I know what she’s thinking. I put up with a lot of bullying in middle school, back when our home life was going off the rails. I withdrew into books then. I spent all my waking hours in fantasy worlds, which I guess made me come off as nonverbal and antisocial. I’d show up at school carrying chunky volumes of Lord of the Rings or The Spiderwick Chronicles, and I’d hunch over them all day, oblivious to everything around me.
The other kids didn’t like that. Some of my classmates made a game of making faces behind me while I was reading to see if I’d notice. Some spread the rumor that I didn’t know how to talk. Loony Junie, they’d call me, as if “loony” weren’t a word we left back in the nineties.
“No, it’s not like that; it’s more like . . . creepy internet people,” I say. I don’t think Rory will understand the concept of trolling. “It’s just, like, they think I’m a famous writer now, so they can say whatever shit they want to me. Death threats and stuff. I was just asking Tom to help me find out who’s doing it, or at least, like, vaguely where they’re located.”
Rory looks to her husband. “You can do that, right? This sounds serious.”
Tom sighs, hapless. “Again, I can’t get IP addresses from Twitter—”
“I’ll get you the IP address,” I say. “I just need you to look it up for me.”
Between my pleading face and Rory’s expectant glare, I imagine Tom doesn’t feel like he has a choice.
“Sure.” He reaches for another beer. “Happy to help out.”
He doesn’t ask any more questions. Tom, bless him, takes everything at face value. So does Rory. I feel a deep pang of affection for them right then. There’s no guile in this family; just open, loving trust, and the best corn bread with kale chili I’ve ever tasted.
WHEN I GET HOME THAT NIGHT, I SETTLE DOWN AT MY DESK TO TEACH myself some basic web design.
It’s not too difficult. I participated in a four-week HTML boot camp in undergrad, back when I had the half-baked idea that if I couldn’t make it as a writer then at least I’d have a steady income as a programmer, until I realized that the programming market is also quickly becoming too saturated for anyone who isn’t a natural talent. I couldn’t get a job with the skills I retained, but I do know enough to throw together a half-decent website that doesn’t immediately appear like a Russian hacker’s trap.
The design of the site isn’t too important—it’s supposed to look like a janky homegrown blog. I spend about fifteen minutes copying, pasting, and formatting some of the more vicious “proof” of my alleged plagiarism onto the homepage. I also make sure to keep this website hidden from any SEO searches—I don’t want random users Googling the scandal to stumble on my website.
Finally I make my own fake Twitter account. No profile picture, no header. Just the handle @LazarusAthena—that’ll catch the eye.
When that’s all set up, I send a DM to the @AthenaLiusGhost account:
Hey. I don’t know who you are, but thank you for doing all this work to expose June Hayward. I have some additional proof documented here, if you’re interested.
Then I paste the link to my honey trap.
THE @ATHENALIUSGHOST ACCOUNT DOESN’T RESPOND IMMEDIATELY. I lie in bed for ten minutes or so, constantly refreshing my Twitter app, but it looks like @AthenaLiusGhost isn’t even online. In the meantime, on my real account, I get three new DMs from strangers encouraging me to kill myself, so I stop checking my messages for the time being.
Still, I can’t help but browse my timeline to check on the rest of the conversation. The flurry of accusations has died down, though some prominent bloggers are still calling for my head. (Why hasn’t @EdenPress responded to these allegations yet? demands Adele Sparks-Sato. This is a terrible look for your imprint, @DaniellaWoodhouse. Says a lot about how much you care about marginalized voices.)
The discourse has taken an unpredicted turn, though: rumors have begun swirling about Athena, too. From what I can tell, it started with a long thread by another new, anonymous account with the handle @NoHeroesNoGods. June Song’s actions are indeed sickening, if true, reads their first tweet. But we shouldn’t act as if Athena Liu was the paragon of good Asian American rep. Thread. [1/?]
We in the Chinese American community have been uncomfortable with the way she’s chosen to write about racialization and Chinese history for years. [2/?]
Her treatment of the Kuomintang, for instance, is a stunning example of Western imperialist brainwashing. She frames the Nationalists as the obvious choice for Chinese democratization, but ignores the atrocities carried out by the KMT after their move to Taiwan. What would Taiwanese aboriginals say to these claims? [3/?]
Moreover, in her short story “My Father’s Escape,” Athena refers to the dissidents from Tiananmen Square as heroes. Many of these same dissidents, however, became fervent Trump supporters when they escaped to the West. [4/?]
Does Athena Liu’s support of democracy extend only to PRC bashing? What’s more, many of Athena’s statements about her father’s experiences are inconsistent. Her representation of her entire family history is inconsistent, for that matter. [5/?]
And on and on for sixteen tweets, culminating in a linked Google Doc with more evidence of Athena’s crimes. Athena, @NoHeroesNoGods concludes, was out of touch with most radical Asian diaspora movements. Athena was not a real Marxist; she was a champagne socialist at best. Athena lied about her family history to make it seem more tragic than it was—for convenience, for claims to authenticity, for attention. Athena, like Maxine Hong Kingston, always presented the worst of Chinese history and culture to milk sympathy from her white audience. Athena was a race traitor.
Most people on Twitter have no fucking clue what’s going on, because no one is that deep into Chinese history or politics, nor have they read Athena’s work closely enough to make a smart judgment. But what they see, and what they latch on to, is “Athena Liu = Problematic.”
Then the second wave of the shitstorm starts, this time with Athena at the center. Most of the accounts that participate so clearly do not care about the truth. They’re here for the entertainment. These people love to have a target, and they’ll tear apart anything you put in front of them.
What a piece of shit!!!
I always knew she was fake.
Glad this bitch has finally been exposed. I’ve been iffy on Athena for years.
A TikTok of someone ripping all the pages out of Athena’s books and throwing them on a bonfire goes viral. (This sparks another debate about Nazis and book burning, but I won’t drag you down that corner of the internet.) Kimberly Deng, the YouTuber at UCLA, posts an hour-long video dissecting “problematic” lines in each one of Athena’s books. (Athena once wrote about a love interest’s “almond-shaped eyes,” which buys into Western standards of beauty and the objectification of Asian women.)
There’s something disturbing, almost gleeful, about the way they rip into her. It’s like they’ve been waiting for this opportunity all along, like they’ve been preparing these barbs for years. I’m not surprised, to be honest. Athena is such a perfect target. She was too pretty, too successful, too suspiciously clean to have nothing on her ledger. She had it coming for her, and I’m sure some blowback like this would have happened sooner or later, even if she hadn’t choked to death on a pandan pancake.
Marnie: Wow, are you guys seeing this stuff about Athena Liu?
Jen: Yeah, wild . . . sorry, what’s a Han supremacist?
Marnie: I think like a white supremacist, but for Chinese ethnic groups. I mean, her lack of inclusion of other Chinese minorities in her work is CONSPICUOUS.
Jen: I didn’t know you liked her books
Marnie: Oh I only read one. Lol. Couldn’t get past the first page. Very try-hard litfic, if you know what I mean.