I recently visited my local library, juice box in hand - Juicy Juice, of course, '100% Juice for 100% Kids' - and began the mind numbing endeavor of reading all 284 pages of Lily Yang’s
Operation Architect for my summer KiwiFarms book report.
Lily Yang’s Operation Architect is a self-described dystopian psychological thriller that reads like a schizophrenic mixtape of delusion, projection, and formatting crimes. Marketed as fiction, the book quickly contradicts itself by
openly doxing real family members, physicians, and therapists on Yang’s personal website thus obliterating any plausible deniability both in a legal and a literary sense. What’s left is a fever dream that swings violently between confessional memoir, teen diary, and unhinged revenge fantasy.
The writing is unproofed, self-indulgent, and riddled with typos, typed out emojis, and abrupt POV switches. Every chapter feels like it was typed during a paranoid episode and uploaded without review. Page layout is a war crime. Structure? Chaotic. It’s a neurological pole vaulting event where many of the conversations and events don't bridge from one to the other and leave the reader confused and blue balled.
While some passages clearly draw from real events including job firings, therapy sessions, interpersonal conflicts others veer hard into melodramatic fiction: a shadowy
Council of D000m™ as I have dubbed it discusses her fate in secret, and the book concludes with an edgy teen suicide scene complete with dog howling symbolism and “nobody came for her” pathos.
Yang believes she's crafted an epic own against the psychiatric system and
elites. In reality, she provides a devastating case study in self-sabotage. What was meant to vindicate her instead reads like an accidental confessional meticulously documenting how she harassed coworkers, burned bridges, and alienated everyone around her while claiming to be the victim.
I am purposely leaving out most of the
Council of D000m™ as they're the most fictionalized aspect of the book and don't add much other than a perspective of her ideation that a shadow cabal of evil psuedo-federal agents are getting her fired. At many many points Lily is an unreliable narrator to the story, but we can plausibly speculate that much of what she says here is true (her's at points and the unadulterated) to a degree and some points of the story are backed up by her postings on other platforms like her
Youtube, 4chan, etc.
- Early Job Process
- Our heroine Alice (Lily's self-insert) begins her story with pumpkin spice latte and laptop in hand, she reads an email from the NSA shooting down her job application for not completing or failing her background check. Alice interprets this as them hiding the true reason.
- Alice is offered probationary employment as some form of government contractor or employee (intern?) of the United States Air Force (AFMC). She is wholly unprepared for the seriousness of working for and with the Military.
- The First Firing
- Lily has a tough time settling into her first job. She's reprimanded for being late, her boss is strict and her coworkers are quite straightforward as well.
- Her work performance is consistently noted to be lacking, she asks her coworkers for too much help, and seems to use her phone too much while on the job.
- Lily receives an email from a college advisor saying “Gook luck with finals,” interprets the likely typo as a racial slur directed at her in retaliation for anonymously posting slurs online, and spirals into paranoia, believing it confirms her counselor knows more than she is telling her. (she didn't proofread and uses a different name for Alice, Nicole but in this context it should be Alice.)
- Lily has meeting regarding termination. She offered to either wait for termination, or to resign on favorable terms. She folds and signs the resignation. Later in the book she obsesses over the destruction of the termination letter when it's already clear she signed the resignation. She believes a mysterious man who was smoking a cigarette outside the building ratted on her for being 45 minutes late while being a probationary employee.
- It's not stated in the book, but Lily has claimed to have attempted to sue an employer for wrongful termination and it seems that the AFMC was the one she sued. She did not succeed in the suit.
- Lily attends a college house party at the age of 20 (where she's apparently already one year graduated?), drinks, drives, and gets pulled over by the police. The police in a very believable way opens with "Do you have mental issues?"
- Alice is stopped because she failed to stop at a stop sign according to the officer. The officer smells alcohol on her breath, gives her a field sobriety test and breathalyzer, and Alice pops a 0.03 which due to her age is cause for a zero-tolerance DUI in California.
- Gets sentenced to 20 hours of community service at a sober living facility.
- The recurring theme of strange phrasings and oversharing is common
- Alice uses this as a way to try to get the entirety of her 20 hours without doing them.
- Alice can't understand cause and effect as Barbara now tells her the facility has no more work hours for her and she needs to move onto another facility.
- Alice joins a food pantry program to finish her hours, the following ensues and is the first sign of a paranoid scheme being formed. Anthony is her voice of logic and reason throughout almost the entire story but is listened to less and less.
- Alice while going through the FBI employment process is administered a polygraph test. She self-admittedly lies twice during the polygraph, once about smoking marijuana, and second about being in contact with the former terrorist Ted Kaczynski which she claims was "a joke".
- She fails the polygraph, barring her from employment with the FBI permanently.
- The Casino Job
- Alice gets a job at a casino that seems to be going well for her initially. She becomes a dealer there.
- Alice purchases a toy poodle (dog) as a pet. The poodle is a grounding and stabilizing companion that isn't against her in a world that seems to be.
- It's also here that Alice gets a taste of playing poker, more on that later.
- Alice's mom messages her worried about how she is doing and is superstitious that she got fired. Rather than commending her mother's intuition, Alice paints it as some form of spying on her life. Being caught doing something wrong or embarrassing is Alice's biggest fear (driving the paranoia) despite writing an entire book about doing wrong and embarrassing things. Alice's mom also gives typical mom warnings not to drink and drive and believes her mom knows too much somehow.
- Alice moves to a new apartment, noting that the weird events stopped once she moves. This is a recurring theme. Alice moves, feels unwatched initially, has a bad experience, becomes paranoid, has a break, leaves to a new place.
- Alice has multiple events where she believes that she is seeing players at her poker table during games and during dealing on the job crying randomly. This freaks her out and drives paranoia that these people are crying because they are hiding something from her. When she asks why they're crying some people say it's allergies, others say they're not with other witnesses saying she must be on shrooms and acid, while one even says "Yeah I'm having a bad time". She doesn't have empathy for the guy going through a bad time and assumes once again this is some conspiracy.
For now I will end it here as part one.
