Yellowface

June Hayward is the protagonist and narrator of Yellowface and in these opening chapters, she establishes herself as a jealous and unreliable narrator driven by the need to succeed in publishing. She casts herself in this light through her few interactions with Athena Liu, her semi-friend and professional rival, as well as her many opinions on her successes. June’s perception of Athena drives her to not only take her recently finished novel but edit and package it under her own name, committing plagiarism and profiting off her friend’s tragic death. June’s sense of entitlement over The Last Front is a prime example of White Privilege in Publishing, which defines June’s expectations and goals for her career.

June’s perception of the publishing world is defined by marketability rather than pure talent. She uses this concept to explain Athena’s success while her own work flounders in obscurity. Not only does this rob Athena of agency, painting her as someone with a career that was given rather than earned, but it also reduces literature to a business. The commodity June believes the publishing world values most is identity:

Publishing picks a winner–someone attractive enough, someone cool and young and, oh, we’re all thinking it, let’s just say it, “diverse” enough–and lavishes all its money and resources on them. It’s so fucking arbitrary. Or perhaps not arbitrary, but it hinges on factors that have nothing to do with the strength of one’s prose (5-6).

June believes that both Athena’s inexorable rise and her own frustrating plateau are due to their respective identities as Chinese American and white. While recognizing that Athena is talented, she believes that it is only due to her identity and that publishing is more willing to listen to her than to June. This is a distorted perspective that reduces Athena’s success to her race while simultaneously ignoring the obstacles that come with being Asian American in the United States. Not only does this support a view of Otherness as Commodity, but it also exhibits June’s white privilege and her belief that she is owed success.

As the narrator, June decides how she presents the events of the novel to her readers, and in this section, she begins crafting her narrative. With Athena’s passing in the first chapter and the second focusing on June’s theft of The Last Front, a cohesive narrative forms. June centers herself, not only in the tragedy of Athena’s death but also in the pages of her novel. She presents herself as Athena’s best friend on social media—a lie—and basks in the attention she receives. Even at Athena’s funeral, June thinks of how she is being inconvenienced: “Mrs. Liu presses against me sniffling […] Her tear-smudged mascara leaves clumpy stains on my velvet blouse that won’t come out, even after half a dozen washes, so eventually I throw the whole outfit away altogether” (26). At a time when she should be providing comfort, she does nothing but complain to herself, her velvet funeral attire symbolizing the way she luxuriates in her friend’s death. Throughout these early scenes, June focuses on how Athena’s death either inconveniences her or benefits her. In her mind, Athena’s life and death are meant to impact her life and give her the career she always wanted. June’s presentation of these events reduces Athena to a plot device, rather than an independent person with a full life ahead of her.

The self-centered nature of her inner monologue continues with her work on The Last Front. June’s perception of the novel changes throughout Yellowface, and she becomes more convinced as time goes on that she is solely responsible for its greatness. The novel gives her an opportunity to center herself in a space meant for Athena: “No seriously–it felt natural, like this was my calling, like it was divinely ordained. Once I got started, it felt like it was the most obvious thing in the world that I should complete, then polish Athena’s story” (29). This is the beginning of a long process in which The Last Front transforms in June’s mind from a piece of brilliant writing by Athena to a flawed and unpublishable jumble of words that June saves and makes her own. Her feelings of entitlement to the text contribute to her role as an antihero, and they only grow more pronounced as she profits and, in turn, sees her career threatened by the truth. June truly believes that she earned the right to succeed in publishing and that people need to read what she writes. White privilege’s hold on the publishing industry has taught June to believe this, to make her suspect that her own failings are not because of her deficits but due to others. This system makes her believe that she has found a loophole and that by putting her name on a narrative about marginalized people, publishers will finally pay attention to her.