Yellowface - Entry 5
May 8, 2024 * literature, yellowface * part 11
Contents
June is being pressured by her editor and publishing company to write a new book, something that would reassert her image as a writer who can actually write, and kill any lingering sentiments of her being a thief.
However, June has writer's block. She can’t think of anything. She confesses that she actually took multiple things from Athena’s apartment the night she died, including just a paragraph of text that Athena wrote for a book idea. This book idea ignites June’s passion for writing, and she takes it as a writing prompt, finishing the book and publishing it, and it turns out to be a major success. However, it’s this book that takes her down.
Online, someone posts that the first paragraph of the book is exactly the same as something Athena submitted at a writing workshop a few years ago, and so it’s clear that she plagiarized, even if it was only the first paragraph. June is ostracized by her editor and publisher, the media turns on her, and she returns to her dangerous cycle of depression, subject to the pain of public opinion.
Analysis/Reflection
June didn’t stop when she was ahead, and it came back to bite her. In a sense, it’s karma, but I really do see now what Kuang meant when she called the book a “a horror story on loneliness in a fiercely competitive world.” I had to put down the book for a moment at this point, just to take a breather. Kuang is a great writer, and it really shows through here, as the public backlash and the narrative of June’s experience following it is intense.
June’s lack of a support group, which previously used to be Eden’s Angels, furthers the detriment of her mental condition, and it’s exceedingly clear here how the dangerous combination of loneliness, guilt, anxiety, and paranoia lead to the deterioration of one’s condition. Publishing, it seems, is a lonely field that isolates its participants.
We continue to see June crafting reasons to justify her plagiarism of Athena’s works, and convincing herself that she was right in writing about Chinese heritage and culture, and portraying herself as an ethnically ambiguous Asian writer. June walks around Chinatown in Washington D.C. to try and “expose” herself to the culture more, and tries again to no avail to find something to write about that isn’t Chinese. This shows June’s internal contradiction, where she claims that she’s allowed to write about Chinese history and culture because she’s extensively researched it, but at the same time she refuses to do research into other cultures to attempt to expand her worldview.
When right wing individuals rally around her book and support her, June avoids taking accountability by claiming that she voted for Biden. In the real world, this extends to individuals refusing to take accountability of their actions on account of their own personal views, such as celebrities who don’t consider the effects of what they post to a large fanbase and their influence on public opinion as a whole using their personal affiliations to hide behind a veil of a supposed lack of need of accountability.