This is one of those novels which features a protagonist designed to be unlikeable. From the outset, June (Junie, Juniper) Song Hayward is openly envious of her friend and colleague, Athena Liu. The two girls knew each other in Yale, as freshmen, and then continued to keep in touch. Both were young, aspiring writers, but Athena achieved success quickly, whereas June continued to struggle.
everything ramped up from there [the launch of Athena’s first novel]. Her Twitter follow count shot up to mid-five figures; her Instagram numbers hit six figures. She did puff-piece interviews with the Wall Street Journal and Huff Post” (p67).
June did get a first novel published but it did not sell widely and did not make her name. June is also envious of Athena’s looks, sophistication, and confidence.
One evening when Athena is celebrating a contract with Netflicks, she invites June back to her apartment in Dupont. (One of the charms of this novel for me personally is how it is set in DC and Virginia. with all the familiar landmarks, including the last key scene played out on the Exorcist Stairs near Georgetown University!) Somewhat drunk, the two young ladies decide to eat pancakes. Athena chokes fatally on a pancake. June did try to help but was unable to save Athena. After the body of her friend is taken away, June steals the one hard copy existing of the draft manuscript Athena has just completed, and takes it home with her. The manuscript is of a novel called The Last Front, which tells in mosaic form of the 140,000 workers in the Chinese Labour Corps who were recruited by the British Army and sent to the Allied Front during WWI.
“Many were killed by bombs, accidents, and diseases. Most were mistreated upon arrival in Franfe, cheated out of their wages, assigned to dirty and cramped living quarters, denied interpreters, and attacked by other laborers. Many never made it home” (p27).
Reading Athena’s draft, June realises it is incomplete, and also sees its potential, so she next steals the draft novel, completing it and then passing it off as her own, without any shared credit or acknowledgements to the dead girl. With this theft, June achieves everything she always longed for, fame and fortune. Her agent sells the manuscript to Eden, a smaller but significant publisher, who give June a very hefty advance, and which her sales earn back swiftly once it is released. The novel provides a lot of background context about the whole commercial production of a fiction novel in the USA. Publishing, once a novel is written and finished and sold, involves going to auction, negotiating deals, fielding calls from potential editors, choosing a publisher. Most books are sold 2 years before their release, we learn, time for production – and production involves many rounds of editing, making promotional materials for publicity and marketing, sending out advanced reader copies (ARCs), foreign sale rights, the whole industry of publishing and its mechanics by which bestsellers are launched. June learns that bestsellers are preselected and then promoted vigorously to be bestsellers.
However, June is far from home free even after achieving accolades and success. This novel is named Yellowfever because this is what engulfs June, being a white cis American woman. (Athena is a Chinese American, born in Hong Kong and educated in private schools worldwide, a cosmopolitan and highly privileged from birth.) June is questioned for writing about the Chinese diaspora and taking on a representation which she is not entitled to. She is accused of cultural appropriation and much worse. At her publisher’s suggestion, she drops the surname of Hayward and uses her middle name, Song, to seem possibly Chinese. Likewise, she uses Juniper rather than June, to further that origin ambiguity. But of course, the reader is well aware than yellowfacing would be a relatively small issue even if we grant it is a problem, because the bigger issue is the plagiarism and intellectual theft by June of Athena’s work. June lives in terror of being found out, while being smug and triumphal about all the gains and rewards she receives from the sales, royalties, and many other perks of The Last Front. She seems without conscience, managing to persuade Athena’s mother not to release Athena’s notebooks for archiving, so that no one will find out June’s crime/secret. She also persuades herself she is justified, on two grounds, one:
“And fuck it, I’ll just say it: taking Athena’s manuscript felt like reparations, payback for the things that Athena took from me” (p39).
All Athena had actually ‘taken’ from June, is a story of a traumatic event that happened in June’s life, which Athena turned into a story and published. But June had long felt Athena’s successes were somehow shortchanging her, June, of the same. Hence the illogical feeling of payback.
And secondly, by repeatedly telling herself she had done a lot of work on the draft, she feels ownership of it:
“By the end [of the editorial rounds], I’ve become so familiar with the project that I can’t tell where Athena ends and I begin, or which words belong to whom. I’ve done the research. I’ve read a dozen books now on Asian racial politics and the history of Chinese labor at the front. I’ve lingered over every word, every sentence, and every paragraph so many times that I nearly know them by heart – hell, I’ve probably been over this novel more times than Athena herself” (p45).
It is of course nearly impossible to feel too much sympathy for the protagonist, which is probably exactly what Kuang intends. But it is a riveting nevertheless, to find out what will happen, whether or not she will be found out, if anyone penetrates her guilty secret.
The novel shows us how ugly social media can get, how it can be trial by media and/or social media and the reputational damage that can be done therein. It details how trolling happens, how menacing virtual death threats can be, and how easily these happen, without being able to call anyone to account for it. For June’s case, the waters are muddied by her plagiarism of another’s work, but there is also the issue of whether she is yellowfacing, passing herself off as potentially an ethnic minority, taking on the voices of those who have suffered and been oppressed and discriminated without any personal connection to these groups. People are routinely called out, rightly and wrongly, and none of these calling outs are without impact, injurious in many cases. She denounces her detractors, but knows of course that she has done even worse than they are accusing her of.
The novel also highlights how isolating life is if one has a guilty secret to hide. June is disconnected even from her family because she cannot speak of what she has done, or else the entire edifice of her life and career could crumble. June knows she is being cornered, but keeps fighting back. She even considers a career change, retraining, relocating entirely, but in the end, cannot remove herself from the sweet temptation of being an achiever in the writing industry, which is all she seems to genuinely care about. So it is a life of triumph and terror combined, of relishing her ill gotten gains mightily, while never ceasing to look over her shoulder. What tangled webs we weave.
Overall, a very interesting read, raising not only racial issues, but also cyber and social media issues, and intellectual property issues, in a very realistic and immediate manner.
This sounds so interesting! Really looking forward to it.