Marnie: But here are some threads that break it down.
Someone threads a story eerily similar to my memory of Athena at the American History Museum: I went to an event where she interviewed Korean War vets and recorded everything they said in a little dictaphone. Her story “Parasails Over Choson” came out six months later. It’s been praised as one of the more faithful depictions of POWs in Korea, but it’s always sat wrong with me. It felt like she was pulling the words straight from the veterans’ mouths, putting them on paper, and passing them off as her own. There was no credit, no acknowledgment. She made it sound like she’d come up with it all by herself. I’ve kept this to myself for years because I didn’t want to come off as attacking another Asian writer. But if we’re talking about literary legacies, I think this is important to bring up.
I’ll confess, I’m enjoying this a bit. It feels good to know that someone out there also knows as well as I do that Athena was a thief.
Though it doesn’t matter what the truth is. No one spreading these rumors cares about fact-checking or due diligence. They’ll use phrases like “I think it’s important to know” and “I just found out” and “sharing this so my followers are aware,” but deep down they’re all so fucking delighted, gorging themselves on this hot gossip, thrilled at the chance to take Athena Liu down. She was mortal after all, they’re thinking. She was just like us. And in destroying her, we create an audience; we create moral authority for ourselves.
In a perverse way, this is very good for me. The more Athena gets dragged into the mud, the more confusing this whole thing seems, which undercuts the righteous authority of my detractors. Two wrongs don’t make a right, obviously, but the internet is very bad at recognizing this. Now that the story’s been complicated, it’s not so satisfying to lambast me for stealing from a lovely, innocent victim. Now Athena is a pretentious snob, a maybe-racist (no one can really make up their minds on that one), a definite Han Chinese supremacist, and a thief in her own right for her representations of Korean and Vietnamese characters. Athena is the liar, the hypocrite. Athena Liu Is Posthumously Canceled.
I don’t bring it up with Brett or Daniella. I’m over it; we all know how these things end up. I saw this same cycle happen once with a debut writer in her twenties who accused a much older and established writer of grooming and creeping on her, only for others to accuse her of grooming and creeping on even younger writers in return. Still today no one knows the truth, but she hasn’t gotten another book deal in years. Such is the nature of a Twitter dustup. Allegations get flung left and right, everyone’s reputations are torn down, and when the dust clears, everything remains exactly as it was.
I GET THE DM I WAS WAITING FOR THAT EVENING.
Thanks, says @AthenaLiusGhost. Have linked to most of that stuff already, though. If you come up with any new proof please let me know. Let’s get justice for Athena.
I dash over to my desk and open WordPress on my laptop. Just as I’d hoped, my website has received its first, and only, visitor. I copy the nine-digit IP address and text it to Tom. Here you go. Any shred of information would be amazing.
I have a few theories on who the account is. Adele Sparks-Sato, maybe. Lily Wu and Kimberly Deng are contenders. Or Diana Qiu, that deranged visual artist. Though I’m not sure what I’d do if they were the culprits—Adele and Diana are based in NYC, and Lily in Boston, and an IP address from either would be circumstantial at best.
Tom texts me back a few hours later.
You’re in luck. Tried a couple of different IP geolocation services, and they all spit out the same city. You don’t know anyone in Fairfax, do you?
Sorry . . . I’m guessing that’s a little close for comfort. Probably you should go to the police if you think they might try anything serious?
Also, sorry I can’t be more specific.
You can usually get within a couple of miles, but you’d need to do some heavy duty hacking to pin down a physical address.
But I don’t need a physical address. I know exactly who this is. There’s only one person Athena and I both know who lives in Fairfax, and I wouldn’t put this past him at all.
Heart hammering, I pull up Twitter and search “Geoffrey Carlino” to see what Athena’s ex-boyfriend has been up to lately.
Fourteen
AH, GEOFF.
Where does one even start with Geoff?
Athena and I weren’t close when they started dating. I was still in NYC, struggling through my underpaid, understimulating Teach for America year, but I know as well as anyone the story of their disastrous implosion, a messy affair that played out on Twitter and Instagram for the entire world to see. From what I understand, Geoff and Athena met at a writers’ residency in Oregon, back when both were young, up-and-coming hotshots. She was months away from the launch of her first novel; he was fresh off signing his first deal with a small but prestigious genre publishing house. Their coupling was foreordained; they were both hot and for the most part straight, both prodigies on the verge of taking the publishing world by storm. I suppose Geoff’s study-abroad year in Beijing was part of the attraction (though after they broke up, Athena would complain to me how “Geoff’s Chinese name was Jie Fu, and he wanted me to call him that when we were alone, and isn’t that just so fucking weird? Like, his name is fucking Geoff”).
After the residency, Athena moved into Geoff’s parents’ second house in Fairfax. I know this because for the next six months, both their Instagram feeds constantly churned out sickeningly cute photos of the two of them: close-ups with their bright smiles pressed side to side, skin clear and freckles radiant; black-and-white shots taken at coffee shops, captioned with things like writer at work; and full body pics of them hiking up and down the East Coast, their tall, lithe forms dripping with sweat. There was a time it seemed that they would join the ranks of famous literary couples like Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Ana?s Nin and Henry Miller, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald if Zelda had published more.
But Geoff . . . How does one put this kindly? Geoff simply isn’t that talented. We might even compare Geoff’s publication history to mine. He started out strong with dozens of award-winning publications in prestigious short-story magazines. But his first novel, a self-proclaimed “genre-bending thriller” about “race-hopping” androids in a near-future society, failed to make the expected splash. A reviewer at Locus called it “a confused and ultimately misguided, possibly malicious, exploration of postraciality and racial fluidity.” My debut novel didn’t sell very well, but at least no reviewers ever said that I should “keep the ill-considered and shallow philosophizing to undergraduate bars and off the page where grown adults can see.”