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Chapter 3
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
Although initially intimidated, June quickly decides she likes her new editor at Eden Press. Daniella Woodhouse is a “no-nonsense” woman who made a name for herself in literary circles by suggesting that anyone pointing out sexism in the publishing industry is “pathetic.” June finds the revisions process exhilarating because it proves to her that she’s just as good as Athena. Or maybe even better than Athena. To improve Athena’s work, she and Daniella make it easier to navigate by taking out the untranslated Chinese phrases and giving the characters more distinct names. (June can hardly tell the difference between the first and last or male and female names Athena used.) They also make the White characters less “embarrassingly” racist by excising scenes which June knows from Athena’s rough-draft notes come wholesale from the historical record.
June likes Daniella, but reading between the lines of her description makes it clear that Daniella is a problematic figure in her own right. She’s not just unwilling to acknowledge structural impediments in the publishing industry, but she also telegraphs her cultural insensitivity and unacknowledged White privilege in the edits she requests for The Last Front. These edits are clearly designed for the ease and comfort of White readers at the expense of the book’s artistic integrity and historical accuracy.
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At Daniella’s request, June also replaces the ending Athena wrote. Athena provided a detailed account (which in June’s opinion reads like a “history paper”) of the ways in which the Allied powers gave the CLC laborers and the Chinese government short shrift in the aftermath of the war. June’s ending provides the more uplifting image of one of the laborers getting on a boat to go home and an epigraph drawn from a historical letter one of the laborers wrote which says, “I am convinced that it is the will of Heaven that all mankind should live as one family.”
The edits Daniella and June visit upon Athena’s novel downplay the economic and political abuse perpetuated against the CLC laborers (and the Chinese government) by the Allied forces. The sentiment expressed in the CLC laborer’s letter is one that people like June and Daniella (that is, White, privileged, and self-centered) like as long as it doesn’t require them to acknowledge the violence and abuse suffered by marginalized and oppressed people.
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After a while, June finds it hard to tell where Athena’s voice ends and hers picks up. Still, Athena’s “fingerprints” are all over the novel. Noting that the easiest place to hide a lie is “in plain sight,” June doesn’t try to obscure the fact that The Last Front sounds so much like Athena. Instead, she tries to give it a plausible explanation. She researches the topic until she’s confident she knows as much as Athena did. In interviews and online, she pretends that she and Athena were much closer than in reality and claims that Athena gave her feedback and help with research on the novel. She sets up a scholarship in Athena’s honor with the Asian American Writer’s Collective. She’s confident that anyone who accuses her of theft will be judged a monster for attacking a grieving woman.
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But then, June gets a Google alert for Athena’s name and learns that Mrs. Liu has decided to donate her notebooks—the notebooks which contain the research and planning for all her novels, including The Last Front—to the Yale library. June is angry at herself for not taking the notebooks, too; they were laying on the desk next to the manuscript, but she was just so panicked the night Athena died.
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If anyone gets a look at the notebooks, they’ll know that The Last Front was Athena’s book. June decides to stop Mrs. Liu from making the donation. She visits Athena’s grieving mother, smoothly bringing their conversation around to the topic of the notebooks. Mrs. Liu doesn’t want to keep them because she knows they’re painfully full of Athena’s personal and familial history. And she hopes they’ll be of interest to scholars in the future. June seizes on the autobiographical nature of the notebooks, saying that making them public would be a betrayal of Athena’s privacy, almost like publicly displaying her rotting corpse. June manipulates Mrs. Liu easily. After all, she’s a writer and has a gift with words.
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Mrs. Liu asks June to take the notebooks off her hands. For a second, June considers it—who knows how much more brilliant material they might contain?—but she knows that such greediness only means more risk. Instead, she tries to make Mrs. Liu think that the best course is keeping them private in perpetuity. Mrs. Liu agrees. And then, after another half hour of small talk with the gracious but clearly grieving and exhausted Mrs. Liu, June leaves. News of the donation quietly fizzles out and it never comes to fruition.
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