Do we still think about other people?

A couple of weeks ago there was a conversation at my book club that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. We had just read 'Yellowface' by R. F. Kuang, which follows the story of a middling author who takes her dead friend's unpublished manuscript about Chinese labourers and publishes it, passing the work off as her own. At each book club we discuss the book for an hour or two and then we go…