That’s good advice, if only I had the mental fortitude to not care so much about what people think of me. I keep reading through Goodreads tirades, vicious tweet threads, and condescending Reddit posts. I keep clicking on negative articles when they show up in my Google Alerts, even when the title promises nothing but self-righteous vehemence.
I can’t help it. I need to know what the world is saying about me. I need to sketch out the contours of my digitally perceived self, because at least if I know the extent of the damage then I’ll know how much I should be worried.
The most widely circulated hate piece is an essay review in the Los Angeles Review of Books by a critic named Adele Sparks-Sato, whose work I actually enjoy, because she’s good at pointing out that the novels everyone else touts as “the voice of a generation” are actually self-indulgent, narcissistic nonsense. She’s published some of the harshest criticisms of Athena’s work in the past (on Athena’s debut: “Here, Liu falls into the novice trap of mistaking a lyrical, self-othering sentence for a profound observation. Unfortunately, you can still be Orientalist even if you’re Asian. My read? Athena Liu needs to get over her own yellow fever.”). This time, she’s come after me:
“In The Last Front, Juniper Song misses an excellent opportunity to excavate a forgotten history and instead uses the suffering of thousands of Chinese laborers as a site for melodrama and white redemption,” she writes. “She could have, for instance, interrogated the use of Christian missionaries to convince young, illiterate Chinese men to work and die overseas, and who in France were largely recruited to keep the Chinese docile, tame, and cooperative. Instead she unabashedly praises the missionaries’ role in converting laborers. The Last Front hardly breaks new ground; instead, it joins novels like The Help and The Good Earth in a long line of what I dub historical exploitation novels: inauthentic stories that use troubled pasts as an entertaining set piece for white entertainment.”
Whatever. Who is Adele to tell me off about authenticity? Isn’t the name “Sato” Japanese? Isn’t there a whole discourse about how being Chinese and Japanese are totally different experiences?
Can this Adele bitch take a fucking chill pill? I text Eden’s Angels.
Marnie: With initials like ASS . . . no?
Jen: Critics build an audience by dragging others down. It’s the only way they can legitimize themselves. It’s a toxic culture. Don’t get pulled in. We’re better than that.
Some undergraduate at UCLA named Kimberly Deng puts up a twelve-minute YouTube video titled “ALL THE CULTURAL MISTAKES IN THE LAST FRONT!!!” which racks up a hundred thousand views within a week. I watch for a bit out of curiosity, but I’m unimpressed more than I am insulted. It’s full of trivial stuff like “Chinese soldiers wouldn’t have eaten foods like mince pie for a holiday meal” (How would she know what they were eating, and when?) or ad hom details about naming conventions (“Ah Kay? Did she get this shit from a Hong Kong crime drama?”) that Athena herself wrote in. The comments are all shit like YAAAS KWEEN and OMG GO OFF KIMMY and LOLLLL THAT WHITE GIRL IS QUAKING. Kimberly later has the nerve to DM me on Instagram asking if I’d like to be a guest on her channel, and I take some vindictive pleasure in instructing her to contact me through my publicist, Emily, and then instructing Emily to ghost her.
Another online firebrand, a guy named Xiao Chen, puts out a Substack essay arguing that The Last Front should never have been published. I’m actually quite familiar with Xiao Chen’s brand—Athena had complained about him viciously and often. Xiao Chen had gone viral the previous year for a piece in Vox titled “Enough with Diaspora Fiction,” which argued essentially that no one in the current wave of Chinese American novelists was producing anything of value, because none of them had lived through things like the Tiananmen Square massacre or the Cultural Revolution, and that spoiled Bay Area kids who couldn’t even speak Mandarin and who thought that Asian identification boiled down to being annoyingly obsessed with bubble tea and BTS were diluting the radical force of the diaspora canon. I’ve seen him getting in vicious spats with other writers on Twitter; LEARN CHINESE, he would snap, or SHUT UP, BRAINWASHED WESTERN PUPPETS. His modus operandi seems to be ascribing everything wrong with a text to some armchair-diagnosed psychological problem with the writer; in my case, Xiao Chen thinks I wrote The Last Front because I am “one of the many white women, like those who write queer fan fiction of The Untamed, who not only have an unexamined fetish for feminine-looking Asian men, but who think Chinese history is something to cherry-pick from in search of intriguing and shiny nuggets, like nice Ming vases to set in the corner.”
Honestly, his vitriol makes me laugh. Some critical pieces are cold and condescending enough to wound, but this one is so emotional, so angry, that it only reveals Xiao Chen’s own insecurities and bottomless, inexplicable rage. I imagine him hunched over a laptop in his basement, snarling and spitting to an audience of none. I wonder what Xiao Chen would do if he ever saw me in person—punch me in the face, or utter some inane niceties and slink away. People like him are always braver online than they are in the flesh.
Jen: People like that just can’t stand to see women succeed.
Marnie: Misogynism at its worst. Also, what’s The Untamed?
There’s one scene, which occurs two hundred pages into the novel, that all the critics are obsessed with. Indeed, every negative review mentions it by at least the third paragraph. Annie Waters—a character I’d expanded from Athena’s draft, the seventeen-year-old daughter of YMCA missionaries—visits the laborers’ camp alone to hand out Bibles and Christmas biscuits. The men, who haven’t seen their wives or any women of their kind in months, understandably ogle over her. She’s blonde, slim, and pretty; of course they can’t get enough of her. One asks if he can kiss her on the cheek, and since it’s Christmastime, she bashfully permits it.
I thought the scene was touching. Here we have people divided by language and race, who are nonetheless able to share a tender moment in the middle of a war. The scene also fixed an earlier gripe Daniella had with the novel, which was that it centered almost entirely on men. The era of the macho war story is over, she’d written. We need to start elevating female perspectives.
Athena’s original draft didn’t include the kiss. In her version, Annie was a sheltered, fidgety girl who thought the laborers were dirty, frightening thugs. Athena’s Annie told the men a frigid “Merry Christmas” and left the biscuits at the edge of the barbed-wire enclosure, then skirted timidly away like the men were dogs that would break free of their leashes and maul her to death if given the chance.
It’s clear Athena was trying to point out all the racism the laborers suffered from people fighting on their own side. But there was already so much of that throughout the book. It was starting to feel heavy-handed, repetitive. Why not include a scene that showed the potential for interracial love, instead? Can’t we all get behind decrying antimiscegenation?
This is, apparently, the most racist artistic choice I could have made.
From Adele Sparks-Sato: “Song, rather than exploring the kind of real challenges posed against interracial romances between French women and Chinese laborers, decides instead to portray Chinese workers as animalistic creatures who cannot control their lust for the white woman.”
From Xiao Chen: Do all white women think we’re obsessed with fucking them??? Imagine the arrogance. Trust me, Juniper, you’re not that hot.