My tweet racks up thirty thousand likes in one day. It’s the most attention I’ve ever gotten on Twitter, much of it from literary luminaries and internet personalities with verified checkmarks. It all makes me strangely excited, watching my follower count tick up by the second. But then that makes me feel gross, the same way I feel after masturbating when I only started out of boredom, so then I block Twitter on all my devices (I’m taking a hiatus for my mental health, but thank you everyone for your concern) and vow not to log back in until at least a week has passed.
I ATTEND ATHENA’S FUNERAL, WHERE ATHENA’S MOTHER HAS INVITED me to speak. She called me a few days after the accident, and I nearly dropped the phone when she told me who she was; I had this sudden fear that she would interrogate me, or accuse me of killing her daughter—but instead she kept apologizing, as if Athena had been very rude to die in my presence.
The funeral is at a Korean church out in Rockville, which is strange to me because I thought Athena was Chinese, but whatever. I’m struck by how few people present are my age. It’s mostly old Asian people, probably friends of her mother. Not a single writer I recognize, nor anyone from college. Though maybe this funeral is just a community affair—probably Athena’s actual acquaintances went to the virtual service that the Asian American Writers’ Collective set up.
It’s closed casket, thank God.
A lot of the eulogies are in Chinese, so I sit there awkwardly, looking around for cues on when to laugh or shake my head and cry. When it’s my turn, Athena’s mother introduces me as one of her daughter’s closest friends.
“Junie was there the night my Athena died,” said Mrs. Liu. “She did her best to save her.”
That’s all it takes for my tears to start flowing. But that’s a good thing, says an awful, cynical voice in my mind. Crying makes my grief look genuine. It deflects from the fact that I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing here.
“Athena was dazzling,” I say, and I do mean it. “She was larger than life. Untouchable. Looking at her was like looking at the sun. She was so brilliant that it hurt to stare for too long.”
I suffer through half an hour of the wake before I make up an excuse to leave—I can only take so much pungent Chinese food and old people who can’t or won’t speak in English. Mrs. Liu presses against me, sniffling, as I say my goodbyes. She makes me promise to keep in touch, to let her know how I’m doing. Her tear-smudged mascara leaves clumpy stains on my velvet blouse that won’t come out, even after half a dozen washes, so eventually I throw the whole outfit away altogether.
I CANCEL MY TUTORING SESSIONS FOR THE REST OF THE MONTH. (I work part-time at the Veritas College Institute, coaching the SAT test and ghostwriting common app essays, which is the default landing job for every Ivy League graduate without better prospects.) My boss is annoyed, and the parents who booked me are understandably pissed, but I cannot sit in a windowless room and go over multiple-choice reading comprehension answers with gum-chewing, braces-wearing brats right now. I simply cannot. “Last week I watched a friend thrash around on the ground until she died,” I snap when a student’s mother calls me to complain. “So I think I can take some bereavement leave, all right?”
I don’t go out those next few weeks. I stay in my apartment, wearing pajamas all day. I order Chipotle at least a dozen times. I watch old episodes of The Office until I can quote them word for word, just for something to calm my mind.
I also read.
Athena was right to be excited. The Last Front, simply put, is a masterpiece.
I have to tunnel down a Wikipedia rabbit hole for a bit to situate myself. The novel is about the unsung contributions and experiences of the Chinese Labour Corps, the 140,000 Chinese workers who were recruited by the British Army and sent to the Allied Front during World War I. Many were killed by bombs, accidents, and diseases. Most were mistreated upon arrival in France, cheated out of their wages, assigned to dirty and cramped living quarters, denied interpreters, and attacked by other laborers. Many never made it back home.
It’s a running joke that every Serious Author at some point does a grand and ambitious war novel, and I suppose this one is Athena’s. She has the confidence, the understated and lyrical prose necessary to tell such a heavy story without coming across as pompous, juvenile, or sanctimonious. Most grand war epics by young writers tend to read like mere imitations of grand war epics; their authors come off as toddlers riding toy horses. But Athena’s war epic sounds like an echo from the battlefield. It rings true.
It’s clear what she meant when she called this an evolution in her craft. So far her novels had presented linear narratives, all told in the past tense from the third person perspective of a singular protagonist. But here Athena does something similar to what Christopher Nolan does in the movie Dunkirk: instead of following one particular story, she layers disparate narratives and perspectives together to form a moving mosaic, a crowd crying out in unison. It’s cinematic in effect; you can almost see it in your head, documentary style: a multiplicity of voices unburying the past.
A story with no proper protagonist shouldn’t be this compelling. But Athena’s sentences are so engaging, I keep getting lost in the story, reading ahead instead of transcribing it to my laptop. It’s a love story disguised as a war story, and the details are so shockingly vivid, so particular, it’s hard to believe it’s not a memoir, that she didn’t simply transcribe the words of ghosts speaking in her ear. I understand now why this took so very long to write—the painstaking research bleeds through in every paragraph, from the standard-issue fur-lined hats to the enamel mugs the laborers used to drink their watered-down tea.
She has this sorcerous ability to keep your eyes riveted to the page. I have to know what happens to A Geng, the spindly student translator, and Xiao Li, the unwanted seventh son. I’m in tears at the end, when I find out that Liu Dong never made it back home to his waiting bride.
But it needs work. It’s far from a first draft—it’s not even a proper “draft,” really; it’s more like an amalgamation of startlingly beautiful sentences, bluntly stated themes, and the occasional “[and then they travel - complete later].” But she’s laid out enough breadcrumbs that I can follow the trail. I see where it’s all going, and it’s gorgeous. It’s simply, breathtakingly gorgeous.
So gorgeous I can’t help but give finishing it a try.
It’s just a lark at first. A writing exercise. I wasn’t rewriting the manuscript so much as seeing if I could fill in the blanks; if I had enough technical knowhow to shade, fine-tune, and extrapolate until the picture was complete. I was only going to play around with one of the middle chapters—one that had so many unfinished scenes that you could only tell what it was trying to say if you were intimately acquainted with the writing, and the writer.
But then I just kept going. I couldn’t stop. They say that editing a bad draft is far easier than composing on a blank page, and that’s true—I feel so confident in my writing just then. I keep finding turns of phrases that suit the text far better than Athena’s throwaway descriptions. I spot where the pacing sags, and I mercilessly cut out the meandering filler. I draw out the plot’s through line like a clear, powerful note. I tidy up; I trim and decorate; I make the text sing.
I know you won’t believe me, but there was never a moment when I thought to myself, I’m going to take this and make it mine. It’s not like I sat down and hatched up some evil plan to profit off my dead friend’s work. No, seriously—it felt natural, like this was my calling, like it was divinely ordained. Once I got started, it felt like it was the most obvious thing in the world that I should complete, then polish Athena’s story.
And then—who knows? Maybe I could get it published for her, too.