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 because I 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 because I agree with them, but because I 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, 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 ill-intentioned. 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.