Yellowface Chapter 12 Summary & Analysis

More than anything, June wants to hide away in her apartment, but she has two prior commitments that she must honor. The first is a library event with a bunch of D.C. third graders. That one is fine. But the second, an appearance on a panel about writing East Asia-inspired stories at a Virginia literary festival, is an unmitigated disaster.

June’s desire to hide has little to do with honoring the guilt she feels as a result of her actions but is instead a way to try to avoid dealing with it. But the book isn’t willing to let her off the hook so easily as it asks her—and readers—to confront the harm her plagiarism and yellowface positioning can and do cause.

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First, June arrives at her panel 10 minutes late thanks to misreading the schedule. Then, she realizes that she’s the only White woman on the panel which otherwise includes a poet and performance artist named Diana Qiu, a young adult author and civil rights lawyer named Noor Rishi, and Ailin Zhou, who writes “race-bended” historical romances. The moderator, Annie, asks June the first question, and in answering, June mispronounces Ailin’s name. Ailin corrects her. The joke June tries to make about it earns a stony silence from the crowd.

Arriving late draws extra attention to June at an event where she would reasonably be expected to face scrutiny anyway. The book leaves her inclusion on the panel an open question—is she involved because The Last Front is a bestseller only, or because these event organizers, like Susan Lee, have assumed that June is Chinese American (just as she’s implicitly inviting people to think)? In any case, she immediately proves her strongest detractors right when she butchers the name of an actual Chinese American writer and then makes an insensitive joke about it. It’s clear that she’s used to her privilege as a White woman protecting her, and she doesn’t know how to handle herself when it stops doing so.

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When Annie pitches June a softball question about what literature can do for “underrepresented groups,” June offers a well-practiced answer featuring an anecdote about the indignities the CLC laborers suffered in Canada and concluding that her novel illustrates how the very necessary work that Chinese laborers did was “hidden and discredited.” Diana Qiu angrily interrupts, demanding that June and the panel address the allegations that June herself used, hid, and discredited the labor of the Chinese American Athena. People begin to film or live-Tweet the exchange, even as Annie quickly shuts it down. But the panel is ruined. June sits silent, red-faced, and trying not to cry for the remainder of the hour.

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It’s a mark of the privilege American society accords to White people that the Annie tries to help June out with easy questions. It’s a mark of June’s cluelessness that she can’t answer in a satisfactory way. The book thus shows one of the ways in which it’s harmful when dominant groups appropriate marginalized voices for their own purposes, because it tends to end rather than to further the discussion. June retreats into her privilege when she casts herself as the victim of an unwarranted and unprofessional attack by an angry Chinese American woman, even though Diana’s questions are legitimate.

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When June gets home, she reaches out to Marnie and Jen, who oblige her by gleefully attacking Diana Qiu’s “performative outrage,” physical appearance, and bad art in their private text chain. June pulls up Qiu’s website on her laptop. Her friends are right: Qiu is ugly and her art is bad. June assures herself that Qiu is just jealous. And June isn’t going to let people like her win.

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June and her friends attack Diana in their group chat in starkly racialized ways. No matter what she says to defend herself elsewhere, moments like this showcase June’s overt anti-AAPI racism. And, by twisting the story around to turn herself into the victim, she takes advantage of the benefit of the doubt accorded to White people in American society. She can’t accept the criticism as valid and, as she did with Candice earlier, ascribes Diana’s actions to jealousy rather than a valid reaction to June’s own poor behavior. This is especially ironic since Diana Qiu’s reputation is (presumably) based on Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut.

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Yellowface: Chapter 12 Summary & Analysis