we learn from other people’s perspectives: June, her mother, her ex. What do you think of Athena’s character based on these representations?
6. If you knew that nobody would ever find out, would you steal someone else’s work for your own success? If not, why not?
7. Do you consider June to be a sympathetic character?
8. Cancel culture and social media is explored heavily in Yellowface. Do you think social media is an overall positive or negative tool for artists when promoting their work? Do you agree with cancel culture?
9. Were you expecting the reveal at the end of the novel? If not, who did you think June’s online stalker might be?
10. Rebecca F. Kuang said of the novel, ‘If at the end of the day Yellowface makes you want to put your phone in a drawer and never look at it again, I think it’ll have done its job’. Did the novel prompt you to reconsider your relationship with social media?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rebecca F. Kuang is the #1 New York Times and #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of Yellowface, Babel: An Arcane History and the Poppy War trilogy. Her work has won the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, and British Book Awards. A Marshall Scholar, she has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford. She is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale, where she studies diaspora, contemporary Sinophone literature, and Asian American literature. Her next novel is Katabasis.