Summary
After the scandal blows over, June finds herself and her novel trending into irrelevance. The publishing world moves on. June hungers for more success and fame, desperately wanting to be back in the spotlight. She feels increasing pressure to start a new project that will be as good as The Last Front, not only because she wants to gain more recognition, but because her agent and publishing team are similarly invested in continuing June’s success. June confesses that she has nothing she’s currently working on, aware that there’s only so much time before Brett and Daniella move on if she doesn’t produce something new.
June’s creative block is rooted in her feelings of imagined judgment from Athena. Athena has become June’s internal editor and critic; June feels paralyzed as she considers everything that Athena would say about what June is writing.
June remembers that the night of Athena’s death, she also took a few draft papers from another project that were lying next to the manuscript. All of a sudden, she feels her creative block fade and begins to work based on what’s written on the draft pages. She titles the project Mother Witch.
In a flashback, June tells the story of how during their time at Yale, Athena “stole” from her. While in college, a sophomore that June had gone on a date with sexually assaulted her after the two returned to his dorm room. June explains that she felt “blasé” immediately after the event but later started suffering from flashbacks. She began to experience nightmares after the other student, Andrew, texted her again. Amidst this, Athena was the only friend who asked June if she was okay, and June ended up telling Athena about the entire event. June soon tried to move on from the event and continue her time in college avoiding thinking about the assault.
However, while Athena and June were still at Yale, Athena managed to get a short story published in a prestigious on-campus magazine; June, jealous, discovers that the story portrays all the emotions and thoughts that she had told Athena about when sharing the story of her assault with Athena. Even the details of the assault mirror June’s experience. The two never discussed the similarities, with June deciding to abstain from confronting Athena about the story.
Mother Witch, a novella, comes out to warm critical reception but mediocre sales. Despite this relative success, June feels a sense of unease, believing that everything feels “too calm” and continuing to fear the resurgence of another scandal.
June’s fears prove true when, two weeks after Mother Witch's release, Adele Sparks-Sato—one of the first reviewers who gave The Last Front a scathingly bad review and endorsed the accusations that June had plagiarized the novel—publishes a blog post accusing June of plagiarism again. Athena had workshopped the beginning of the draft that June took from her apartment in a creative writing workshop with the Asian American Writers’ Collective several years back, where Adele Sparks-Sato and all the other attendees had read it as a short story. In her blog post, Adele uploads a copy of the story that she had received at the workshop. Sinking into quiet despair, June realizes that there is no way she can deny the accusations this time around.
A flood of renewed hate for June dominates social media. June ignores all calls from Brett and her publishing team. Her writer friends ignore her and cut her out of their writing groups. Even Marnie and Jen, who were unwavering sources of support for June, abandon her. Finally, June accepts a meeting with Daniella and Brett. She is surprised that there is a lawyer present, and Daniella asks June to tell them the truth, explaining that there’s still a chance they could negotiate a deal with Athena’s estate. June continues to deny plagiarizing and doubles down on the claims that the work is all her own, despite being unable to prove this with any early drafts or evidence that the project had been hers in its beginning stages. Daniella encourages June to delete social media and just focus on writing something new. After the meeting ends, Brett and June discuss the scandal privately and Brett tells June that the scandal has been picked up by right-wing commentators as an opportunity to discuss it as a “culture war issue.” The attention from right-wing media has also increased the book’s sales. They end their discussion with Brett urging June to meet with Daniella next week and bring her pitches for a new book.
Shortly after, June receives a call from Athena’s mother, Mrs. Liu. Mrs. Liu explains that Adele Sparks-Sato reached out to her and asked to read Athena’s drafting notebooks. Mrs. Liu first wanted to check with June, asking if that was a good idea. June, horrified, realizes she absolutely cannot let Adele access the notebooks, otherwise confirmation of her plagiarism will finally be public and undeniable. June manages to convince Mrs. Liu to refuse Adele’s request. Eventually, the scandal dies down once more. The Last Front’s sales numbers are up after the book is embraced by the alt-right commentators in order to discuss perceived infringements upon free speech by “left-wing fascist cancel-culture.” June proclaims that she’s willing to accept the attention because it brings her money; in order to resolve her own potential discomfort, she cites that she voted for Biden and has no intention of “becoming a white supremacist.”
However, pressure on June to produce new work continues to mount. She feels lost, unable to find new ideas. She considers writing about other cultures, but feels intimidated by the amount of research it would take to write a new historical or cultural novel from scratch about an identity other than her own. Instead, she decides to try and write again about Chinese culture; in an attempt to gather material, she visits Washington D.C.’s Chinatown, where she feels totally out of place. She tries to make conversation with a waiter at a soup dumpling restaurant but when the manager recognizes her as the author who was in the news for stealing Athena’s work, the manager forcibly refuses to serve June and asks her to leave the restaurant.
Brett calls June again and, in the absence of any new work from her, proposes that she write a book that’s based on a pre-existing piece of media or idea—a process also known as intellectual property work. By agreeing, June would forfeit the right to any intellectual property, and receive only the flat rate that she’s paid initially, rather than any royalties that the work generates after release. The script she’s offered is supposed to be a dystopian twist on China’s one-child policy. June refuses, stating that the book would be wildly offensive to Chinese people. Brett tries to convince her to give it a shot, but June adamantly continues to refuse.
June flies out to teach at a writers’ workshop for AAPI high school students in New England. After the first class, which she believes was a success, June feels a sudden surge of creativity. However, after trying to write, she realizes that she was just rewriting the stories that her students had composed in class. The next day, she walks in on the students huddled around a computer, evidently gossiping about the accusations that June’s novel was plagiarized. June, hurt and offended, takes her anger out on one of the students—a girl named Skylar—by humiliating her and critiquing her piece incredibly harshly in front of the entire class. The director of the workshop calls June after several students reported that June had been bullying Skylar. June makes up an excuse to leave the workshop and abandon the teaching position.
Desperate for some kind of emotional support, June goes and sees her mother, who lives in a suburb outside of Philadelphia. She hopes that her mother will ask her if she’s okay or intuit that something is wrong, but is disappointed to see that her mother is just as emotionally neglectful as June remembers her to be. June tries to share how she’s struggling with a creative block; her mother, rather than reassuring her, tells her to pursue accounting and follow in her sister’s footsteps. June grows annoyed, reminded of the rift of understanding between herself and her mother, and ceases to try and share anything with her.
Analysis
The novel’s events after the scandal initiate its path towards a conclusion; after peaking during the publishing of The Last Front, June’s career plummets in light of the accusations that surface about her plagiarizing Athena. June continuously finds ways of dismissing each accusation that comes her way—as she manages to do when explaining that Mother Witch has similarities to Athena’s short story only because they shared writing material, a false excuse for the real plagiarism she commits by copying the draft she stole from Athena. However, the damage to her career is done. She no longer has a universally good reputation. Her writing colleagues abandon her, and while her team stays on to support her, they only do so because they hope that she will produce new work that can salvage her reputation.
June’s inability to write leads to a new conflict emerging between her and her team as Brett and Daniella continuously pressure June into delivering new projects. June is acutely aware that her team’s decision to remain with her is conditional, and yet, finds herself facing a total creative block. It begins to become clear that June lacks the ability to write anything original without a pre-existing framework. When teaching at the young writers’ conference, she feels a sudden burst of inspiration; however, upon re-evaluating what she had written, June realizes that she had only felt so inspired because she had copied all of the stories that her students presented in class.
June’s desire to find new material to desperately search for stories in unfamiliar places may allow her to continue capitalizing on Chinese culture. Again, much like in previous chapters, we see June crafting excuses to justify her decision to write about Chinese heritage and culture—in this instance, explaining that it will be easier to write what she knows due to the extensive research she did in order to finish Athena’s manuscript. June’s resistance to researching new cultures reveals her hypocrisy; she is only willing to invest the labor necessary to understand a culture when she can easily profit from it. June knows that publishing a “cultural” novel that relates to identity will allow her to profit once more off of the general trending interest in novels that highlight marginalized narratives. However, she isn’t motivated enough to repeat the same process of learning a culture and history again, now that the profit she will gain is less certain. With The Last Front, she knew Athena’s success and talented writing would yield reward. With only her own abilities to carry her forward, June refuses to venture outside what she’s already researched, and instead hopes to cash in on a novel that delves into Chinese history and culture once more for quick success.
While searching for new material, and after deciding to write a novel around Chinese identity once more, June decides to go to Chinatown. She finds the neighborhood run-down and admits that despite living in Washington D.C. for several years, she never wanted to venture outside of her own familiar spaces, especially after hearing that Chinatown was “dirty.” These revelations of June's racism intensify the irony surrounding her constant justifications earlier on in the book that she had done the appropriate research and education in order to depict Chinese culture respectfully. As she wanders the neighborhood, she finds herself disgusted with the surroundings. Out of desperation, she enters a restaurant that sells soup dumplings, even though she admits that she doesn’t even know what they are and finds the smells, appearance, and taste of Chinese food unappetizing.
June’s confrontation with the restaurant’s waitstaff further exposes how insincere her attempts to interact with Chinese culture are. Her motivations are entirely in bad faith. June tries to speak to the waiter in order to extract from him a story of identity that may serve as the plot for a new novel. However, when the manager intervenes, June’s plan fails; the manager recognizes June as the woman who plagiarized Athena’s manuscript and forcibly asks June to leave immediately. For the first time, June’s motivations are directly exposed. She is unable to protest, unable to find any excuse that can explain why she’s there in the restaurant.
Despite the confrontation in the restaurant and the steady decline of her career, June continues to turn a blind eye toward the complex politics surrounding her decisions to appropriate a cultural identity that is not her own. She teaches at a conference meant for young Asian American writers, even after the humiliating experience she had in Chinatown. June has the character flaw of hubris (excessive self-confidence), leading her to dig herself deeper into the web of falsehoods and lies that she both tells others and convinces herself of. For example, when right-wing commentators pick up the scandal as a way of rallying against left-wing “identity politics,” June defends herself by citing the fact that she voted for Biden as a valid reason to simply ignore the ways her work is being used by a political movement she doesn’t agree with. Rather than speak up, she chooses to remain silent, instead adhering to the belief that she has every right to profit off of the right-wing discourse that renews sales of The Last Front. She separates herself from the effects her novel has, even when those effects are ethically fraught or even opposed to her own personal views.
