Yellowface

Within the week, The Last Front debuts on the New York Times bestseller list in the number three spot. June wants someone to celebrate with her, but Rory and their mother don’t understand her literary career, and she isn’t close to anyone else. For the first time, she really misses Athena, whom she knows would have joyfully celebrated her success with her. Instead, she contents herself with the little serotonin boosts she gets each time her social media posts get a like or a “congratulations.”

The Last Front spends nearly a month on the bestseller list, and June finds herself inundated with invitations to literary events. Before, she found these crushingly humiliating. But now that she’s a critical and commercial success, the events are fun. At BookCon, she shares a table with Daniella and three of Daniella’s other authors—Marnie Kimball, Jen Walker, and Heidi Steel. They discuss the state of the publishing industry with June like she’s an insider. They ask where she got the idea for her novel. She tells them a half true story about discovering the Corps in an undergrad class. She and Heidi have an animated discussion about how important it is to elevate marginalized voices in the literary canon.

June even runs into Garrett, and after a short relapse into her old, deferential attitude, she remembers that the tables have turned. Garrett wants to be seen with her, finally. She brushes him off cooly.

The book sells well enough to make June moderately wealthy, something that finally gets her family’s attention. She moves into a nicer apartment and becomes the sort of person who has a liquor cabinet stocked with decent whiskey. But, she points out, she’s careful to pay it forward. She makes a generous donation to the Asian American Writers’ Collective, and she volunteers to mentor young writers from underrepresented demographics through a program called Scribblers’ Fairy Godmothers. She feels virtuous doing these things, and better than Athena, whom she claimed had a vexed relationship with her identity and the Asian American writing community. 

June’s mentee is a girl named Emmy Cho, who’s writing a story about a queer Korean-American girl coming of age in the Midwest. It’s based on her own life. She’s worried that it won’t be exciting enough to garner anyone’s attention, but June assures her that her identity alone is enough to get publishers “slobbering.” At the end of their first meeting, Emmy shyly asks June if she’s White. June says she is, defensively wondering what Emmy is implying. Can’t a White person be a good mentor?