these clout-chasing white “allies,” and Asian activists seeking attention who are acting up. I am not the bad guy. I am the victim here. AT LEAST SOME PEOPLE SPEAK OUT ON MY BEHALF. MOSTLY WHITE people, to be fair, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re in the wrong. Brett, bless him, puts up the following statement: “The recently made allegations against my client Juniper Song are utterly groundless and illintentioned. The online attacks have been nothing short of character assassination.” He waxes on a bit about my unimpeachable writing talent, about how hard I’ve worked at my craft since he signed me four years ago, and then finishes with, “I and the Lambert Agency stand firmly behind Juniper Song.” My team at Eden don’t say a thing, which annoys me a bit. But given the sheer number of accounts tagging Eden urging them to drop my contract, Eden’s indifference is a vote of confidence in and of itself. Daniella sent us a concerned email when the allegations first circulated, but when Brett assured her there was no truth to the accusations, she counseled us to keep our heads down. We don’t want to legitimize the claims by responding. Our team has found that in the past, engaging with trolls only emboldens them. I’m sorry this is happening to June, but we do believe the best thing to do is to keep quiet. “These are wild accusations to make without solid proof,” tweets an internet personality who is largely famous for having reasonable and nuanced takes on unreasonable situations. “These are people’s livelihoods at stake. I’m troubled by how eager this community is to delight in the suffering of others. We all need to do better.” A pop-culture blogger with conservative leanings and seventy thousand followers launches a hate campaign against Adele Sparks-Sato. ASS IS A CRAZY PERSON WITH A VENDETTA AGAINST MORE SUCCESSFUL WRITERS, he rants. NEWS FLASH: JEALOUSY LOOKS UGLY ON YOU, ADELE. (This is entertaining to witness, but to be clear, I do not condone such actions. I guess it’s nice to have someone speak in your defense, but in a perfect world, they wouldn’t be frequent commentators on Fox News.) Eden’s Angels, bless them, are firmly on my side. From Jen: So normallyI don’t agree with fascists but he’s right about ASS lmao. Marnie: Well you don’t need to be a fascist to know that! Jen: You alright, though? Hanging in there? Marnie: This is horrendous. I am so, so sorry you’re going through this. Let me know if there’s anything we can do. You are so brave.
Jen: It’s tall poppy syndrome. They hate seeing young women succeed. That’s all this is. I get shit like this all the time from male CEOS. They can’t STAND us. Marnie: They’re dogpiling on you for clout and attention and they know it. It’s not about you, it’s about them. Jen: Don’t wrestle with pigs, and all that!! Block it out, Junie. Ignore the haters. RISE ABOVE!! IF ONLYI COULD. I CANNOT UNGLUE MYSELF FROM MY DEVICES. WHENEVER I close my eyes, I still see that azure-blue screen. I still imagine the likes racking up on yet another takedown thread about me. I do try a digital purge. Everyone keeps urging that I do this, as if pretending Twitter doesn’t exist will solve all my problems. Trolls feed on your attention! Jen keeps reminding me. What’s on the internet can’t hurt you if you don’t look at it. But it doesn’t feel like a cleanse; it feels like sticking my head in the sand while everything is falling down around me. I can’t ignore the damage. I have to track the exact trajectory of the hurricane, because knowing the precise moment it’ll hit and where will make things hurt less. At least, my brain is convinced this is so. I try taking a walk, to lose myself in details like birdsong and splattered sunlight and the wet patches left by the rain on the cement, but the world outside feels so insubstantial, irrelevant, like a video game environment that’s still buffering. Sometimes I do manage to forget it all for a moment, but then my focus slips and I think back to my phone lying on my bed, buzzing with more and more notifications. And then my breathing quickens, and my head swims, and I know I’m on the verge of an anxiety attack, soI double back to my apartment and curl up on my bed and whip out my phone for another hour of doom-scrolling, because that is paradoxically the only thing that calms things down. I can’t eat. I want to eat—I’m starving all the time, and I keep ordering huge, hot, greasy delivery meals of pizza or pasta bowls, but the moment I start to chew, my thoughts begin to spiral again about my impending professional implosion and then I can’t take another bite without gagging. I can’t sleep. I lie awake every night until the sun comes up, feverishly refreshing various threads and accounts to see who’s retweeted or responded to what, composing imaginary responses in my head, then composing imaginary rebuttals to the backlash to those responses. I wish I had an exit strategy. I wish there were some magical apologyI could make, or defenseI could offer, that would make everything stop. But there is no point, I know, in getting embroiled in the mess. Anything I post
will become further evidence that people can use against me. And what would an online victory even look like? There’s no way to reverse the exposure, to make the internet forget about me. I’m marked forever. Every time someone Googles my name, or brings me up at a literary conference, the association with this plagiarism scandal will foul the air like a persistent fart. I know some authors who have been able to jump from scandal to scandal with their reputations perfectly intact. Mostly white. Mostly male. Isaac Asimov was a serial sexual harasser; so was Harlan Ellison. David Foster Wallace abused, harassed, and stalked Mary Karr. They are still hailed as geniuses. Sometimes, I think ruefully to myself that maybe this is just something I have to get through. An online raking over the coals feels like a rite of passage every notable author must now undergo. Last year, a YA writer was driven off social media for encouraging her fans to leave one-star reviews on another writer’s debut (afterward, it transpired the debut writer had stolen her fiancé). In any case, both writers involved just signed new, sixfigure deals for their follow-up trilogies. And Marnie Kimball, Daniella’s favorite author, has gotten in hot water at least a dozen times, always for tweeting something edgy and indefensible, like The classics are just better and if you don’t get them, you don’t know how to read. Sorry. Her sales are doing fine. Maybe Daniella’s right. Maybe silence is the best response. Even Athena suffered her own period of online vitriol, though in her case she really had done nothing wrong. Two years ago, she’d tweeted some uncontroversial, bleeding-heart thread about the recent rise of hate crimes against Asian Americans. I’ve never been so nervous to be in my own skin, she’d said. Until now, I never felt so much like this country was not my own. It read as a little cheesy and narcissistic, but whatever; it was a cause close to her heart, and you couldn’t exactly hate on someone who was afraid of being attacked on the street. But then some anonymous account with an emoji of the Chinese flag in the bio asked her, If you care about Asians so much, why are you dating white? I don’t know why Athena responded. One never argues a racist troll into submission. But she must have been feeling defensive, or raring for a fight, because she quote tweeted the reply and said: WhoI date has nothing to do with my politics. Hating on interracial couples? Is this 2018?
Then the floodgates opened. Hateful messages inundated her replies and DMs. She showed some of them to me when we met up for coffee later that week, and they were utterly vile: Shut up and go suck white cock WAMF couples are unnatural. WAMF is how you get Eliot Rodger. You want me to come shoot you up like Eliot Rodger? The whites will never love you LOL stop trying honey Don’t you dare speak for Asians. You lost that right when you let a white man colonize your cunt. By the time she took her account private, the AMRAs (the Asian Men’s Rights Activists, she called them) had already found her author account and email address. She started getting death threats. Screenshots of the initial Twitter encounter started circulating on Reddit, on which the main thread eventually acquired over a thousand posts, many of them screenshotted photos of Athena and her then-boyfriend, Geoff, pulled from their respective Instagram accounts, with captions like RACE TRAITOR and Some Asians have no loyalty for their race. They only want white cock, white money, white baby. But some day they will wake up and learn that white supremacy will not save them. Pray that this girl learns before it is too late. Someone hacked her author website so that when you clicked on the home page, all you found was a cartoon of an Asian woman with slants for eyes prostrating herself to a crowd of slobbering white johns. Here for you, I’d texted her, because it seemed like the appropriate thing to say. People are such assholes. Thanks, she answered. Then: I’ll be okay, I think. It’s just so fucking scary. Like, I don’t feel safe in my own home. I’d thought she was exaggerating back then. Athena was good at that, playing up her fear for sympathy, the way she played up her vulnerability for attention at barcons all the time. Anyhow, the internet was just the internet. What, was some Reddit lowlife living in his mother’s basement really going to drive hundreds of miles to DC to accost her outside her apartment? Back then, I’d thought this ugly thought: Why couldn’t she just stay offline for a while and focus on the fact that she was rich, pretty, and successful?
But now I know exactly what Athena meant. You can’t shut it out. You lose all sense of security, because at every moment—when you’re sleeping, when you’re awake, when you’ve just put your phone down for a few minutes because you’ve hopped in the shower—dozens, maybe hundreds, maybe thousands of strangers are out there, mining your personal information, worming their ways into your life, looking for ways to mock, humiliate, or worse, endanger you. You come to regret everything you’ve ever shared about yourself: every photo, every meme, every comment on a YouTube video, every offhand tweet. Because the trolls will find them. I deleted as much of my digital footprint as I could in those first twenty-four hours, but the Wayback Machine still exists. Someone mocks my enthusiastic review of Wonder Woman from 2018: Of fucking course Hayward loves white woman savior narratives. How much do you want to bet she loves the IDF, too? Someone pulls up a photo of me at my high school prom: This dress is Juniper Song’s villain origin story. Someone posts information about the test prep company whereI used to work: Parents, if you’re using this service, BEWARE of Juniper Song! If I hadn’t quit Veritas already, I truly believe that these people could have gotten me fired. You all need to get outside, a prominent writer had complained once on Twitter. Get some fresh air. Twitter is not real life. But Twitter is real life; it’s realer than real life, because that is the realm that the social economy of publishing exists on, because the industry has no alternative. Offline, writers are all faceless, hypothetical creatures pounding out words in isolation from one another. You can’t peek over anyone’s shoulder. You can’t tell if everyone else is really doing as dandy as they pretend they are. But online, you can tune into all the hot gossip, even if you’re not nearly important enough to have a seat in the room where it happens. Online, you can tell Stephen King to go fuck himself. Online, you can discover that the current literary star of the moment is actually so problematic that all of her works should be canceled, forever. Reputations in publishing are built and destroyed, constantly, online. I imagine a crowd of angry voices and pointed fingers, converging on me to rip pieces of flesh from my body like the naiads did to Orpheus, until all that’s left is the prurient, whispered question, “Did you hear about Juniper Song?” and fragments of rumors growing darker and more distorted; bloody, decomposing shreds of my virtual identity; until there is
nothing left but the statement, justified or not, that Juniper Song Is Canceled.
Twelve ALL I WANT IS TO HIBERNATE IN MY APARTMENT FOR THE INDEFINITE future, but I have two prior commitments for the month—a library visit with students in DC, and a panel at a Virginia literary festival about writing East Asia– inspired stories. I’ve also been emailing back and forth with some woman from the French Embassy about a visit to the CLC memorial in Noyellessur-Mer next month to coincide with the release of the French edition of The Last Front. But she stopped answering my emails around the same time that the smear campaign went viral, which is fine with me; the last thing I want is to sit seven hours on a plane just for obnoxious French people to snub me on the other end. But neither the library nor the literary festival has sent me any updates since the news broke, which I take to mean they still want me to come. To cancel may as well be admitting guilt. The library visit goes okay. The students turn out to be third graders, instead of the high schoolers I’d expected. They won’t be old enough to tackle The Last Front for years, and they certainly have no interest in Chinese laborers in World War I. Thankfully, this means that they’re too young to care about Twitter drama as well—though they’re not especially excited to see me, they don’t greet me with revulsion, either. They sit, fidgeting but silent, in the lobby of the MLK Jr. Memorial Library whileI read for twenty minutes from the first chapter, and then they ask some cute, inane questions on what it’s like to be a published author (“Do you get to see the factories where the books are made?” “Do you get paid millions of dollars?”). I tell them some bland truisms about how literacy is important because it opens doors to other worlds, and how maybe they’ll want to
become storytellers as well. Then their teacher thanks me, we take a group picture, and we all part ways without fuss. The panel is a disaster. I’ve already pissed everyone off by arriving late. I misread the schedule —my panel is in the Oak Room, not the Cedar Room, which means I have to haul ass all the way across the conference center. The room is packed by the timeI arrive. All the other panelists are huddled at the far end of the table, talking to one another with their hands over their mics. They hush when I approach. “I’m so sorry,” I pant as I find my seat. I’m nearly ten minutes late. “This place is so confusing, huh?” No one responds. Two of them glance my way, and then at each other; the last one stares down at her phone. The hostility is adamant. “All right!” Annie Brosch, our moderator, says cheerily. “Now we’re all here, so let’s begin—shall we do names first, and our most recent publications?” We go down the table, left to right. There’s Diana Qiu, a poet and visual artist; Noor Rishi, a writer of young adult contemporaries who daylights as a civil rights lawyer; and Ailin Zhou, a critically acclaimed author of historical romances set in a “race-bended” (her words) Victorian England. Then there’s me. I lean toward my mic. “Um, hi, I’m June Hayward, also writing as Juniper Song. I wrote The Last Front.” This gets bland stares, but no boos. Right now, that’s the best I can hope for. “I’d love for everyone to discuss what inspired their books,” says Annie. “Juniper, why don’t you kick us off?” My mouth has gone dry; my voice cracks, and I cough beforeI continue. “So I’m very inspired by history, like Ailing. I actually first learned about the CLC—” Ailin interrupts me. “My name is pronounced ‘Ai-lin.’” “Oh, Ailin, sorry.” I feel a twinge of irritation. I was copying Annie’s pronunciation, and Ailin hadn’t interrupted her. “I just think it’s very important that we get our names right,” Ailin says to a smattering of applause. “I used to be afraid of telling people they’d gotten my name wrong, but I’ve now made it a part of my praxis. It matters that we defy white supremacy, every day, bit by bit. It matters that we demand respect.”
More applause. I lean back from my mic, cheeks red. Seriously? Praxis? “Of course,” Annie says smoothly. “Sorry about that, Ailin. I should have asked for pronunciation guides before the panel.” “Ai-lin,” I say, slowly and correctly, sinceI feel obligated to say something. “Like you’re ailing, but in Texas.” I’m trying to be funny, but apparently this comes off the wrong way as well, because the audience visibly tenses. Ailin says nothing. There’s a long, awkward pause, and then Annie asks, “And, um, Noor? What inspires your work?” We go on like this for a while. Annie, at least, is good at keeping the conversation moving. She addresses questions to each one of us in turn, instead of letting the panelists lead the conversation, which means I can stay in my lane and avoid talking to Ailin directly for the entire hour. The other panelists cross-reference and riff off of one another’s answers often, but no one responds to what I’m saying. The audience doesn’t seem to care about me, either; I might as well be talking into thin air. But that’s fine. I just need to get through this hour. Annie must notice that I’ve been giving rather curt answers, because she turns to me and asks, “And Juniper? Did you want to elaborate further on what narrative fiction can do for underrepresented groups?” “Um, sure.” I clear my throat again. “Yeah. So, um, here’s an anecdote that always comes to mind when I think about whyI wrote The Last Front. So in the early twentieth century, Canada was so hostile to Chinese immigrants that there was a five-hundred-dollar head tax imposed on every Chinese person to enter the country. When the CLC laborers were brought to Canada, the head tax for their immigration was waived since that was part of the war effort, but that meant that they weren’t allowed to get out of the trains during their trip, and that they were closely guarded the whole time they were in Canada.” Usually when I tell this story, I get riveted stares. But maybe this audience has simply decided to hate me, or maybe they’re overheated and tired and bored of my moralizing, because people keep fidgeting, glancing around, or checking their phones. No one looks at my face. There’s nothing I can do but soldier on. “They stayed in those railway cars for days in the heat. They couldn’t get medical treatment, even when some fainted from dehydration. They couldn’t speak to a single person on
the outside, because the Canadian government had issued a total press blackout on the presence of the Chinese laborers. And I think that’s a good metaphor for the central argument of the book, which is that Chinese labor was used, then hidden and discredited like it was something shameful.” “Oh, really?” Diana Qiu cuts in suddenly. “So you have a problem with unacknowledged Asian labor?” I’m so startled by this interruption that for a moment I just stare at her. Diana Qiu is a lean, artsy type with sharp, dark eyes, finely plucked brows, and red lipstick so boldly scarlet it looks like an open scar in her face. Her edgy-chic aesthetic reminds me a bit of Athena, actually, and the resemblance makes me shiver. From the corner of my eye, I see a flash. Someone’s taken a photo. Several audience members lift their phones—they’re recording this exchange. “What kind of question is that?” I know I shouldn’t escalate, but the indignance slips out beforeI can stop it. “I mean, obviously that’s wrong; that’s the whole point—” “So is stealing words from a dead woman,” Diana says. Several audience members literally gasp. “Let’s keep the discussion to the prepared questions,” Annie says ineffectually. “Noor, what do you think about—” “Someone has to say it.” Diana raises her voice. “There’s good evidence now that June Hayward did not write The Last Front. We’ve all seen the allegations. Let’s not pretend. And I’m sorry, but I’m not going to sit around on this panel and pretend like she’s a colleague who deserves my respect, when Athena’s legacy is at stake—” “Please,” Annie says, more loudly this time. “This is not an appropriate venue for that discussion, and we need to respect all of our invited panelists.” Diana looks like she wants to say something more. But then Noor touches her on the arm, and Diana leans back from her mic, arms crossed. I say nothing. I don’t know what I could say. Diana and the audience have already judged my guilt, and nothing I utter could redeem me in their eyes. I can only sit there, heart racing, awash in the humiliation. “All right?” Annie asks. “Please. Could we move on?” “All right,” Diana says curtly.