Summary
June celebrates winning a series of awards for her novel. She attributes her success to a few features of the novel, including the good writing but most importantly admitting that the book is easy “award bait” due to the fact that it is about something “important” in history. The novel fits within a larger trend within publishing to highlight novels that appease contemporary audiences’ desires for fiction that is socially conscious.
Brett tells June that a production company, Greenhouse Productions, has indicated interest in producing a film based on The Last Front. She meets with two producers, Justin and Harvey, who express enthusiasm over June’s novel and the potential for it to be a great war epic. They ask June how she would want the film to be made, but June falters and can’t think of any real opinions, and instead tells them to take creative liberties to make the film as they see fit. Although no hard offer is made yet, June starts to get her hopes up about the opportunity.
In a drastic turn of events, attacks on Twitter from an account named @AthenaLiusGhost begin to flood June’s timeline. The thread accuses June of stealing the book from Athena and details the history of June and Athena’s relationship, written from Athena’s point of view. The tweets demand that June pull the book immediately. Within minutes, the thread blows up. June’s messages are flooded with hate and accusations of racism, threats, and demands for a public apology. June calls Brett, who, after asking June if the accusations are true—she vehemently denies them and tells him that the novel is fully her own—assures her that the scandal will blow over soon enough.
June is unconvinced and sickened by the accusations, aware of their validity. The scandal continues to escalate, with more and more people accusing June of racism and “yellowface”: the practice of imitating East Asian people. Online, users begin to dig through June’s social media history to unearth other examples of when she was racist, surfacing tweets that all demonstrate a lack of awareness about identity but that June, in the narration, vehemently defends as innocent.
June begins to spiral and panic. She becomes tortured with anxiety, convinced that her career is ruined. She finds herself unable to sleep or eat, thinking about how in today’s contemporary media climate, a Twitter scandal can destroy a career.
Despite the accusations and scandal, June is forced to attend a pre-scheduled event at a literary festival. She speaks on a panel, which quickly turns disastrous as her co-speakers passive-aggressively attack her, asking pointed questions about her representation of Chinese history and culture in her novel. At one point, one of the panelists also brings up how June stole Athena’s words—a fact that is now widely circulating online, although it has yet to be confirmed.
A few days later, in hopes of getting her mind off of things a little, June heads to a family barbecue hosted by her sister, Rory, and Rory’s husband, Tom. June and her sister don’t get along, both not understanding the appeal of each other’s chosen lifestyles; Rory lives in the suburbs and is an accountant, in contrast to June’s life in the city and choice of a creative career. Because Tom works in IT, June starts to ask him whether she could try and track down the owner of the "Athena Liu's Ghost" account using its IP address. Tom agrees to help June try and hunt down the account.
Back at home, June comes up with an idea to make a fake Twitter account that appears to sympathize with the @AthenaLiusGhost account and DM it. June also checks on everything else that’s being said online and discovers that alongside the continuing hate coming her way, many accounts have also started targeting Athena and criticizing her treatment of Chinese history in her novels. She sets up a fake website in order to lure the account onto it and obtain the user’s IP address from the website. Her plan works and Tom is able to pinpoint the IP address as originating in Fairfax, Virginia. June immediately realizes who it is: Geoffrey Carlino, Athena’s ex-boyfriend.
June recalls Geoff, a boy Athena met at a writer’s residency. Although both writers, Geoff’s success never paralleled Athena’s; his debut novel was a flop, and despite a relationship that appeared perfect on Instagram—both Geoff and Athena posted many pictures together—Athena eventually broke up with him shortly after his novel received a slew of bad reviews. After their breakup, Geoff took to Twitter and began posting long threads condemning Athena. His agent dropped him.
June decides to confront Geoff. She texts him, revealing that she knows who he is, and tells him to meet her the next day. She threatens to expose his identity if he doesn’t show. The next day, they meet. Geoff knows what June did because when Athena and Geoff were still dating, Athena had told him about her work on The Last Front. June is thus forced to confess that she took the manuscript. Geoff tells June that he knows their relationship was nowhere near as close as Athena’s been portraying it on social media. He repeatedly insults Athena, calling her pathetic and relaying to her how Athena looked down on June’s failed writing career. June pleads with Geoff for him to cease accusing her of stealing the manuscript online. Geoff attempts to blackmail June, promising that he’ll stop so long as she gives him her royalties. June refuses and reveals that she’d been recording Geoff, telling him that she’ll leak the recording which proves he’s trying to leech off of Athena’s legacy and his accusations—not, as he depicts online, actually gain justice for Athena.
Once she’s home, June crafts a public statement addressing the allegations and posts it online. After the first wave of hate, her statement begins to gain positive reactions. June also learns that Greenhouse Productions has made an offer on the options for producing a film based on The Last Front. Within a week after her statement, June stops receiving hate mail. She feels a renewed sense of calm, believing the scandal to have fully blown over.
Analysis
The developments following Geoff’s accusations on Twitter, published under the name @AthenaLiusGhost, bring social media to the forefront of the novel’s plot. Social media becomes the narrative’s engine as June grapples with the potentially disastrous consequences that could occur if the allegations were publicly confirmed. Within this subplot, Kuang depicts how quickly social media can accelerate the transmission of information. After Geoff’s account first publishes the accusations, it only takes a few hours before the Twitter thread gains traction and June begins receiving death threats.
Geoff and June form an unlikely character parallel. Both were attached in some way to Athena, and both failed to garner nearly as much writing success as she did. Both June and Geoff’s first novels were failures. Both also profit—or attempt to profit—off of Athena’s legacy; June, by publishing the manuscript under her own name, and Geoff, by attempting to blackmail June through the public facade of obtaining “justice” for Athena, which June manages to record and use in order to force him into retracting all of the accusations.
As the narrative arc of the accusations starts with social media, so it ends with June using the same medium in order to reverse her fortune and track down Geoff. With Tom’s help, she is able to trace Geoff’s IP address, utilizing the internet in order to force him to take down the Twitter thread that originally set off the stream of hate that she received accusing her of not only plagiarism but also racism. Later, she posts a public thread addressing the controversy, and it receives positive reactions. Despite Geoff’s accusations failing to lead to any tangible result, they do trigger a series of internal reactions within June as she begins to face more situations in which she’s publicly labeled as racist; these situations, such as the panel she participates in where she is again accused of racism in front of a real-life audience, lead her to doubt whether her decision to publish the manuscript is as morally justified as she initially believed. The elaborate excuses that we saw her manufacture in the initial chapters of the novel begin to crack, with June herself asking whether she really had the right to profit off of Chinese history in the way that she did.
In many ways, Kuang plays with the reader’s relationship to June by rendering her an unreliable narrator and ethically ambiguous figure. June exploits Athena’s manuscript and plagiarizes it; she refuses to admit her wrongdoing by continuously weaving a series of justifications that often rely on criticizing Athena’s behavior. At one point, she references the accusations that Athena faced while still alive—criticisms that mirror the ones June receives concerning unjust representations of Chinese culture.
While the reader may believe June’s actions to be ethically flawed, June reveals information that pushes the reader to consider whether she may deserve some degree of sympathy. Early in her career, the publishing industry shunned June for no seeming reason. June lacks a family that supports her writing career or even attempts to try and understand the work that she produces; even her own mother doesn’t read her novels. And as June reveals, Athena, despite being Chinese, was nowhere near a perfect model of ethical writing practices, exploiting ethnographic interviews she conducted in order to write her novels and profit off of the individuals she spoke to without credit. Between June and Athena, Kuang explores what it means to write a novel that handles narratives from other cultures, seemingly posing the question: what kind of ethics should govern writing, especially in relation to culture, history, and identity?
