Summary
June despairs over continued hate she receives on the internet. While clicking through negative reviews of her book on social media, she comes across a piece that close-reads The Last Front and manages to theorize that the text’s authorship is exactly what only June knows it to really be: a hybrid novel written by both Athena and June.
Suddenly, June comes up with her next idea. She hopes to write a version of her and Athena’s friendship, blurring fact and fiction. In the hopes of appealing to contemporary audiences, she decides to also add queer undertones to the partially fictionalized retelling of their friendship she will portray. Although she immediately wants to tell Daniella, she holds off, as Daniella is busy dealing with her own set of accusations, which allege that she made repeated bigoted comments to staff about authors’ identities.
June begins to feel hopeful. She believes that this new work will make her previous plagiarism all part of a larger artistic identity, resolving the “horrible mess” and unethical choices that led her to where she is now. She even posts a photo of herself writing on Instagram, reactivating an account that she had deleted in the throes of the scandal. A few moments later, June receives a comment that comes from Athena’s old Instagram account. Horrified, she sees that the account has an uncanny new photo of Athena, although June notices that the image is both like and unlike her; her skin appears pale and her smile stretched out, almost as if straight out of a horror movie. By Athena’s hands are copies of The Last Front and Mother Witch. June, suspecting that the account is Geoff, texts him and tells him to meet her the next day.
Geoff and June meet up. After seeing the photos, Geoff tells June they’re photoshopped. They move on to discussing Athena and begin to bond over their shared experience of Athena’s writing process. Much like Athena “took” June’s story of sexual assault, Geoff confesses that Athena would regularly write and publish stories that lifted entire conversations from their arguments. During their conversation, June looks up and sees a flash of a woman who resembles Athena—something like a ghost. As they part ways, Geoff advises June to just try and block out the Instagram account and any other intrusive thoughts about Athena.
June finds herself unable to let go of Athena. Everyday, the Instagram account posts new photos. June is plagued by recurring dreams about Athena that force her to relive the moment when Athena died. In her search for answers or ways to stop the psychological torture, June reads into lore about Chinese ghosts, learning that many Chinese ghosts are reflections of women who suffered injustices. She continues to see Athena’s ghost everywhere.
One day, as she is writing in a cafe, June thinks she sees Athena’s ghost and sprints after her. She grabs her but as the woman turns around, June realizes it’s Diana Qiu, a poet and one of the women who publicly criticized June at a reading and later posted a long article denouncing June. Alongside Adele, Diana was one of June’s most outspoken critics. June accuses Diana of dressing like Athena and threatens her. Diana, terrified, pulls out pepper spray and demands that June let her go. June stumbles away, realizing that Diana isn’t actually wearing Athena’s clothes, and that she only hallucinated the resemblance.
June leaves her encounter with Diana feeling disoriented and scared of herself. When she gets home, she realizes just how much she’s spiraled out of control; her hair is unkempt, she hasn’t slept well for weeks, and she barely speaks to anyone. The feeling of Athena haunting her has destroyed her, leaving her feeling like a shell of her former self. June tries to call her former therapist for help but can’t get the care she needs, as the therapist is out-of-state.
June logs back onto Instagram and sees that Athena’s account has posted again. Extremely distressed, June finally messages the account. The ghost responds immediately and tells June to meet her the following night.
June arrives at the steps where the ghost told her to meet her. Athena stands on the steps. She begins taunting June, although June notices that whoever this version of Athena is seems slightly off, as if the voice she’s using is fake or acting out a performance in some way. Athena questions June, demanding to know why she profited off of her, why she stole her work. Quickly, Athena’s voice seems to change, but June ignores it, instead desperately trying to explain to Athena and apologize to her for all that she did.
In the seconds after June confesses, a figure steps out, and June realizes it’s not Athena; it’s Candice, Daniella’s assistant that June had complained about and gotten fired from the publishing firm. Candice was recording the entire encounter, and, filled with contempt and a desire for revenge against June, she explains how she plans to expose June’s lies. When June tries to convince Candice not to do it, trying to explain how she was justified in profiting off of Athena’s identity, Candice launches into a tirade against June, explaining the realities of being a minority author—how publishing houses exploit the racial trauma of marginalized writers by only publishing books that conform to stereotypes, how only one or two minority authors every year are able to break through, and how every author is further pigeonholed into a narrative that focuses on their identity, as Athena was. But June refuses to listen to Candice and instead leans even more on her own feelings of how she, as a white woman, has been treated unfairly by the industry.
Realizing that if Candice publishes the video and a book exposing her lies her career will be over, June turns to physical violence. She even goes so far as to consider murdering Candice. The two begin to fight and just as June contemplates killing Candice, Candice pushes her off of the steps.
June spends four days in the hospital with a concussion and several broken bones. Candice has already published a piece in The New York Times with a tell-all about June’s plagiarism, accompanied by the tapes from the night of the confrontation. June’s fall gets chalked up as a jogging accident as there’s no proof that Candice was ever there.
June falls into a spiral of depression, her career seemingly finished, unable to imagine a way back into writing. However, a month later, a publicity release announces that Candice has sold a memoir; June recognizes this moment as an opportunity to write a book in response detailing how Candice convinced June that Athena’s ghost existed and stalked her. She feels a wave of new inspiration, vowing to “tell our audience what they ought to believe” with her own truth. June explains that she sees this truth as fluid, formed not by reality, but by the very act of writing. The novel ends with June proclaiming that she will sell a book that exposes the publishing industry for its exploitative tendencies and refashions June as the hero of the entire scandal—a hero that capitalizes upon framing Athena and Candice as the villains, casting June as a tragic victim within the industry’s desires to embrace token figures.
Analysis
R.F. Kuang writes in the novel’s acknowledgments that Yellowface is, at its core, “a horror story about loneliness” in the “fiercely competitive” publishing industry. The final chapter crystallizes the novel’s overarching focus on the publishing industry and its relation to unethical practices toward authors. Although June is an undoubtedly flawed protagonist—and exhibits bigoted behavior at many points throughout the novel—her desire to write and the choices she makes as a result don’t occur in a vacuum; they’re part of a larger industry that isolates writers, pitting them against each other by very selectively choosing where to invest attention and resources.
As we saw in the beginning of the novel, Athena and June frequently parallel each other and align in their experiences, with loneliness being a unifying thread winding through both women’s paths in college and their early twenties. However, when Athena became successful, June came to believe that this success made them different beyond the point of reconciliation. She envied Athena. Candice’s speech during her confrontation with June reveals that June may have been mistaken in blaming Athena for her role as a publishing industry success story.
Externally, from June's perspective, Athena appeared to have an easy path towards success. June came to view herself as the victim of the publishing industry’s harsh cruelty after her first novel failed, in large part due to her agent and publisher’s lack of interest. But what Candice attempts to explain to June is that Athena, too, suffered at the hands of the publishing industry. Just like June, Athena suffered at the hands of an industry that is solely focused on turning as much profit as possible—in the process, exploiting authors for whatever they can. Athena was forced to write fiction that one-dimensionally related to her Chinese identity; when she expressed an interest in working on other themes and subjects, her publisher rejected these proposals, and further incentivized Athena to only conform to what they thought a writer of Asian American identity “should” write in order to appeal to a wide audience.
However, Candice expresses a lack of good faith or trust in Athena's own intentions when writing about her identity. Candice accuses Athena of "milking" her racial trauma—alluding to the fact that Athena knowingly wrote the narratives that she knew would fulfill the audience's expectations of the stories she could produce as a person of a certain racial background. Candice's distrust and dislike of Athena mirrors doubts that June, herself, expressed over the course of the novel when wondering how "genuine" Athena's intentions were in choosing her subject matter.
What this final confrontation demonstrates is a bleak picture of contemporary publishing and the way it deforms the writer; writers are left to either accept their defeat or refashion themselves into the version that they know will sell, as Athena did when writing about Chinese identity and catering to the market that the publishing industry wanted to push her towards. Still, June's own egotism comes to the forefront of the novel's conclusion as she is convinced she can still make herself the "hero" of the story by writing another book and telling the "truth" about all that happened. While Yellowface is a work that consistently employs metafictional elements—representing fiction and authors within its own fictional structure—this final monologue zeroes in on the metafictionality as the reader witnesses June planning to write a book very similar to the one the reader holds in their hands at that very moment.
