
The unease starts with the title
Yellowface winks obscenely from bookstore shelves. It stimulates. It sets the machinery of the mind in motion… and then jams its gears.
The reader gets the term is racially charged. Recalls ‘Blackface’ – yep, that’s a thing. Thinks of Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But that’s about all they can manage.
How does that relate to the eyes in the cover art, eyes which avoid inspection?

All the bookstore browser can do is guess wildly.
The cover tells them they don’t know squat. The first sentence (shared above) throws them further off-kilter.
So far, so mysterious
Okay. I give you full permission to unclench. I won’t spoil the novel.
I won’t pull quotes from the depths of its sleek interior; doing so would be like dragging props from a haunted house.
Looking at Kuang’s tricks in isolation would be educational. But it would dull the shock of reading the book and catching the fairground ghouls in context.
Let me show restraint, then
Let me leave most ghosts un-busted.
We won’t go further than her opening line – but that’s enough to make you want to read the whole darn thing.
There are terms for a book that dilates your pupils and parches your throat. It’s a page-turner, suspense novel, thriller.
And in Yellowface, Kuang has engineered a haunted house-rollercoaster hybrid.
The stakes are high. The protagonist: floundering. And the reader (speaking for myself): strapped in for the ride.
How does she do it?
She opens ‘curiosity gaps’: she dangles the prospect of knowledge, but withholds it until it is earned.
When Kuang writes, “The night I watch Athena Liu die…” she skips ahead. She flaunts future events in a way that moves the reader ahead of the action.
From that acrophobic position, they’re left to wonder, “How will the story fill in the blanks?”
Often, readers know how a chapter is going to climax. But as to how will the plot ratchet to that giddy height… Kuang keeps that back.
Her message – the same message as is beamed by title, cover and blurb – is firm: “Read on and find out.”
Aidan Clifford writes for Pinstripe Poets – artists who love their day jobs. This post is part of a series called ‘Write like the Greats’. See the rest here.