Yellowface - Entry 3
May 8, 2024 * literature, yellowface * part 9
Contents
In this section of the story, we see the issues with June’s literary success. While it seems like her success is increasing at an incredible rate, with June’s book being considered for a movie deal, talk starts about how she plagiarized her book off of Athena. Attacks from a twitter account named @AthenaLiusGhost begin to flood June’s social media feed, and while she hurriedly reassures her editor and publisher that the accusations are false, she grows sickened and panicked.
June begins to panic, and drives herself into a spiral of loneliness and anxiety, and she can’t make herself sleep or eat, instead scrolling through hateful comments on social media for hours at a time. June is reeling from the attacks, and seeking a breather, goes to see her sister Rory and her husband Tom. The time away from the publishing world helps June, and she asks Tom to try and track down the person behind Athena Liu’s Ghost account.
Analysis/Reflection
There’s a lot that’s revealed about June’s character here. In particular, it shows how she’s easily prone to anxiety and paranoia, and doesn’t cope healthily, instead starving herself and doom scrolling through a feed of negativity in social media.
This part of the story portrays a narrative on social media and “cancel culture” that’s exceedingly relevant today, highlighting the detrimental effects of social media on one’s mental health, shown horrifyingly through June’s depression and pit of despair. Cancel culture is something we witness in real time every day, and the way in which individuals on the internet, protected by relative anonymity and the shield of their screens, often lack empathy and jump to conclusions without regard for the feelings of the author.
This is in many ways a mirror into our own lives, where many of us sit behind computer screens and type away at our keyboards, feeding into the cesspool that is social media, pushing cancel culture and making remarks without a care of how they impact those reading them, and those they’re directed at.
I think we can also reasonably extrapolate that June doesn’t have many friends or people that she can turn to for help, and that highlights the dangers of being left alone during such a critical moment in her life, when her mental health is reaching all time lows, and she’s facing the wrath of the internet. It’s ironic, really. She desired what Athena had, but only saw the good parts of it, not the less idealistic, ugly, and horrifying reality that accompanies it, and what Athena was probably undergoing as well.