Chinese-American author says sensitivity readers used disingenuously to prevent criticism

A Chinese-American writer has said that sensitivity readers are used "disingenuously" by publishers to prevent criticism on social media.

Rebecca Kuang, who has recently published her fifth novel, Yellowface, a satirical take on the publishing industry about a white woman stealing the manuscript of her friend, Hong Kong-born Athena Liu, and passing it off as her own, said that people used sensitivity readers to avoid "online scandal".

In the novel, protagonist June Hayward even changes her name to the ethnically ambiguous Juniper Song, using her middle name that came from her white hippy mother, in order to avoid accusations of cultural appropriation.

In one blackly comic moment, she gets a publisher fired for insisting on a sensitivity reader for the novel, which concerns the Chinese Labour Corps in the First World War.

'Underinformed'

Sensitivity readers are used by publishers and authors to assess whether passages should be altered if they contain tropes and descriptions that could be seen as offensive or outdated.

In February, the Telegraph revealed how hundreds of changes had been made to new editions of Roald Dahl's children's novels by sensitivity readers.

"I think a lot of people use sensitivity readers in a way that's very disingenuous and underinformed," Kuang told an audience at the Hay Festival.

“By which I mean they're using it to cover their asses, so they don't get into trouble on Twitter later, because everyone wants to avoid the reader being like, 'Oh this page of the book is racist and then a whole online scandal."

She added: "I've always found it really weird to pay somebody to tell you if you've accidentally been racist - you should be able to do the research to know yourself."

Four sensitivity readers

She added that she herself had used four sensitivity readers herself for her novel, Babel, set in an alternate-reality 1830s Oxford, which included a wide range of international characters, and had "really loved that experience".

"We were treating them as collaborators, people who could bring in an extra detail and depth and complexity to characters with a shared background," she said, adding that they had helped her with the portrayal of Ramiz Rafi "Ramy" Mirza, an Indian Muslim student.

Kuang, who has also written a trilogy of fantasy novels set in the second Sino-Japanese War, said that white writers should be able to portray characters of colour and vice versa, without facing accusations of appropriation.

"This discourse has been going on for a long time - I think, in recent years, there's this language of staying in your own lane, cultural appropriation, having the right to write this kind of story, not writing stories outside your personal experience without permission," she said.

"I'm really sympathetic to where this language is coming from, when I was growing up every time I was reading a novel with an Asian character, there was always somebody named Lotus Blossom, who was very petite and demure and had almond-shaped eyes and a slit skirt, just these boring bland stereotypes over and over again that didn't treat Asian-Americans as people but as ornamental set pieces," she said.

"The problem is that this framework has spiralled into this really strict focus on race. So that if you're not strictly Asian, you're not allowed to write about Asian people at all, if you're not black you're not allowed to write about black characters I find this deeply frustrating, and pretty illogical because it leads to logic such as my writing from the perspective of a white author is cultural appropriation.

"You get situations where Asian American authors are told, 'oh you can only write about Asian immigrant trauma,'" she said.

She added that she believed "quite strongly" that writers should be able to write about anything regardless of their background. "Now books will do that badly but when they do they just won't sell very well because they're horrible.

"And when it is well researched and it is taking into consideration the history of literary representations of the communities that they're writing about I see no problem with white writers writing about Asian Americans and I also see no problem with writing about white characters myself. It's a question of craft, not about whether you have the right blood type to write about a subject - that's so silly.”

Yellowface is number 13 on Amazon's bestseller list and is also included among bestsellers on the Waterstones website, having been published in the UK last Thursday. It is a New York Times bestseller.