Calvin’s Reviews > Yellowface > Status Update

Allegations of June stealing Athena's work begin at an Asian literary festival. The attacks then turn to Athena and how she is essentially a leech radicalising her "culture for clicks".
June has the idea to create a website in order to grab the IP address of the twitter account at the centre of her scandal.

Greenhouse Productions comes for an informal coffee discussion on any possible future nuances that June would have for her film adaption. Afterwards a twitter attack on June and her apparent white-supremacy racism begins, which has her cowering in her apartment afraid that she her flesh will be ripped to shreds.

Number 3 on the NYT bestsellers list. The obvious audience members questioning her appropriation of Chinese culture, but it is an intimate inscription moment with an elder whose a descendant of one of the Chinese Laborers that finally catalyses June's shame that it really was not a story a white person should have told.

The book is officially published, but not without its drama. A publishing assistant's instance on a cultural sensitivity reader, following with a passive aggressive apology and removal from the team. To find an unprofessional rating of 1 star on Goodreads. At the reading and Q&A session on publication day, June feels as if she's seen Athena's ghost, suddenly losing all her composure at the event.

Athena's manuscript edited and slightly rewritten by June is quickly highly acclaimed by publishing houses. Rights and thoughts for novels that previously were out of reach for June's debut are suddenly fixed clauses in the offers for the novel's auction.

Athena choked to death from her own pancakes. June the grieving friend turned thief of manuscript.