Yellowface and the controversy in the Publishing world

hi everybody welcome back to our channnel and as our name suggests we're never shy of a candid and

difficult discussion and one of the things that's got us thinking a lot recently is Linda and I had

the pleasure of reading yellow face which is a fantastic book about the publishing industry

um and what this led to is a discussion about representation in the books that we are reading

as five women of color we're really lucky we're drawn a lot to those stories written

by people of color but we wanted to have an open discussion that hopefully you guys can join in

on about the publishing industry how writers from underrepresented groups get themselves published

and the challenges they face so yeah Linda why don't you kick us off we are yours I just wanted

to say though that like we do not work in the publishing indust and this is Sol our opinion yeah

based still things that we have seen having run the Canada book club now for nearly seven years

years so yeah we we have a lot of experience um in terms of yellow face on Wow you know I

find really funny so the author I'll give you okay I'll give you BL no spoilers no spoilers

good to yeah you guys have to read it all right so we've got two people in this book one is a really

really successful East Asian Auer she's a Chinese American called AO and she is like The Prodigy

every book is a best center her latest book is about to be adapted into Netflix she's about to

meet Netflix she is raking in it and she's quite young and then her friend well I used to tell

Friend Lucy acquaint acquaint acquaintance they went to Yale together at they y they y they call

each other but her friend June June Haywood white woman isn't a successful author at all published

one book and it completely flopped and so they roll in the same circles and there's this weird

codependence on each other even though aena is super successful it's like why' you need her I

think she needs her for validation anyway asena dies all of a sudden this is not a spoiler sprin

in the blur it's very early on very early on she dies all of a sudden and Jun is there when she

dies and steals her unfinished manuscript and publishes it as her own and then you see what

happens after that and I think the thing that kills me in this book it really isn't about the

fact that she steals it I mean that's immoral but it's about how the publishing industry defends a

white woman for publishing uh a book about it's a CH story that okay that's fine you can do that

you need the sensitivity reading to have been done could have done the research and so on and

it's about how they defended this white author with all the backlash that she faces all the

rumors that come out and you just wonder like wow like this is obviously written from a perspective

of someone who knows their stuff and I believe that the author does and I think that the author

was in a prime position to do so because she's so successful that she used her platform to do this

yeah if feel was any other also they' be like you're just bitter you're just bitter about the

industry so that is what I felt and that's the BLB yeah so hope you buys it's a really really

good book and actually it's really everyone who has had the opportuni to read it so far who does

like him publish has said it's quite authentic quite true to life which I think is great but

I think it does pose a really big challenge you know as as Linda's mentioned when June Haywood

publishes this book about Chinese laborers in World War I she publ publishes under a new

name June s so she can maybe Juniper J Juniper so she can maybe mistaken for yeah an ambiguous name

and and there's all sorts of kind of there's all sorts of ramifications but it does kind of raise