Hayward assumes the pseudonym Juniper Song to evade indictments of cultural appropriation.
Below, read an exclusive excerpt.
Chapter 3
I know what you’re thinking.Thief.
‘Yellowface’ by R.F. Kuang.HarperCollins
And perhaps, because all bad things must be racially motivated,Racist.
It’s not so awful as it sounds.
But what I did was noteasy.
I did rewrite most of the book.
Athena’s early drafts are chaotic, primordial, with half-finished sentences littered all over the place.
Sometimes I couldn’t even tell where she was going with a paragraph, so I excised it completely.
It’s not like I took a painting and passed it off as my own.
Imagine if Michelangelo left huge chunks of the Sistine Chapel unfinished.
Imagine if Raphael had to step in and do the rest.
This whole project is beautiful, in a way.
A never-before-seen kind of literary collaboration.
And so what if it was stolen?
So what if I lifted it wholesale?
Athena died before anyone knew the manuscript existed.
I gave it a chance to go out into the world without the judgment that multiple authorship always entails.
Athena is, after all, thanked in the acknowledgments.
And maybe Athena would have even wanted this.
She was always into trippy literary hoaxes like this.
Why is that?"
Okayperhaps that last one is a bit of a stretch.
And if this sounds like me assuaging my own consciencefine.
But the truth is, I was too excited.
For the first time in months, I was happy about writing again.
I felt like I’d been given a second chance.
I’d even begun toying around with some of my old ideas.
The possibilities felt endless.
It was like driving a new car or working on a new laptop.
I’d somehow absorbed all the directness and verve of Athena’s writing.
I felt, as Kanye put it, harder, better, faster, and stronger.
I felt like the kind of person who now listened to Kanye.
“It makes my fingers itch to see a good sentence,” she’d said.
“It makes me want to imitate the same.”
That’s precisely how I felt about editing Athena’s work.
She made me a better writer.
I felt like now I was writing for both of us.
I felt like I was carrying on the torch.
Is that justification enough for you?
Or are you still convinced that I’m some racist thief?
Here’s how I really felt, when things came down to it.
At Yale, I once dated a graduate student in the philosophy department who did population ethics.
The general theme of his research was under what circumstances someone counts as a moral agent that deserves consideration.
Especially when the dead are thieves and liars, too.
Excerpted from Yellowface by R. F. Kuang, published byWilliam Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
