Yellowface

Mourning Athena is a strange experience for June, quite unlike the hopelessness that she felt when her dad died. She feels more shocked than sad, and she only loses it once, on a night spent watching Heimlich maneuver videos online. Feeling like her ignorance cost Athena her life, she calls her sister Rory in tears. Rory reminds her that she isn’t responsible. She worries that June might be backsliding and might need to reach out to Dr. Gaily. June says no.

When, about one week after Athena’s death, June writes a long, tasteful Twitter thread about it, she’s excited by the amount of attention she gets. Then she feels guilty and takes a weeklong hiatus from social media.

June is surprised when Athena’s mother, Mrs. Liu, doesn’t just invite her to the funeral, but asks her to give a eulogy. The service is at a Korean church (strange, June thinks; she thought Athena was Chinese), attended by “old Asian people.” June leaves as quickly as she can afterwards, uninterested in the strong-smelling food and unable to understand the conversations happening in languages other than English.

June takes a month off of work for “bereavement leave” (she tutors affluent teenagers preparing for the SAT and ghostwrites their college application essays), which irritates her clients’ parents. But really, she’s reading the draft of Athena’s novel, The Last Front, which follows the experiences of members of the Chinese Labour Corps (CLC) recruited and deployed by the British Army during World War I. It’s a rough draft and still needs quite a bit of work, but it’s so brilliant and compelling that June keeps getting wrapped up in reading and forgetting to transcribe it into her computer.

June has decided to try her hand at finishing Athena’s masterpiece. At first, it was just a “lark,” but soon she’s wrapped up in the process. It’s much easier to edit someone else’s work than her own, and it’s exhilarating to realize that she has technical expertise to match the great Athena Liu. She swears that she never intended to steal it—rather, she just wanted to make sure that the best version possible of Athena’s masterpiece made it into the light of day. It takes three weeks to complete the revisions. Then she sends it to her agent, Brett.

At first, June maintains, she meant to tell Brett the truth, but she worried that this would just create messy complications. Instead, she tells herself that passing it off as her own work is the best way to honor Athena’s legacy by making sure her full-realized masterpiece gets published.

Brett picked up June as a client during an open pitch session, based on a Twitter-length description of her debut novel, Over the Sycamore. The book describes the difficult coming-of-age experiences of sisters Janie and Rose the summer their father died. Brett is young and “dude-bro-ey,” but generally responsive and professional.

Brett is impressed with the draft, and when June’s current editor, Garret McKintosh, passes on it sight unseen, he immediately starts pitching it to other editors. Soon there’s a bidding war for the rights to The Last Front, won by Eden Press, a reputable indie publisher for what is, to June, a jaw-dropping amount of money. Publisher’s Weekly lavishes praise on the deal. June quits her tutoring job. Congratulations pour in from everywhere. June thinks she’s finally gotten the success she deserves, and it tastes delicious.