Yellowface: Chapter 14 Summary & Analysis

June watched Athena’s relationship with Geoff through the Internet like everyone else. The young power couple met at a writers’ residency shortly before Athena’s first book came out, and their budding romance garnered a lot of attention in the literary world. But then Geoff’s first book—a sci-fi story about “race hopping” androids which he meant as a careful exploration of “racial fluidity” but which reviewers judged as sophomoric and shallow philosophizing at best—flopped. And before that, he’d written a short story cycle about the abuse of an android named Xiao Li at the hands of human men that came off less as the “scorching interrogation of colonial misogyny” and other social ills he’d intended and more as a fetishization of Chinese women.

Athena quietly broke up with Geoff and distanced herself as he fought back against his detractors online with increasingly angry “screeds,” some of which attacked Athena directly. Who knows what actually happened, June thinks now. She knows all too well how “Twitter makes unqualified yet eager judges” of everyone. In any case, June is certain that Geoff is behind the @AthenaLiusGhost account. Luckily she has his contact information squirreled away after Athena’s unsuccessful attempt to organize a D.C.-area writers’ retreat a few years earlier. She texts him, accusing him of running the account and demanding a meeting the following day.

Geoff shows up dressed like he’s trying to hide his identity. June thinks he looks ridiculous, but then she’s been scanning the coffeeshop’s exits like a “KGB agent” since she arrived. Geoff is almost off-puttingly handsome, but June refuses to let him charm her. She goes on the offensive immediately, telling him that trashing her online “disrespects” Athena’s memory as much as June’s reputation. She points out that he has no proof. He says that Athena talked to him about her research and the manuscript while they were still dating. But he acknowledges he has no hard proof.

Nevertheless, Geoff tries to bully June. He calls her a terrible person and tells her that Athena called her a “hack” writer after her first book came out. June calmly and carefully baits him into a poorly-conceived blackmail attempt, which she records on her phone. Now that she has the one thing Geoff lacks—concrete evidence of bad behavior—she knows that she can keep him quiet for good. If he keeps harassing her, she threatens to release the recording. His barely suppressed frustration and rage are alarming, but in the end June feels only triumph over her victory as she walks away from the meeting.

Confident now that no one has the receipts to back up the allegations against her (only Mrs. Liu has access to the notebooks and she made it clear she had no intention of reading them), June crafts and posts a careful public statement distancing herself from Geoff’s allegations of theft. Initial responses predictably continue the attack. But when Geoff deactivates the @AthenaLiusGhost a few days later, most of the online book community rallies behind June. She even gets a dubious vote of confidence from Xiao Chen, who says The Last Front is so obviously racist that “only a white person could have written it.” And the good news keeps coming. After the fiasco blows over, Brett emails to say that Greenhouse wants to option the book. Soon, June isn’t afraid to look at Twitter or Google her own name anymore. She’s “innocent in the court of public opinion.”