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Chapter 16
Themes
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
Eventually the second controversy spends itself out, too. June’s books are still selling well, in part because a lot of the book-reading public aren’t on Twitter and in part because she has become the pet subject of alt-right figures eager to attack “cancel culture” and who encourage their followers to support her by buying her books. She feels a little bad about getting the wrong kind of attention, but decides she has no moral obligation regarding it. After all, she didn’t mean to become “a white supremacist Barbie.” She even claims that a good, liberal democratic voter like herself can do a lot of good with “racist redneck” money.
June’s ongoing financial success should remind her that online fame and attention aren’t the only metric of success. But she’s also selling well in part because she’s become a poster child for so-called anti-White reverse racism. She labels this attention as “wrong” because it’s antithetical to the kinds of postures and positions the group to which she wants to belong (the online literati) take. But, readers should note, the things she’s said about Athena’s success and her own failures show that she’s perhaps more in line with her new fans than she’d publicly admit. There’s nothing to prove that her democratic and liberal stances are anything more heartfelt than publicly positioning herself to court the attention of a likely demographic. She has, after all, shown her willingness to do and say whatever it takes to court online attention and fame.
Themes
Nevertheless, June starts considering leaving the industry altogether and starting another career where her Whiteness would be an asset rather than a liability. But she can’t give up on the magic that she’s always found in writing. It was all that kept her going after her father’s death. However, it seems to be abandoning her now. All her ideas seem insipid, uninspired, or involve too much difficult and tedious research. She finds herself continually defaulting to Chinese stories since she did “all that research” for The Last Front and has become, in the two years since she stole the manuscript from Athena’s apartment, fluent enough in the “current political touchpoints.”
The more embattled June becomes, the more she retreats into the protection of her White privilege. She’s always been bitter about what she considered Athena’s unfair advantage (her AAPI identity), and her desire to find places where White people have the advantage confirms her sense of superiority. As in the lead up to Mother Witch, it’s hard if not impossible to tell whether June has writer’s block because she’s just not as good as she thinks she is, or because she’s facing an unimaginable amount of pressure in an industry always looking for the next big thing.
Themes
So, June takes a trip to D.C.’s Chinatown, intent on finding a compelling story to tell. She enters a quasi-authentic looking restaurant where she reluctantly orders soup dumplings (“soup dumpling” sounds gross, in her opinion, but it’s all the shop sells) from a standoffish waitress. Waiting for her food, she tries to strike up a conversation with a middle-aged waiter wiping down the tables, but it feels stilted and awkward. Then the standoffish waitress intervenes. June suddenly realizes that the waitress suspects her of being an undercover cop. But then the waitress recognizes June. She’s “that girl who stole Athena Liu’s work.” The waitress asks June to leave. Stuffing a $20 bill into the waitress’s hand and too ashamed to wait for her dumplings or her change, June flees.
In the beginning, June offered all sort of excuses for why The Last Front wasn’t cultural appropriation or culturally insensitive even as she made changes that exonerated and glorified White characters and exoticized the Chinese laborers of the CLC. Because readers only get to see tiny snippets of the book and to read others’ opinions about it, however, June retains plausible deniability. It’s hard to tell if she is just clueless or she is actively participating in the kind of cultural appropriation she accuses Geoff of. But when she goes to Chinatown in search of a compelling and sellable story, she can no longer offer plausible excuses. However, the book does leave open the question of whether June is just a clueless or exploitative person, or whether she’s driven to these extremes by the expectations and pressures of the publishing industry.
Themes
About a month later, Brett and June have a phone call about a “new opportunity”—intellectual property work. June balks. She’s always believed that IP work—where an organization hires writers to flesh out pre-concocted ideas, frequently associated with established film or book franchises—is for people who can’t succeed on their own merits. Not people like her. Brett says it’s not all like that. This opportunity is with Snowglobe, a company that has a record for using careful market research to churn out bestsellers, some of which have been very well received. Brett tactfully tries to say that June might find it easier to work from a “preexisting scaffold.” He might be right, but it still wounds her pride to hear him say it.
Yet again, June proves that she is more interested in the identity of “famous writer” than in the craft of writing. Moreover, taking and adapting someone else’s ideas (licitly this time) would tend to confirm the views of people like Adele Sparks-Sato and others who have already decided that June is little more than a plagiarizing hack. She sees herself—and, crucially, wants to be seen as—as a serious literary genius. But that is, perhaps, her greatest fiction.
Themes
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June signs a nondisclosure agreement so that Brett can tell her about the book Snowglobe wants her to write. Based loosely on the real demographic shifts that happened after China imposed a one-child policy on families in the late 1970s (cultural preferences for sons and selective abortions of girls skewed the population so that men far outnumber women in contemporary China), the pitch describes a dystopian world in which Chinese women are raised in captivity and sold into reproductive slavery—one-child meets Handmaid’s Tale. Brett thinks its social criticism is “sharp.” June doesn’t understand how he can’t anticipate the political and cultural attacks it will garner. She’s not opposed to IP work, but she tells Brett that she wants a different pitch. Two weeks later, Snowglobe and Simon & Schuster announce that they’ve signed Heidi Steel to write The Last Woman in China.
Notably, other famous authors like Heidi Steel don’t care about using IP ideas; by turning up her nose June merely makes herself more vulnerable. Yellowface positions Snowglobe’s pitch here as a clear example of cultural appropriation and the exploitation of painful history. June understands this (although it’s not clear if she objects on moral or economic grounds). But she’s unable or unwilling to see how her actions and the changes she imposed on The Last Front played out the same dynamic. She’s either clueless about her own biases and cultural appropriation, or she simply considers herself in a superior category to most people because she knows how to express the correct, socially accepted beliefs.
Themes
