Yellowface

smoking pot and following bands around and naming her children things like Juniper Song and Aurora Whisper. She went back to work after Dad died, and since then has molded herself entirely into the American ideal of a working single mother: perfect attendance at her office job, perfect attendance at our parent-teacher meetings, just enough savings to put Rory and me through good schools with minimal student debt and to set up a retirement account for herself. The demands of such a hustle, it seems, left no room for creativity. She’s the kind of suburban white mother who buys home living magazines at the grocery checkout counter, who drinks crate upon crate of four-dollar wines from Trader Joe’s, who refers to Twilight as “those vampire books,” and who hasn’t read anything other than Costco discount paperbacks for decades. Mom always got along better with Rory. I always got the sense that she didn’t quite know what to do with me. It was Dad who could always follow me wherever my imagination went. But we don’t talk about Dad. We sit in silence for a while, chewing on egg rolls and stir-fried chicken bits so sweet they taste like candy. At last, Mom asks, “How’s your, well, book writing going?” Mom has always had the particular ability to reduce all my aspirations to trivial obsessions with a simple disinterested question. I set down my chopsticks. “It’s, uh, fine.” “Oh, that’s good.” “Well, actually, I’m sort of . . .” I want to tell her why I’ve been so miserable these past few months, but I don’t know where to begin. “I’m in a difficult place. Creatively. Like, I can’t think of anything to write about.” “You mean like writer’s block?” “Sort of like that. Only usuallyI have all these tricks to break out of it. Writing exercises, listening to music, going on long walks and whatnot. It’s not working this time.” Mom shoves some bits of chicken aside to snag a candied pecan. “Well, maybe it’s time to move on, then.” “Mom.” “I’m just saying. Rory’s friend can always get you into that class. You just have to fill out the application.” Mom has suggested that I do a master’s in tax and accounting at American University every time I’ve seen her in the last four years. She’s even gone so far as to print and mail me the application the summer after

my debut novel flopped and I resorted to tutoring kids for the SAT to make rent. “For the last time, I don’t want to be an accountant.” “What’s so wrong with being an accountant?” “I’ve told you, I don’t want to work an office job like you and Rory—” I know what she’ll say next. We’ve been hurling these lines at each other for years. “You’re too good for office jobs? Junie the Yalie won’t put in a hard day’s work like the rest of us?” “Mom, stop.” “Rory puts food on the table. Rory has a retirement account—” “I make more than enough to live on,” I snap. “I’m renting a one￾bedroom in Rosslyn. I have insurance. I bought a new laptop. I’m probably richer than Rory, even—” “Then what’s the problem? What’s so important about this next book?” “I can’t rely on my old work,” I say, though I know I can’t make her understand. “I need to write the next best thing. And then another. Otherwise the sales will whittle down, and people will stop reading my work, and everyone will forget about me.” Saying this out loud makes me want to cry. I hadn’t realized how much this terrified me: being unknown, being forgotten. I sniffle. “And then when I die, I won’t have left any mark on the world. It’ll be likeI was never here at all.” Mom watches me for a long while, and then places her hand on my arm. “Writing isn’t the whole world, Junie. And there’s plenty of careers that won’t give you such constant heartbreak. That’s all I’m saying.” But writing is the whole world. How can I explain this to her? Stopping isn’t an option. I need to create. It is a physical urge, a craving, like breathing, like eating; when it’s going well, it’s better than sex, and when it’s not, I can’t take pleasure in anything else. Dad played the guitar during his off time; he understood. A musician needs to be heard; a writer needs to be read. I want to move people’s hearts. I want my books in stores all over the world. I couldn’t stand to be like Mom and Rory, living their little and self-contained lives, with no great projects or prospects to propel them from one chapter to the next. I want the world to wait with bated breath for what I will say next. I want my words to last forever. I want to be eternal, permanent; when I’m gone, I want to leave behind a mountain of pages that scream, Juniper Song was here, and she told us what was on her mind.

OnlyI don’t know what it is I want to say anymore. I don’t know if I ever did. And I’m terrified that the only thing I’ll ever be remembered for, and the only method by which I can produce good work, is slipping on someone else’s skin. I don’t want to only be the vessel for Athena’s ghost. “You could work with Aunt Cheryl,” Mom suggests, oblivious. “She’s still looking for an assistant. You could move out of DC—it’s too expensive anyhow. Come down to Melbourne with me—you could buy a whole house in Suntree with your earnings. Rory showed me—” I gape at her. “You asked Rory for my tax returns?” “We were just planning for your future.” Mom shrugs, unbothered. “So with what you have in savings now, it’s smart that you make some property investments. Cheryl has a few houses in mind—” “Jesus, it’s precisely this . . .” I take a deep breath, force myself to calm down. Mom’s been like this sinceI was a child. Nothing short of a brain transplant will change her now. “I don’t want to have this conversation anymore.” “You have to be practical, Junie. You’re young; you have assets. You’ve got to take advantage of them—” “Okay, stop, please,” I snap. “I know you’ve never supported my writing—” She blinks. “Of courseI supported your writing.” “No, you didn’t. You hated it. You’ve always thought it was stupid, I get it—” “Oh, no, Junie. I know what the arts are like. Not everyone’s going to make it big.” She rubs the top of my head, the way she did when I was a child, only now it doesn’t feel remotely comforting. A gesture like this, between adult women, can only be patronizing. “And I just didn’t want to see you get hurt.”

Twenty TWO DAYS LATER, I’M BACK IN DC, WITHOUT A SINGLE BOOK IDEA or any clue what to do. When you’ve got a project in your jaws, a full-time writing schedule feels like a blessing. But when you’re struggling to come up with a concept, the hours feel suffocating, accusatory. Time should be flying by as you sit wild-eyed at your laptop, possessed by the muse, pouring out your magnum opus. Instead the seconds creep to a halt. I have nothing to do. Nothing to write, nothing with which to distract myself. Most days I occupy myself with housework, counting down the minutes until the distraction of my next mealtime. I water my plants. I arrange my mugs. I can make the ritual of consuming a microwave lasagna last for half an hour. I envy the barista at Starbucks, the clerks at Kramers; at least they can while away the days with their dignified menial labor. I keep winding up on admissions pages of various graduate school programs. I don’t filter for degrees in any one field in particular. I consider them all—law, social work, education, even accounting—because they all promise a gateway into a wholly different life, after an appropriately long period of educational hand-holding in which I don’t have to do any thinking for myself. I even consider returning to the Veritas College Institute, if only for something to do, but my willpower evaporates every timeI reach for my phone. I told my boss I was quitting to pursue my dreams; I can’t bear explaining whyI want to come back. Most nights I end up curled up in bed, phone clutched inches away from my face, browsing the web for mentions of myself and my books just to feel

an echo of that thrill from the timeI was a literary darling. I read old press releases about myself: the Publishers Weekly profile calling me “incisive and sensitive,” the New Yorker blurb calling me “publishing’s most exciting new talent.” I read and reread the most glowing reviews of The Last Front and Mother Witch on Goodreads, trying to remind myself that there was a time when people truly loved my work. Whenever that starts to feel stale—usually when the clock creeps toward midnight—I venture into reading the negative shit. In the past, whenever I trawled Goodreads, I would filter out everything but the five-star reviews, which I would skim over and over again whenever I needed a little ego boost. But now I go straight for the vitriol. It’s like pressing a bleeding sore repeatedly, trying to see how far you can go with your tolerance for pain, because if you know the limits of it, you gain some sense of control over it. The one-star reviews contain everything you’d expect: If I stole a novel, I’d steal something better than this LOL! Just here to say, fuck June Hayward. Haven’t read this book, but giving this one star because the writer is a plagiarizing, racist thief. Took off three stars for the Annie Waters scene alone. I lie there for hours every night, awash in every cruel thing the internet has ever said about me. It’s cathartic, in a perverse way. I like to concentrate all the negativity, to take it all in at once. I take comfort in the fact that it could literally not get any worse than this. I’ve entertained, occasionally, the question of what literary redemption might look like. What if I begged my haters for forgiveness? What if, instead of holding the line, I admitted everything and made an attempt at reparations? Diana Qiu has an article up on Medium titled “June Hayward Must Make Amends, and Here’s How.” The twelve-item laundry list includes things like: “Provide public proof she’s taken a training course in racial sensitivity,” “Donate the entirety of her earnings from The Last Front and Mother Witch to a charity selected by an objective committee of Asian American writers,” and “Post her tax returns from the last three years to confirm how much she profited from Athena Liu’s work.” Tax returns. Is she fucking serious? Who does Diana think she is?

I can stand to be a pariah. But to bend, to throw away all my savings, to kowtow to the Twitterati and prostrate myself before the taunting, smug crowd—I would rather die. One night, I see a surprisingly thoughtful take amidst the kiddie pool of filth. It’s a review of The Last Front published two months ago, so verbose that it’s nearly a full-length article. Drama aside, I find the question of authorship so interesting, reads the penultimate paragraph. Unless Hayward releases a detailed and honest statement, we’ll never quite know the truth behind its creation. But a close reading leads one to believe that this is indeed a text of mixed authorship, for it seems quite schizophrenic in its handling of its central themes. At times it is so outraged about the covering up of the CLC that the moralizing bleeds off the page. At others, it descends to the same romantic platitudes that the rest of the text criticizes. It’s either a very clever manipulation of the reader, or it is what we think it might be—a work partially completed by one author, and finished by another. I sit up, suddenly curious. Who is this person? I click on their profile, but the username is bland and innocuous—“daisychain453.” There is no profile picture. The account has no friends or followers I recognize, and its previous review history—similarly thoughtful takes on much-hated books like The Help and American Dirt—is fascinating to skim through, but reveals no clues about the author. I’m frightened by how well this reviewer seems to know me. The earlier portions of the review were so clever, so incisive about the techniques employed in the text, that I wonder if she somehow got access to my editor’s emails, if she is perhaps someone who worked at Eden. It’s the last paragraph, however, that lingers in my mind: What no one’s really touched on in this discourse, however, is the nature of Liu and Hayward’s relationship. All the evidence suggests that they were indeed friends, though this seems a horrible thing to do to a friend. Was it a case of petty jealousy, then? Was Hayward—gasp—somehow responsible for Liu’s death? Was she, in some twisted way, trying to pay tribute to a friendly rival? Or is she in fact innocent in this whole affair? In any case, I’d pay to read a novel about that whole mess itself. I’VE COME UP WITH MY NEXT PROJECT. I wake up with the concept sitting in my mind, fully formed, welded together by my unconscious over hours of fitful, dreaming sleep. This is it: the path to literary redemption and blockbuster success at once. The answer has been so obvious this entire time, I can’t believeI didn’t see it until now.

I won’t dodge the controversy anymore. That mindset has been holding me back—until now, I’d been convinced that my literary resurrection would have to be divorced from Athena’s legacy. But I can’t move on and forget. Nobody will let me forget, least of all Athena’s ghost. I cannot rid myself of her influence, or of the rumors surrounding her, surrounding us. Instead I have to face them head-on. I’ll write about us. Well, no—a fictionalized version of us, a pseudo￾autobiography in which I blur fact and fiction. I’ll describe the night she died in all its heart-stopping, lurid detail. I’ll describe how I stole her work and published it. I’ll describe every step along my way to literary stardom, and then my horrifying fall. Academics and scholars will have a field day with this text. They’ll write entire books about how I cleverly blended the truth with lies, how I reclaimed the rumors about me, subverted the ugly gossip about a treasured friendship into a tale that confronts the reader with their own sick desire for scandal and destruction. They’ll call it radical. Groundbreaking. No one’s ever refuted literary expectations like this before. I’ll play up the sapphic quality of it all, too. Readers will love that; queer love stories are all the rage now. Drop in a little hint of girl crushing and the TikTokers will go rabid. They could cast us in a movie together. Florence Pugh will play me. That girl from Crazy Rich Asians will play Athena. The score will consist entirely of classical music. It’ll win all the awards. And once this scandal has been transformed and preserved in novel form, once all the ugly, unconfirmed rumors about me have been relegated safely to the realm of fiction, I’ll be free. I’m so excited that I almost email Daniella right then with the pitch. But Daniella’s dealing with her own shitstorm right now. An unnamed former editorial assistant has testified to Publishers Weekly that Daniella had a habit of saying all sorts of bigoted things during meetings (“We already have a Muslim writer,” she’d told the team once during acquisitions. “Any more and we’ll be outnumbered.”). Eden has gone into PR lockdown in response. I am firmly committed to promoting diversity, equity, inclusion in all areas of my work, Daniella assured us in an email sent to all her writers. These remarks were taken out of context, and leaked to the press by someoneI believe has a personal vendetta against me. The last I heard, she’d made some donations to some bail

fund in the Midwest, although it’s not immediately obvious how this has anything to do with the original problem of Islamophobia. I’m not terribly worried. The Daniella thing will blow over. Publishing professionals are accused of verbal gaffes all the time, but it’s not like you can cancel the one female editor at an otherwise all-male imprint. But it’s probably best not to wander into her inbox for now. Instead, for the first time in weeks, I begin drafting in earnest. The words flow so easily from my fingertips, perhaps because there’s nothing to make up, nothing to pause and wonder about. It’s just the truth coming out of me, and this timeI am in total control of the narrative. I start writing thousands of words a day, a level of productivity that I haven’t hit since college. I actively look forward to sitting down with my laptop every morning. I don’t stop writing until near midnight. I can’t help but feel that there is some greater, karmic reason why my writing flow has returned. This feels like redemption. No—like absolution. For if I can write this thing on my own, if I can turn this whole horrible mess into a beautiful story, then . . . well, it won’t change what I’ve done. But it will assign artistic value to it all. It will be a way of revealing the truth without saying it. And beyond anything else, it will entertain. It will stay in readers’ thoughts forever, like a catchy tune or a beautiful woman’s face. This story will become eternal. Athena will be a part of that. What more can we want as writers than such immortality? Don’t ghosts just want to be remembered? I THINK CONSTANTLY ABOUT ATHENA THESE DAYS. Memories of her don’t haunt me anymore. I don’t force flashbacks of her out of my mind when they intrude. Instead I linger within them. I mine them for details, immerse myself in the feelings surrounding them, and imagine dozens of ways to reimagine and reframe them. I sit with her ghost. I invite her to speak. My therapist taught me once that the best way to deal with panic￾inducing flashbacks is to think of them as scenes from a horror movie. Jump scares are terrifying the first time you see them because they catch you off guard, and because you don’t know what to expect. But once you watch them again and again, once you know exactly when the demon￾possessed nun jumps out from behind the corner, they lose their power over you.

I do the same to every awful thought I’ve ever had about Athena. I delve deep into the horrible. I write out every excruciating detail of my evening at the Chinese American Social Club of Rockville. I describe how rotten I felt when the @AthenaLiusGhost account first went online, how the ensuing fallout wrecked my mental health. I capture Athena’s specter and etch it out onto the page, where it is trapped in black-and-white immovable text, where it can do little more than say, “Boo!” I write about how inadequate Athena has made me feel since college, how I swallowed back vinegary envy every time she achieved something I could not. The wayI felt when Geoff told me how she’d mocked me at that convention. I recount the way she stole the story of my maybe-rape. I describe how, despite it all, I still loved her. But as I dig into the past, I find myself lingering on good memories, too. There are more of them than I realized. I haven’t let myself dwell on college for so long, but onceI scratch the surface, it all comes bubbling to the fore. Starbucks every Tuesday after our Women in Victorian Lit seminar: an iced mocha for me, a Very Berry Hibiscus Refresher for Athena. Nights at slam poetry events during which we’d sipped ginger beers and giggled at the performers, who were not real poets, and who would one day certainly grow out of this nonsense. A Les Mis sing-along party at a drama major’s apartment, where we’d shrieked at the top of our lungs, “One day more!” As I transcribe all this, I wonder if our friendship had indeed been as strained as I’d perceived it. Was that jealous tension always there? Were we rivals from the start? Or had I, in the throes of my insecurity, projected it all against Athena? I remember the day during our senior year that Athena received the first offer on her debut novel, when her agent called and told her on her way to barre class that she would soon have her book on shelves. She called me first. Me. She hadn’t even told her parents yet. “Oh my God,” she’d breathed. “June. You won’t believe it. I can’t believe it.” Then she told me about the offer, and I gasped, and we both screamed back and forth at each other for a good thirty seconds. “Holy shit, Athena,” I whispered. “It’s happening. Everything you wanted—”

“I feel like I’m standing on a cliff, and my whole life is in front of me.” I remember so clearly her breathy whisper; shocked and hopeful and vulnerable all at once. “I feel like everything is about to change.” “It will,” I promised her. “Athena, you’re going to be a fucking star.” And then we screamed back and forth a little more, relishing the other’s presence at the other end of the line, for it was so nice to know someone who understood this exact dream, who knew how mere words can become sentences can become a completed masterpiece, how that masterpiece can rocket you into a wholly unrecognizable world where you have everything —a world you wrote for yourself. I FALL IN LOVE WITH WRITING AGAIN. I START TO DREAM AGAIN. EVER since the @AthenaLiusGhost tweets broke, I’ve been operating from fear, defensiveness, and insecurity. But now I’m able to dwell once again on all of publishing’s promises, the things this world could give me. Brett will sell this to Daniella for a much lower advance than The Last Front got, given the circumstances. But it’ll be a surprise hit. It’ll go into its second printing before launch day. Then the press cycle will kick up, and everyone will be unable to stop talking about the sheer audacity of it all. The frenzied discourse will drive sales, and I’ll earn out my advance within weeks. I’ll start making double the royalties I was before. I’m feeling so good that I even log on to Instagram for the first time in weeks and—ignoring the slew of hateful comments on all my previous posts—put up a photo of myself from today’s writing session. I’m sitting at a hardwood table near a café window during golden hour, freckles popping, hair falling in soft waves around my shoulders. One hand cups my cheek; the other skims my laptop keyboard, fingers ready to compose. “Falling right into this manuscript,” I write in the caption. “Blocking out the negativity, because when you’re a writer, all that matters is the story within. We’re overdue for the next chapter. I can’t wait to share this one with you all.” ATHENA’S OLD INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT GOES ACTIVE THAT NIGHT. I wouldn’t have even seen the post if I hadn’t been scrolling through my notifications, trawling for likes. Someone compliments my blemish-free skin and asks for my skin-care routine. Someone exclaims that they love the coffee shop I’m at. Someone else writes, New Juniper Song book? Can’t wait!