lingering on my tongue, all that feels paltry in comparison to what true literary stardom looks like. I want what Stephen King has, what Neil Gaiman has. Why not a movie deal? Why not Hollywood stardom? Why not a multimedia empire? Why not the world?
Eleven THE ATTACKS START ON TWITTER. The first tweet comes from an account named @Athena LiusGhost, created earlier this week; no profile picture, no words in the bio: Juniper Song, aka June Hayward, did not write The Last Front. I did. She stole my book, stole my voice, and stole my words. #SaveAthena. Then, dated a few hours later, several sickening follow-ups in the thread. June Hayward befriended me a few years ago to get closer to my process and my work. She came over often to my apartment, and I would catch her rooting through my notebooks when she thought I wasn’t looking. The proof is in black and white. Read my previous novels. Compare them to the prose in The Last Front. Read June’s debut novel, and ask yourself: is The Last Front a novel a white woman could have written? For let’s be clear: Juniper Song Hayward is a white woman. She’s using the pen name Juniper Song to pretend to be Chinese American. She’s taken new author photos to look more tan and ethnic, but she’s as white as they come. June Hayward, you are a thief and a liar. You’ve stolen my legacy, and now you spit on my grave. Shame on June. Shame on Eden Press. Daniella Woodhouse must withdraw the current edition from bookstores and return the rights to Athena’s mother, Patricia Liu. All future editions should be published under Athena’s name alone. Do not let injustice stand. #SaveAthena.
There’s a penultimate tweet tagging over a dozen prominent Twitter accounts, begging them to RT for visibility. Then a final tweet, tagging me. My vision’s gone fuzzy by the timeI read to the end. I take a breath, and my bedroom tilts. I can’t stand up; I can hardly move. My mind’s fizzled out; I can’t form coherent thoughts anymore, I can only click REFRESH on @AthenaLiusGhost’s page, reading the tweets over and over again, watching as the thread slowly gains traction. In the first several hours, it garnered no likes, and I had a wild hope that this, like all crazy fringe accounts, would just fade into the ether. But all those tags must have grabbed it some attention, because fifteen minutes after I first see it, people start responding to the thread. Some book blogger with six thousand followers retweets the first tweet, and then some aspiring author who’s gone viral several times for their literary “hot takes” (which mostly have boiled down to “y’all need to take a critical reading course” and “not all villains are problematic”) quote tweets it with the addition Sickening if true. Oh my god. And then the floodgates are open. People start replying: Are you fucking serious? Where’s the proof? Always thought there was something off about Song. Hmm. Sounds like another Yalie “prodigy” is just a big, lying fraud. WTF!!! SEND HER ASS TO JAIL! I can’t move away from my laptop. Even when I finally get up to pee, my eyes remain glued to my phone. The healthy thing to do would be to shut down all my devices, but I can’t step back. I have to watch the whole disaster unfold in real time, have to see exactly who has retweeted it and who is responding. Then the DMs start coming. They’re all from total strangers. I don’t know whyI even open them, but I’m too curious, or too masochistic, to simply delete them. Die, bitch. June, have you seen these tweets? Are they true? You need to defend yourself if not. You should burn in hell for what you did. Racist thieving whore.
You owe Mrs. Liu every cent in your bank account!!! I was a fan of The Last Front. This is incredibly disappointing. You owe the entire book community a public apology, immediately. I’m going to come to DC and beat the living shit out of you. Racist bitch. It’s after that last one that I finally hurl my phone across my bed. Holy shit. My heartbeat is so loud in my eardrums that I stand up, pace around my apartment, wedge a chair under my front door (no, I don’t think someone’s about to barge in and murder me, it just feels that way), and then curl up on my bed, whereI pull my knees up to my chest and rock back and forth. Oh my God. Oh my God. It’s all over. People know. The whole world is about to know. Daniella will find out, Eden will fire me, I’ll lose all my money, Mrs. Liu will sue me, she’ll decimate me in court, Brett will drop me as a client, my career will be over, and I’ll go down in literary history as the bitch who stole Athena Liu’s work. They’ll make a Wikipedia page about me. They’ll write endless think pieces about me. You won’t be able to mention my name among industry professionals without knowing sneers and awkward laughter. I’ll be a meme. And not a single word I write will ever be published again. Why in God’s name did I publish The Last Front? I want to kick my former self for being so stupid. I thought I was doing something good. Something noble—to bring Athena’s work into the world the way it deserved. But how could I ever have imagined this wouldn’t all come back to bite me in the ass? I’ve been so stable up until now. I’ve done such a good job of managing my anxiety, of focusing on the present instead of all my terrors and insecurities, of compartmentalizing the horror of where and how I got my hands on that original manuscript, of moving on. And it all comes flooding back now—Athena’s hands flying to her throat, her bluing face, her feet drumming against the ground. Oh God, what haveI done? My phone, faceup on my bed, keeps flashing blue with new notifications. They look like alarm sirens.
I burst into wails, loud and ugly, wanton like a toddler’s. My own volume frightens me; I’m scared my neighbors will hear, soI turn my face into my pillow, and that’s how I stay, muffled and hysterical, for hours. THE SUN GOES DOWN. THE ROOM GETS DARK. AT SOME POINT MY adrenaline rush subsides, my pulse slows, my throat goes hoarse from sobbing, and I have no tears left to cry. My panic attack ebbs, probably because I’ve obsessed over the worst-case scenarios so many times now that they can’t scare me anymore. My social and professional implosion is now a familiar concept, and, paradoxically, that means I can think again. I reach for my phone, and as I scroll through Twitter, I realize perhaps this situation isn’t as bad as it first seemed. There’s no way the person behind @AthenaLiusGhost knows what truly happened. They’re right about the central thesis, but wrong about all the other details. I’d never been to Athena’s apartment except for that first and final time. I met Athena in college, not in DC. And I certainly didn’t befriend her intending to steal The Last Front. Until the night Athena died, I didn’t even know it existed. Whoever this person is, they’ve made a very lucky guess at the truth. But they’ve fabricated the rest. And that suggests they do not, in fact, have any concrete evidence. Perhaps, if all they have are suspicions, there’s a way to clear my name. Perhaps there’s a way to exorcise this ghost. My mind keeps wandering to the implications of that Twitter handle— Athena Liu’s ghost—and the memory of Athena’s face at Politics and Prose, her eyes glittering, her lips curled in a patronizing smile. I push it away. On that road lies madness. Athena is fucking dead. I saw her die. And this is a problem for the living. I DON’T WANT BRETT TO HEAR ABOUT THIS FROM TWITTER, SOI SEND him a quick email: There’s something weird going on. Do you have a moment to get on the phone? He must have seen the tweets already, because he calls me not even five minutes later, though it’s nearly nine in the evening. I pick up, trembling. “Hey, Brett.” “Hi, June.” His voice sounds flat, though I can’t tell if I’m projecting. “So what’s going on?” I clear my throat. “I’m guessing you’ve seen the tweets?” “If you could clarify—”
“The ones that sayI stole The Last Front from Athena Liu.” “Well.” A long pause. “So, yeah. It’s not true, is it?” “No!” My voice flies up in pitch. “No, of course not. I don’t know who’s behind it, I don’t know how this started . . .” “Well, if it’s not true, then don’t make such a big deal of it.” Brett doesn’t sound nearly as upset as he should be. I thought he’d be angry, but he just seems mildly irritated. “It’s just some troll; it’ll blow over.” “No, it won’t,” I insist. “All sorts of people are going to see it. They’re going to form opinions—” “So let them form opinions. Eden’s not going to take the book off the shelves on the basis of some internet gossip. And most consumers don’t have their eyes glued to Twitter—trust me, it’s a very small fraction of publishing that’s going to care.” I make a gross whining noise. “My reputation with that fraction matters, though.” “Your reputation is intact,” he says breezily. “It’s all allegations, isn’t it? Totally groundless, right? Don’t issue a response. Don’t get entangled. If they’ve got nothing, they’ve got nothing, and soon enough people will see it for the nasty character assassination that it is.” He sounds so confident, so wholly unconcerned, that I feel a flutter of relief. Maybe he’s right. Maybe this will get construed as bullying—the Twitterati are always vehemently against bullying. Maybe it’ll all be good press for me in the end. Brett yammers on for a bit longer, citing examples of other famous authors who have been targets of online hate campaigns. “It never hurts sales, Junie. It never does. Just let the trolls say what they want. You’re going to be fine.” I nod and bite back what I want to say. Brett’s right—there’s no point in escalating this, since any response only gives the allegations legitimacy. “Okay.” “Okay? Good.” Brett sounds like he’s ready to be done with this call. “Don’t worry so much, all right?” “Hey, wait . . .” The thought has just crossed my mind. “Have you heard anything from the Greenhouse people?” “Hmm? Oh, nah. But it’s only been a week, they’re probably resting up from their trip. Give them some time.”
I feel a niggling dread then, but I tell myself I’m being silly. It’s not like these two things are connected. Justin and Harvey aren’t necessarily glued to Twitter, following the latest book gossip. They’ve got better things to do. “Okay.” “Just relax, June. You’re going to get some haters. It comes with the territory. If it’s not true, then you have nothing to worry about.” Brett pauses for a moment. “I mean, it’s not true, is it?” “No! God. Of course not.” “Then block and ignore them.” Brett snorts. “Or better yet, block Twitter altogether. You writers are too online to begin with. This will blow over. These things always do.” BRETT’S WRONG. THIS WON’T BLOW OVER. TWITTER SCANDALS ARE like snowballs; the more people that see it, the more who feel it necessary to weigh in with their own opinions and agendas, creating an explosion of discourse branching off the instigating conversation. Past a critical mass of visibility, everyone in the industry starts talking about it. And @AthenaLiusGhost, whoever they are, has nearly a thousand followers by now. They’ve reached that critical mass. The Athena-June scandal, as it’s being now referred to, has become the Discourse of the Moment. This is wholly different from the Lily Wu discourse, which involved a dozen people at most. This time, there’s blood in the water. Silence isn’t an option. Everyone has to declare a side, or they’re accused of complicity. (SMH at so many supposed allies staying silent now that their friend’s been exposed, tweet anonymous accounts happily stirring the pot.) A lot of high-profile writers straddle the line, trying to cover their asses but also establish loyalties at the same time. Plagiarism is terrible, writes one author. If Hayward really did plagiarize—and we don’t know yet if she did—then she owes her royalties back to Athena Liu’s family. It’s awful if it’s true, writes another. But until there’s substantiated proof, I hesitate to join this lynch mob. There’s then a heated debate over whether it’s appropriate to use the words “lynch mob” when describing a white woman, and it ends with dozens of people calling the above referenced author a racist. Said author’s account is locked within hours. It’s the Twitter accounts that are non-notable public figures, who have nothing to lose and everything to gain by digging their claws into me, that
are most vicious. She used to write as June Hayward, tweets a user named reyl089. But she published her book about China as June Song. Fucked up, right? The literal definition of yellowface, writes one reply. I don’t think they know what “literal” means. So pathetic, crows another. And without fail, the evergreen Will white people ever stop whiting? Someone else tweets a photo of me taken off my Instagram paired with a photo of Scarlett Johansson, captioned: Corporate wants you to find the differences between these two images LMAO. The replies involve every mean-spirited observation about my appearance you can imagine: I swear to God why do all white women look the same. Ok aside from the fact that ScarJo could actually get it LOLLL Is she squinting because she wants to look more Asian or cuz she’s not used to being out in the sun? I should have stopped looking once I’d glimpsed what I thought was the bottom of the pit of internet stupidity. But reading discourse about myself is like prodding at a sore tooth. I’m compelled to keep digging, just to see how far the rot goes. I search Twitter, Reddit, YouTube (already three book bloggers have put up videos titled variations of “Spilling the tea on Juniper ‘Song’!”), Google News, and even TikTok (yes, this has reached the infants on TikTok) by the hour. It’s debilitating. I can’t focus on anything else. I can’t even leave my apartment; all I do is lie curled up in my bed, scrolling alternately on my laptop or my phone, reading and rereading the same updates across the same five websites. People make up absurd rumors about me. Someone says my past reviews on Goodreads are racist. (All I did was write once that I couldn’t relate to an Indian writer’s romance novel, because all the characters were unlikable and way too obsessed with their family duties to the point of disbelief.) Someone says that I regularly harass and bully people who criticize my work. (I put out a snide subtweet about a particularly dumb review of Over the Sycamore, once, and that was three years ago!) Someone claims that I once hit on them at a convention by “complimenting their skin
in a very racist way.” (All I said was that their red dress really brought out the yellow undertones in their skin. Jesus, I was just being nice. I didn’t even like the dress that much.) And yet the Twitterati have now spun that into a narrative about how I have a fetish for Asian people, which is proven by my recent BTS retweets and the fact that I played some Japanese video games once and tweeted about how hot the characters were, which means I obviously have a perverted obsession with emasculated and submissive Asian people. (Except I don’t even like BTS that much, and the video game characters in question were designed to be European, so what gives?) All the red flags are in the text itself, writes an anonymous Tumblr account, which I found by clicking through “citations” on a Reddit exposé. See on page 317, where she describes A Geng’s almond eyes and smooth skin. Almond eyes? Really??? White women have been fantasizing about Asian men for decades. (But I didn’t even write that description! Athena did!) Someone who did a text comparison of The Last Front and Athena’s other works using NLP programming on Python announces that there is a “stunning frequency in overlap of key words in both texts.” But the words in question are things like “said,” “fought,” “he,” “she,” and “they.” By that standard, couldn’t one argue that I plagiarized from Hemingway? My detractors scour every public statement I’ve ever made about The Last Front to cherry-pick them for further proof of my awfulness. Apparently it’s not appropriate to call stories about Chinese people “romantic,” “exotic,” or “fascinating.” Apparently my description of this book as a drama undercuts its potential critique of racial capitalism. “I object to the characterization of the laborers as indentured servants,” I said once. “The Chinese government volunteered these troops for World War One in an attempt to win soft power with Western countries. The laborers went out of their own free will.” (This perspective is “ignorant of the pressures of Western hegemony” and “totally clueless about the coercions of global capital.”) “These men were largely illiterate,” writes Adele Sparks-Sato. “They were recruited by promises of higher wages, yes, but many had no idea what awaited them in Europe. That Hayward/Song would characterize their employment as free and without coercion demonstrates, at best, scholarly dimness, and at worst, a malicious indifference to the conditions of the Global South’s working class.” They call The Last Front a “white savior story.” They don’t like that I’ve shown valor and bravery by white soldiers and missionaries; they think
it centers the white experience. (But those men did exist. One missionary, Robert Haden, drowned trying to save a Chinese man when the steamship Athos was torpedoed by German submarines. Doesn’t his death matter, too?) And they’re calling me a racist for saying that the laborers were recruited from the north because the British thought southerners from warmer climates would be unsuitable for manual labor. But that’s not my view, it’s the view of British army officers. Why can’t they sort out the difference? What happened to critical reading skills? Also, is it even racist to say that people from the north are better suited for cold climates if it’s true? I want to issue a line-by-line rebuttal. I made the creative choices I did becauseI wanted to broaden the number of human experiences in the story, not to hew closely to stereotypes, good or bad. Similarly, I included depictions of racism in the text not becauseI agree with them, but becauseI wanted to remain faithful to the historical record. But I know it won’t matter. They’ve already decided on their narrative about me. Now they’re just collecting “facts” to back it up. They don’t know me. They can’t know me; they’ve never met me. They’ve taken bits of information about me strewn across the internet and pieced them together into an image that fits their imagined villain but has no bearing on reality. I don’t have yellow fever. I’m not one of those creepy dudes who write exclusively about Japanese folklore and wear kimonos and pronounce every loan word from Asian languages with a deliberate, constructed accent. Matcha. Otaku. I’m not obsessed with stealing Asian culture—I mean, before The Last Front, I had no interest in modern Chinese history whatsoever. But the worst part is, sometimes the trolls have me doubting my own understanding of myself. Sometimes I wonder if I’m the one with a warped version of reality, whether I really am a sociopath who fetishizes Asian women, whether Athena did in fact feel terrified of me throughout our friendship, and whether my presence in her apartment that night was more nefarious than I thought. But I always nip those creeping worries in the bud. I stop my thoughts from spiraling out, just like Dr. Gaily taught me. It’s the internet that’s fucked, not me. It’s this contingent of social justice warriors,