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Chapter 10
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Yellowface, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Critique of the Publishing Industry
Identity, Power, and Privilege
Social Media and Cancel Culture
Ambition, Success, and Notoriety
Loss, Grief, and Guilt
Revenge and Retribution
Summary
Analysis
Then, someone writing from a Twitter account called @AthenaLiusGhost starts attacking June online, saying that she predatorily befriended Athena to steal her work. The account accuses June of engaging in yellowface by positioning herself as Chinese American. Horrified, June refreshes her Twitter feed over and over and watches as the thread gets more and more attention. She isn’t really surprised when netizens—both anonymous individuals and those who’ve already criticized her, like Adele Sparks-Sato—pile on with further allegations of racism and with ad hominem attacks. And that’s before the death threats start appearing in her DMs.
With the arrival of the ghostly Twitter account, the book (and June’s active imagination) take a turn toward the supernatural. Thus far, Athena’s presence has haunted June in fairly subtle ways—she continues to define herself and her success in comparison to her perceptions of Athena, for instance. But now, with someone calling her out directly and publicly, she can’t avoid her guilty conscience any longer. Although this is an uncomfortable experience, it still feeds June’s ego because it means online attention—observe how she cannot or will not tear herself away from Twitter even as the attacks accumulate and escalate.
Active
Themes
Panic overwhelms June. She’s certain that her fame, success, and newfound financial stability are about to go up in smoke. She feels her precarious grip on her mental health starting to slip. She questions why she published The Last Front. After a while, the panic subsides, and she revisits the @AthenaLiusGhost thread. It’s not wrong in its basic claim (she did steal Athena’s work), but it got a lot of other details wrong, like the fact that she and Athena knew each other in college, years before Athena became famous.
The fact that June spirals so quickly suggests that she knows that what she did was wrong. But her desire for fame and attention outweighed her sense of integrity. She’s upset over being called to account and over the possible loss of her newfound fame, not over her own choices.
Active
Themes
June emails Brett, who quickly calls her back. He tells her that if the allegations are false—she says they are, but he asks for confirmation several times, anyway—then she should just stay quiet and let the drama fizzle out. Twitter is a very small—if very vocal—percentage of the literary community.
Active
Themes
But the conversation doesn’t fizzle out. Instead, the “Athena-June scandal” gains traction. It seems to June like everyone in the industry is rushing to join sides, or at least to position themselves so as to avoid backlash when the dust finally settles. The meanest comments come from anonymous individuals, and the allegations involve increasingly convoluted dives into June’s online past. People scour her interviews and public statements about The Last Front for further evidence of her racism, tokenization of Asian people, and White saviorism.
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June spends a lot of time justifying herself in her head—for instance, if historical records show that some of the Christian missionaries brought in to control the CLC laborers were noble, then portraying them as such in her book isn’t White saviorism; it’s accuracy. But she knows that such detailed “rebuttals” won’t do anything. Once people have made up their minds, they only look for evidence that supports their position.
Active
Themes
It’s so bad that sometimes June even starts to wonder if she is the villain people make her out to be, whether she has the “warped version of reality.” But she nips those thoughts in the bud as Dr. Gaily taught her to do and reminds herself that the internet is just full of “social justice warriors” and “clout-chasing white ‘allies.’”
Active
Themes
Amid the furor, a few people stick with June, like Brett, and Daniella and the rest of the team at Eden Press. A few other writers and bloggers (admittedly mostly White) defend her publicly online. And Jen and Marnie send her long and supportive text threads. They recommend that she get offline and stop paying attention to her trolls. But June keeps getting sucked back in.
Active
Themes
June wishes she could offer a “magical apology” to make everything go away. But that’s not how it works. Now she realizes that Athena wasn’t exaggerating her sense of alarm and fear when she, too, was attacked online a few years earlier. It started when an anonymous Twitter user attacked her for dating a White man and quickly exploded into a chorus of online trolls accusing her of being a race traitor. June gets it, belatedly. It’s scary to feel like there are thousands of people out to “mock, humiliate, or worse, endanger you.” And she can’t escape the cycle because, she says, Twitter is the place where the court of public opinion builds and destroys literary careers.
