Yellowface - Entry 6
May 8, 2024 * literature, yellowface * part 12
Contents
The conclusion of this novel further explores June’s downfall. She begins to hallucinate Athena walking around her and following her, and she sees Athena's Instagram account grow active again, posting pictures of her. Not thinking rationally, she panics, going to see Geoff for some avenue of support.
Geoff tells her that it’s probably been hacked, and they both share stories of how Athena “took” narratives from them and used them in her own books.
June can’t break away from Athena, it seems, and sees her in public repeatedly.
Eventually, she contacts the Instagram account, and they agree to meet at a specific location the following night. There, she confesses everything to this “ghost” of Athena, who turns out to be Candice, an assistant that June had gotten fired when her initial book was published.
Candice was recording everything, and she exposed June’s lies to the world.
In the end, June is ever vindictive and falls into a spiral of depression. She decides to write a new book in response to what Candice said, to respin the narrative in her own favor, and that’s where Yellowface ends.
Analysis/Reflection
This final portion of the book emphasizes Yellowface’s overarching message on how the publishing industry is often unethical in its practices towards authors. June isn’t an amazing person by any means, but some of the things she said do resonate, and there’s reasonable questions to be asked both in regards to the publishing industry’s treatment of authors which inevitably isolates them, as well as questions on cultural appropriation and who has the “right” to write about certain things.
“Every time she tried to branch out to new projects, they kept insisting that Asian was her brand, was what her audience expected. They never let her talk about anything other than being an immigrant, other than the fact that half her family died in Cambodia, that her dad killed himself on the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen. Racial trauma sells, right? They treated her like a museum” (Kuang, Yellowface, 307).
Geoff and June’s conversation on how Athena “took” stories from them is one that stood out to me. It shows how Athena, while not maliciously, still “stole” from people and used those things in her writing, and re-poses the question of who actually has the writer to talk about certain cultural histories and identities and extends it to stories and concepts as a whole.
Yellowface is in many ways a commentary on how the publishing industry and society as a whole profit from the exploitation of marginalized voices, establishing the key question of who actually has a right to tell stories.