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Chapter 21
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
June doesn’t take Geoff’s advice. She can’t take her eyes off Athena’s Instagram account, which now posts at least once a day, always tagging her directly. Sometimes, it’s just a picture portraying Athena going about life. Sometimes, she reenacts her own death.
True to form—both for her character as established thus far and for the genre of psychological thriller—June can’t help herself. She merely goes deeper into her own personal hell. She is, in almost every way, the sole architect of her own misery due to her thirst for fame and relevance.
Themes
June can no longer stand the guilty feelings she suffers when she thinks about her happy memories of Athena, so she leans into the bad ones, hoping to make herself feel better. She starts having vivid nightmares, both about the night Athena died and about being haunted by her ghost. She sometimes fantasizes that Athena faked her own death to lay an elaborate trap for June.
The book also uncovers the mechanics of June’s grievance and desire for revenge. Thinking of the good times is too painful. It’s easier—if more damaging in the long run—to focus on the things she feels Athena did to deserve what happened to her and what June has done since her death. It’s easier in the short term to seek vengeance than to grieve, even though this strategy hasn’t served June well in the long run thus far.
Themes
June begins to research Chinese ghost stories. She learns that there are many words for unquiet ghosts in Chinese. She concludes that an outsized number of Chinese ghosts are “hungry, angry, voiceless women,” and that she’s added Athena to their ranks. She tries (unsuccessfully) to exorcise Athena’s ghost. Her pseudo-memoir morphs into a gothic horror. She isn’t sure how it should end, but most of the scenarios she considers involve Athena’s ghost taking its bloody revenge.
June thinks—or wants to think—that she’s being haunted by Athena’s ghost, when the book makes it clear that she’s really being haunted by her own guilty conscience and her inability to properly mourn and move on from the difficult things that have happened to her over the years. She’s also trying (unsuccessfully) to do what Athena did so well: transform her psychological pain and drama into art. But it’s not working, either because she’s a less able craftsperson than Athena or because, as she alleged at the end of the previous chapter, transforming pain into art doesn’t in and of itself make the pain go away.
Themes
And then, Athena’s Instagram posts a horrifying series of images that mirror the scenarios June has been fantasizing about. They depict Athena coming back to life after someone or something places The Last Front on her dead body. In the last picture, Athena appears to be leaping straight out of the phone towards June. June knows that the only way to stop the madness is to confess, but she can’t bring herself to do it. She keeps trying to live with the ghost.
The images’ specificity scares June for good reason—she hasn’t discussed her fears with anyone. Only she and Geoff know the truth, and he’s leaving her alone. Her guilty conscience is doing most of the work, however, since the pictures are amateurish and heavy-handed. They’re mostly successful in spooking June because she’s predisposed, at this moment, to being spooked. Note how her own paranoia and her incredibly online life make her vulnerable to the harassment of whoever is behind the account.
Themes
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A few days later, as June is working in a D.C. café, she thinks she sees Athena’s ghost go past the window again. This time, she chases it and finds herself confronting Diana Qiu a few blocks later. June accuses Diana of stalking her and impersonating Athena. But up close, Diana looks very different. She isn’t even wearing the clothes June thought she saw on the ghost. Diana calls June a “psycho bitch.” Weakly, June protests that she’s “not crazy.”
The book continues to play around with the idea of June being haunted. First, she’s been worried since she stole Athena’s draft about being exposed. Every bit of attention on her work exacerbates her fears and contributes to her paranoia. Second, her fear and resentment give her tunnel vision and her actions here confirm the charges of racism laid against her by her detractors. She’s haunted by the charges of racism made by Diana and others and in turn acts like the parody of a White person who can’t tell one AAPI woman from another.
Themes
But when June gets home and looks at herself in the mirror, she sees what Diana Qiu saw. Unkempt, unwashed hair. Baggy, bloodshot eyes. She’s exhausted. When Rory doesn’t answer June’s call, June calls Dr. Gaily, the psychologist who treated her at Yale and who kindly invited her to reach out if she ever needed help or support again. Although it’s nearly 9:00 at night, Dr. Gaily answers the phone. She remembers June. And she’s happy to help, although she cannot offer telehealth services outside Connecticut. She offers to send June a list of Virginia referrals in the morning. Gratefully, June accepts.
It's a somewhat tragic marker of how isolated June truly is that she only has two people she can call when she’s at her wits’ end, and one of them is the psychologist who treated her years earlier as an undergraduate. Dr. Gaily is kind but unhelpful in this moment. It’s due to licensing standards, but it’s also a subtle way in which the book underlines the possibility that Dr. Gaily was never helpful to June in the way she needed—as an adult June has coping mechanisms that work, but that also keep her from the discomfort of having to face the consequences of her actions.
Themes
June hangs up and drops her cellphone onto the bed. A moment later it lights up and she grabs it, expecting a text from Rory. But it’s a notification for a new post from Athena’s Instagram: a picture of her sitting in the very same café June visited earlier in the day. June can’t take it any longer. She DMs the account, demanding to know what the person behind it wants. The answer comes back quickly. June can meet the ghost at the “Exorcist steps” at 11:00 the following night.
The last picture posted to Athena’s Instagram account complicates the narrative yet again, because it raises the possibility that all three times June thinks she saw Athena’s ghost (at the reading in Chapter 6; in the coffee shop with Geoff in Chapter 21; and earlier this same day) it was the person who has been harassing her. Or, as Diana Qiu alleged, it was three different women who happened to bear a passing resemblance to Athena (maybe just as AAPI women of the right age). June is haunting herself by refusing to come clean and clear her conscience.
Themes
