is entirely original to me as well. I write my own stuff, you guys. I promise.” A brief pause. Daniella glances at Todd, her left eyebrow arched high. “All right, then,” Todd says. “We’ll want this in writing, of course, but if that’s all you did, then . . . this is fairly containable.” “So can we make this go away?” Brett asks. Todd hesitates. “That’s really a question for publicity . . .” “MaybeI could put out a statement,” I say. “Or do, like, an interview. Clear everything up. Most of this is all misunderstandings—maybe if I just . . .” “I think what’s best for you right now is to focus on your next work,” Daniella says crisply. “Eden will put out a statement on your behalf. We’ll send it over for your approval this afternoon.” Emily chips in. “We all feel that in the meantime, it’s best that you, personally, stay off social media. But if you wanted to announce a new project, something you’re currently working on . . .” She trails off. I get the idea. Shut up, stay out of the spotlight, and prove you’re capable of writing your own books. Preferably something that has nothing to do with Athena fucking Liu. “What are you working on now?” Daniella prods. “Brett, I know it’s not under contract with us, but we do have the first look, so if there’s anything you can share with us . . .” “I’m working on it,” I say hoarsely. “Obviously this whole thing has been very distressing, so I’ve been distracted . . .” “But she’ll have something new soon,” Brett jumps in. “I’ll be in touch when she does. Does that sound good, everyone? Junie will fix that first paragraph ASAP, and I’ll circle back next week when we’ve got something shaped like a pitch?” Todd shrugs; his part in this is over. Daniella nods. We all exchange some niceties about how it’s good we could get on the line and clear all this up in person, and then Daniella kills the Zoom room. Brett rings me right after for a follow-up. “Do they hate me?” I ask miserably. “Is Daniella done with me?” “No, no.” He pauses. “Actually, it’s not as bad as it seems. Controversy of any sort is pretty good for free marketing. We’re expecting your royalties to go up in the next payment period.” “What, seriously?”
“Well—so here’s the thing. We didn’t want to tell you over Zoom, but it seems like this whole fiasco got picked up by a lot of, um, well, right-wing commentators. Probably not people you really want to associate with. I mean, let’s be clear about that. But they’re turning this into a culture war issue, and that always drives attention, so sales are . . . up. And it’s always nice when sales are up.” I can’t believe it. This is the first piece of good news I’ve gotten all week. “By how much?” “Enough that you’re going to get a bonus.” It seems like a weird time to celebrate, and perhaps this is wildly inappropriate, but in the back of my mind, I make a mental note to finally get that IKEA couch I’ve been eyeing. It’ll look nice next to my bookshelves. “It just seemed like Daniella wanted to kill me.” A hysterical giggle escapes my throat. “I mean, she looked so mad—” “Oh, Daniella doesn’t really care,” says Brett. “She has to do her job, you understand. But at the end of the day all that really matters is cash flow. Eden’s going to stand with you. You’re pulling in too much money for them to back out now. Feel better?” “So much better.” I exhale. “Wow. All right.” “So you’re going to work on something new?” “I guess I’d fucking better, huh?” “That would be nice.” Brett laughs. “Write up some pitches for me to show Daniella next week. You don’t have to outline a whole project—just throw out some ideas so that she knows you’ve still got it. Just maybe something that isn’t about a Chinese girl, okay?” “Ha ha,” I say, and hang up. MY PHONE RINGS ONCE MORE THAT NIGHT, JUST AS I’VE ORDERED some pizza for dinner. I hit the green ANSWER button, assuming it’s my DoorDash guy. “Hello?” “June?” A pause. “It’s Patricia Liu. Athena’s mom.” Oh, Jesus Christ. I have the fleeting urge to hang up and hurl my phone across the room. But that will only make things worse—then she’ll know I’m too afraid to talk to her, and she’ll make assumptions why, and I’ll be up all night panicking over what she would have said to me. Better to have
it out now and get this over with. If she’s changed her mind about suing for damages, Brett and the Eden team need to know. I can’t keep my voice from cracking. “Hi, Mrs. Liu.” “Hello.” Her voice sounds muffled and nasal. I wonder if she’s been crying. “I’m calling because . . . well, there’s no easy way to say this.” “Mrs. Liu, I think I know—” “A woman named Adele Sparks-Sato reached out to me this morning. She wanted to know if I still had Athena’s drafting notebooks, and if she could have a look.” She doesn’t elaborate, which forces me to ask, “Yes?” “Well, she insinuated that you had stolen The Last Front from Athena. And she wanted to look through Athena’s notebooks, to see if there was any evidence that Athena had been working on that project.” I press my hand against my forehead. This is it. It’s all over. I thought she was calling about Mother Witch, but this is so much worse. “Mrs. Liu, I don’t know what to say.” “I told her no, of course.” My heart skips a beat. Mrs. Liu continues. “I don’t like when strangers . . . Anyhow, I told her to give me some time to think about it. And I thought I would talk to you first.” She pauses again. I know what she wants to ask; she’s just not brave enough to say it. I imagine her standing in her kitchen, nails digging into her palm, trying to speak aloud the possibility that the last person who saw her daughter alive might have stolen her magnum opus as well. “June . . .” Her voice catches. I hear her sniffle. “As you know, June, I very much do not want to open those notebooks.” And the follow-up question, unspoken: DoI have reason to? Believe me, in that moment, I want to confess. This would have been the best time, the right time, to come clean. I think of our last conversation, two years ago, when I visited her home. “I so wish I had been able to read her last novel,” Mrs. Liu told me as I stood up to leave. “Athena so rarely opened herself up to me. Reading her work wasn’t like knowing her thoughts, but it was at least a part of her she’d decided to let me see.” I’ve torn that from her. I’ve denied a mother her daughter’s final words. If I tell her the truth now, Mrs. Liu will at least get those words back. She’ll see the effort that occupied the last years of Athena’s life. But I can’t break.
That’s been the key to staying sane throughout all of this: holding the line, maintaining my innocence. In the face of it all, I’ve never once cracked, never admitted the theft to anyone. By now, I mostly believe the lie myself—that it was my efforts that made The Last Front the success that it was, that when it comes down to it, it is my book. I’ve contorted the truth into such ways that I can, in fact, make peace with it. If I tell Mrs. Liu otherwise, all of this unravels. I drive the nail in my own coffin. And the world may be crumbling around me regardless, but I can’t let it all slip away if there’s even the slightest hope of salvaging it. “Mrs. Liu.” I take a deep breath. “I worked very, very hard on The Last Front. My blood and sweat are in that book.” “I see.” “Your daughter was an exceptional writer. And so am I. And I think it hurts both her legacy, and my future, to overlook either truth.” I’m skilled with words. I know how to lie without lying. And I know, on some level, that Mrs. Liu must know what I’m really telling her. I’m sure she knows, if she gives Adele Sparks-Sato permission, what they will find in Athena’s notebooks. But she is terrified of what lies inside those Moleskines. That is clearer now than ever. I’m speaking to a mother who, when it comes down to it, would really rather not confront what dark things lay buried in her daughter’s soul. No mother wants to know her child that well. Here, then, are the terms of our bargain—she’ll keep my secrets, as long as she never has to confront Athena’s. “Very well,” says Mrs. Liu. “Thank you, June.” Before she hangs up, I blurt, “And Mrs. Liu, about Mother Witch . . .” I trail off. I’m not sure what I want to say, or if it’s prudent to say anything at all. Todd told me that Mrs. Liu isn’t suing for damages, but I hate to have this hanging over me. I want confirmation from Mrs. Liu’s own mouth that this is going away. “I mean, soI don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’m going to rewrite the opening . . .” “Oh, June.” She sighs. “I don’t care about that.” “It really is original work,” I say. “I did—I did take the first paragraph —I don’t know how, I think we were just trading excerpts, and it wound up in my notebook somehow, and it’s been so long that I forgot . . . but anyways, the rest of the story . . .”
“I know,” says Mrs. Liu, and now there’s a hard edge in her voice. “I know, June. Athena never would have written something like that.” BeforeI can ask her what she means, she hangs up.
Seventeen BY THE END OF THE MONTH, THE DUST HAS SETTLED AND ALL RELEVANT parties have made up their minds. I am hated by the internet, an embarrassment to the industry, and hanging on to my relationship with my publisher by a thread. At least I’m not broke. Indeed, by most external measures, I am still quite a success. I occupy that curious space where the fraction of the reading population that’s constantly online hates me, but the rest of America’s book buyers don’t. People are still picking my books off the sale racks at Target and Books-A-Million. Despite a petition circled by Adele Sparks-Sato and Diana Qiu to have Eden pull all my titles from shelves until they’ve conducted a third-party investigation (delusional), my sales haven’t dropped. In fact, they’re doing better. Brett was right about scandals generating free marketing. Unofficial until your royalty statement, reads his latest email, but your sales are nearly double this month what they were this time a year ago. It only takes a little exploring around the seedier corners of the internet to learn what’s going on. Alt-right free-speech proponents have made me their cause célèbre. I and my pretty, Anglo-Saxon face have become the perfect victim of the left-wing fascist cancel-culture mob. (It appears the alt-right cares a lot about due process, but only when the accused has done something like sexual assault or racially motivated plagiarism.) A popular Fox News cohost encourages all of his millions of viewers to support me so that Eden doesn’t drop me from their list, which has created a strange situation in which thousands of Trump voters are buying a book about mistreated Chinese laborers. My publicist passes on an interview request
from a popular young YouTuber, but I decline when I discover that most of her viral videos are titled things like “WATCH ME SNEAK A GUN INTO MY ECON LECTURE LOL” and “LIB SNOWFLAKE GETS OWNED BY THE FACTS ON ABORTION.” Okay, yes, I know how bad this looks. Like Taylor Swift, I had no intention of becoming a white supremacist Barbie. Obviously I’m not a Trumper—I voted for Biden! But if these people are hurling money at me, is it so wrong of me to accept? Should we not celebrate scamming cash from racist rednecks whenever we get the chance? So here’s how things have shaken out. I’ve lost my reputation, but I’m far from canceled, and I have a steady income for the foreseeable future. Things could be worse. Maybe I’ve burned all my bridges in publishing, but that doesn’t mean my life is over. I still have more savings than most people my age. Maybe it’s time to stop while I’m ahead. In those following weeks, I do think often about quitting writing altogether. Maybe my mother was right all along; maybe a lengthy career just isn’t in the cards for me. MaybeI should treat The Last Front as the launchpad to get myself set up somewhere else. I have enough money to pay for any preprofessional graduate degree, and a suitably high GPA from an Ivy League school to get into most top-ten law or business programs. Maybe I’ll study for the LSAT. Maybe I’ll enroll in some online quant boot camps and then go into consulting. It’s attractive, the prospect of a stable job with clearly defined hours and benefits, where being white does not make you boring and redundant but rather a perfectly average and desirable hire. No more panic-scrolling; no more dick-measuring competitions; no more reading emails a thousand times over to figure out if my marketing person hates me or not. But I can’t quit the one thing that gives meaning to my life. Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic. Writing is creating something out of nothing, is opening doors to other lands. Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much. To stop writing would kill me. I’d never be able to walk through a bookstore without fingering the spines with longing, wondering at the lengthy editorial process that got these titles on shelves and reminiscing about my own. And I’d spend the rest of life curdling with jealousy every time someone like Emmy Cho gets a book deal, every timeI learn that some young up-and-comer is living the lifeI should be living.
Writing has formed the core of my identity sinceI was a child. After Dad died, after Mom withdrew into herself, and after Rory decided to forge a life without me, writing gave me a reason to stay alive. And as miserable as it makes me, I’ll cling to that magic for as long as I live. THE PROBLEM IS THAT I HAVE NOTHING TO WRITE FOR DANIELLA. None of my old pitches will do. I’ve pulled a few of my former project drafts from the metaphorical trunk, but their premises all now strike me as dull, derivative, or plain stupid: A YA rom-com about a girl in love with a boy who’s been dead for a hundred years. (This one is all vibes and no plot, and based largely on my undergraduate crush on Nathan Hale’s statue on campus.) A pair of lovers who are reincarnated century after century into the same iteration of their tragic story until they can find a way to break the cycle. (The premise is cool, but it’s too daunting to research so many different historical periods. I mean, what’s cute about the 1700s?) A girl murdered by an ex-boyfriend who comes back as a ghost and who tries to save his next victim, but she keeps failing, and eventually the murdered girls form this ghost posse that at last succeeds in putting the guy in jail. (Okay, that one has promise, but Netflix just aired a modern Bluebeard retelling, and I don’t want to be accused of plagiarism again.) I browse through Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica, looking for promising nuggets of history to expand on. MaybeI could write about the missing Chinese survivors of the Titanic. Or the panhandlers of Gold Mountain. Or the NYPD Oriental Gang Unit—they were called the Jade Squad, and that’d be a fucking cool name for a title, wouldn’t it? Or the Chinese mafia—Patrick Radden Keefe wrote a great nonfiction book about a Chinese snakehead who operated out of New York City for years. What if I did a fictionalized version of her life? Why the obsession with China, though? Why am I limiting myself? Shouldn’t it be equally viable to write about Russian immigrants, or African refugees? I never wanted to pigeonhole my writing brand to China; it only happened that way by accident. I think one of my grandparents or greatgrandparents might have been Jewish; I could call up one of my aunts to ask, use that as a bridge to Jewish history and mythology. And I know for a fact that my mother’s spoken about having some Cherokee heritage before.
Maybe that’s worth interrogating—maybe there’s a story here about discovering connections I didn’t even know I had. Truth be told, I’m intimidated by the work involved. Since I’ve already done all that research for The Last Front, Chinese-inspired stories seem a bit easier. I already know so much about the history, about the current political touchpoints involved. I already speak the critical vocabulary; all I need is a hook. I once met a poet who carried a tiny notebook everywhere she went and wrote down at least one quippy observation about every encounter she had throughout the day. The barista’s hair was a desperate shade of purple. The woman at the table beside her drew out the word “yes” like a stalling tactic. The boss’s name slid off the doorman’s tongue like rusty pennies. “I don’t create so much as I collect,” explained the poet. “The world is already so rich. All I do is distill the messiness of human life into a concentrated reading experience.” I try the same thing on a day running errands around DC. I record some thoughts on the dry cleaner—crowded, efficient, owner is either Greek or Russian and is it racist that I can’t tell which?—and in theK Street Trader Joe’s—every time she came here, the shelves seemed full of organic promise, but she always inevitably left with the same bag of ginger snaps and microwave fettuccini. I feel very Scholarly and Observant while I’m scribbling at the checkout counter, but when I get home, I can’t find the spark in anything I’ve produced. It’s all so bland. No one wants to read about the culinary politics of Trader Ming’s. I need to go further. I need to write about things that white people don’t see on a daily basis. The next afternoon, I take the green line out to Chinatown, which— despite having lived in DC for nearly five years—I’ve actually never been to. I’m a bit apprehensive becauseI saw on Reddit that DC’s Chinatown has the highest crime rates in the city, and when I get out of the metro station, the whole place does carry a menacing air of neglect. I walk with my hands shoved into my pockets, fingers tightly wrapped around my phone and wallet. I wish I’d brought pepper spray. Stop being such a nervous white girl, I scold myself. Real people live here; it’s not a war zone. I can’t learn their stories if I’m acting like a jumpy tourist.
I stroll past the Calvary Baptist Church and snap a photo of the Friendship Archway, which welcomes me to Chinatown in resplendent shades of turquoise and gold. I don’t know what the characters on the middle placard say; I’ll have to look that up later. Otherwise, Chinatown doesn’t have much to offer in the cultural sphere. I stroll past a Starbucks, a Ruby Tuesday, a Rita’s, and a Bed Bath & Beyond. These stores all have Chinese names hanging over their doorways in proud gold or red calligraphy, but on the inside, they carry the same stuff you’d find anywhere else. Weirdly, I don’t see a lot of Chinese people around. I’d read an article a while back arguing that DC Chinatown had been viciously gentrified, but I hadn’t expected it to look so much like any DC block. I’m starving, soI duck into the first casual eateryI see—a shop called Mr. Shen’s Dumplings, its English name barely visible among the Chinese signs and TripAdvisor clippings that crowd the display window. The place feels a little run-down. The tables are chipped, the windows greasy. But isn’t that the mark of an authentic Chinese restaurant? I remember reading this on Twitter once. If a Chinese food joint expends no effort on its aesthetic, that’s a sign the food is amazing. Or that the owners don’t give a shit. I’m the only person inside. That’s not necessarily a bad sign. It’s four in the afternoon; too late for lunch, too early for dinner. A waitress wordlessly places a dirty-looking cup of water and a plastic menu before me, then walks off. I glance around, feeling stupid. I’m clearly intruding on the employees’ off hours between meals, and I feel awkward taking up so much space. There’s nothing I want to eat here. The menu consists entirely of different kinds of soup dumplings. I don’t know what a soup dumpling is, but it sounds gross. The strong, musty, dumpster-like smell wafting from the kitchen doors is killing my appetite. “Are you ready?” The waitress pops up at my side, pen and pad in hand. “Oh—sorry, yeah.” I pause, then point to the first thing I see on the menu. I guess it’d be rude to walk out at this point. “Can I get, um, the pork-and-leek dumplings?” “Six or twelve?” “Six.” “Boiled or pan-fried?”