author he’s excited about—and then he makes his excuses. “Sorry to dip out, Junie, but I’d better go say hi to my UK counterpart before she leaves. She’s only in town for the weekend.” I shrug and wave. He walks off, and hopefully out of my life for good. THE FOLLOWING JANUARY, I GET MY FIRST ROYALTIES STATEMENT FOR The Last Front. I’ve earned out. This means that I’ve sold enough copies to cover my already sizable advance, and that from here on out I get to keep a percentage of all future sales. And sales, if this statement is anything to go by, are astounding. I’ve been wary of spending any of my advance money so far. I’ve read enough cautionary tales to know that advance money dries up fast, that there is no guarantee of earning out, or of securing another book deal approaching the amount of the first. But I treat myself this month. I buy a new laptop; finally, a MacBook Pro that doesn’t shriek and shut down whenever I try to open a Word file bigger than two hundred pages. I move to a nicer apartment—nothing quite as fancy as the Dupont place Athena had leased, but nice enough that anyone who visits will assumeI have inherited wealth. I go to IKEA, order whatever I want without looking at the prices, and pay the extra fees to have it all delivered and assembled by two very handsome college seniors I solicited on TaskRabbit. I let them flirt with me. I tip well. I get a liquor cabinet. I am now the sort of person who has a liquor cabinet. I write a check for the entirety of my remaining student debt, lick the envelope, and send it off to the Department of Education. No more Nelnet emails for the rest of my life, thank God. I get health insurance. I go to the dentist, and when it turns out I’ll have to fork over several thousand dollars to get all these undetected cavities drilled out, I pay the bill without blinking. I see a primary care physician, even though there’s nothing wrong with me, just for a physical, just becauseI can. I start buying nice whisky, even though I can’t taste whisky without thinking of Athena and those stupid old-fashioneds. I start shopping at Whole Foods. I become addicted to their jalapeño corn bread. I start getting my clothes at brand-name outlets instead of the thrift store. I throw out my cheap Etsy jewelry and stop wearing anything that doesn’t feature ethically, sustainably sourced gemstones.
When tax season rolls around, I ask my sister, Rory, who’s an accountant, to handle things. I send her my 1099s for this year; within minutes she responds, Jesus Christ, are you serious??? Hell yeah, I email her back. Told you writing would work out. I DO PAY THINGS FORWARD. I’M NOT LYING WHEN I SAYI WANT TO make a positive contribution to the Asian community. I make a check out to the Asian American Writers’ Collective for two thousand dollars, just as I’d promised, and I’ll keep making those yearly contributions so long as my royalties are this good. I graciously accept a request to serve as a mentor for Scribblers’ Fairy Godmothers, a program that pairs an underrepresented writer with a published writer who can coach them through the vicissitudes of the industry. I’m glad to be spreading my generosity. Athena never made efforts to send the ladder down to her fellow writers of color. If anything, she found them annoying. “My inbox keeps filling up with wannabe writers who think I’ll spend hours writing them advice letters just because we have the same vaguely ethnic background,” she’d complain contemptuously. “‘Hi Miss Liu, I’m a sophomore in high school, and as a fellow Asian American woman I admire you so much.’ Shut up. You’re not special; you’re a dime a dozen.” Athena seemed more than just minorly irritated that Asian American writers clustered admiringly around her. She seemed to actively despise them. She hated it whenever I brought up debut novels that were compared to hers in the press. She’d bitch about how they were unoriginal, too tryhard, too obviously catered to an ethnic niche in the marketplace. “Write something else!” she’d complain. “No one wants another feel-good immigrant story. Boohoo, did they think your lunch smelled bad? Did they make fun of your eyes? God, I’ve read it all before. There’s no originality.” Maybe it was Highlander Syndrome—I’ve read about that before, the way members of marginalized groups feel threatened if someone else like them starts finding success. I’ve experienced that, too—every timeI see a publishing announcement about a young girl hitting it big with her debut, I want to claw my eyes out. Maybe she was terrified someone was going to replace or surpass her. But I’m going to be better than Athena. I am a woman who helps other women.
I’m matched with a girl named Emmy Cho, who sends me an effusive email about how much she admires my books. Emmy is based out in San Francisco, so we do our first mentoring session over Zoom. She’s pretty in a fresh-faced, innocent way—like a cute bunny rabbit, like a defanged Athena, and I instinctively feel an urge to sweep her under my coat and protect her. She tells me about her current work in progress, a coming-of-age novel about a queer Korean American girl growing up in the Midwest in the nineties, based largely on her own experiences. “It’s a bit like that film The Half of It, if you’ve seen it?” She has this adorable habit of tucking her hair behind her ears every time she finishes a sentence. “I’m kind of worried, you know, that the industry isn’t that interested in this kind of story. Like, growing up, I didn’t see any books like that on shelves, and it’s more of a quiet, introspective literary novel instead of, like, a high-octane thriller, soI don’t know . . .” “I don’t think you have anything to worry about,” I assure her. “If anything, it’s easier now than ever to be Asian in the industry.” Her brows furrow. “Do you really mean that?” “Absolutely,” I say. “Diversity is what’s selling right now. Editors are hungry for marginalized voices. You’ll get plenty of opportunities for being different, Emmy. I mean, a queer Asian girl? That’s every checkbox on the list. They’ll be slobbering all over this manuscript.” Emmy laughs nervously. “Well, okay.” “Just write the best thing you can and put it out there,” I say. “You’ll be a hit, I promise.” We chat a little bit more about how her querying process has gone so far (lots of partial requests, but no solid offers yet) and about her feelings toward the manuscript (she’s confident in her narrative voice, but doesn’t know if she’s attempted too many overlapping timelines). As the hour draws to a close, Emmy clears her throat and says, “Um, if you don’t mind me asking, are you white?” My surprise must show on my face, because she immediately apologizes. “Sorry, I don’t know if that’s cool to say, I just, um, like, Song, that’s kind of ambiguous, soI just wanted to know.” “I am white,” I say, more frostily than I’d intended. What is she insinuating? That I can’t be a good mentor to her unless I’m Asian? “Song is my middle name. My mother gave it to me.”
“Okay,” Emmy says, and tucks her hair back behind her ears again. “Um, cool. I was just asking.”
Eight OF COURSE, I HAVE MY DETRACTORS. THE MORE POPULAR A BOOK becomes, the more popular it becomes to hate on said book, which is why revulsion for Rupi Kaur’s poetry has become a millennial personality trait. The majority of my reviews on Goodreads are five stars, but the one-stars are vitriolic. Uninspired colonizer trash, one reads. Another iteration of the white woman exploitation sob story formula: copy, paste, change the names, and voila, bestseller, reads another. And a third, which seems way too personal to be objective: What a stuck-up, obnoxious bitch. Brags too much about being a Yalie. I got this during a Kindle sale, and you can bet I made sure to get every one of the two hundred and ninety-nine cents I spent back. The first timeI get tagged in a bad review on Twitter (All the hype led me wrong, won’t be reading anything more from this author), I text Marnie Kimball and Jen Walker, my new friends from the BookCon after-party. They’d given me their numbers and insisted that I reach out if I was ever having a hard time navigating the industry. Since then our group chat, cheekily named “Eden’s Angels,” has been my go-to source of support and industry gossip. How do you get over rude shit people say about you online? I ask. This is so demoralizing. It’s like they have a personal vendetta. LikeI, personally, once kicked their dog or something. Rule one: Do Not Read Reviews. Marnie does that weird thing older women do where she uses extra spaces and capitalizations, though I can never tell if they’re intentional or typos. If they had anything good to say, they would have written their own books. They are Petty Little People. Let them scream in their own echo chambers, writes Jen. Performing outrage is a bonding activity for them. Gives them serotonin hits, literally, there’s research on this. Don’t
let it get to you. They’re sheep. That’s good advice, if onlyI 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 twelveminute 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 becauseI 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 choiceI 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. “For my next video,” drawls Kimberly Deng, “I will be doing an Annie Waters makeup tutorial, featuring a turmeric face mask and white tears.” The whole conversation sparks the creation of the “Annie Waters meme,” which involves pictures of bland and mediocre-looking white women paired with the caption, taken from the book, “She was a lithe young thing, with hair the color of the rising sun and eyes like the ocean, and the men could not keep their eyes off her as she floated past.” Quite a lot of these memes employ the least flattering photographs of me my haters can find online. I want to point out how outrageously cruel and sexist this is, but the Eden’s Angels assure me that silence is my best defense. When you let trolls know they’ve hurt you, they win, says Jen. You can’t let them think they’re getting to you. SinceI can’t issue any takedowns in person, I often rehearse pretend arguments in the shower. “Actually,” I tell my shampoo bottle, “just because Chinese people were being discriminated against doesn’t mean that they couldn’t be racist as well. And actually, it’s well documented that the Chinese laborers did not get along with Arabs and Moroccans—according to one of my sources, the Chinese would call them ‘black devils.’ Interethnic conflicts are a thing, you know.” In response to accusations that I glorified Western missionaries, I would say, “It’s just as essentialist to claim broadly that not a single Chinese soldier found comfort in Christianity. The missionaries were often discriminatory and patronizing, yes, but we know from reports and memoirs that there were true converts, and it seems racist in turn to argue that conversion was impossible just because they were Chinese.” And in response to Kimberly Deng’s idiotic clickbait, I would say, “Actually, it does fucking make sense that there are scenes set in Canada, because the laborers were first shipped to Canada, and then to France. You could have learned that from Wikipedia.”
I bask in imagining my critics’ crestfallen faces as they realize that simply being Asian doesn’t make them historical experts, that consanguinity doesn’t translate into unique epistemological insight, that their exclusive cultural snobbishness and authenticity testing are only a form of gatekeeping, and that when it all comes down to it, they haven’t a fucking clue what they’re talking about. I’ve gotten so good at having these arguments in my head that I am, in fact, extremely well prepared when one of my detractors confronts me in person. That night, I’m at a historical fiction speaker series hosted by an indie bookstore in Cambridge. The audience has been polite so far, if a little challenging with their questions. It’s mostly Harvard and MIT students, and I remember well from my time at Yale that undergraduates at elite universities always think they know more than they do, and that they consider it their greatest achievement to take down a public intellectual. So far I’ve fielded off questions about my name change (“As I’ve said before, I chose to write under my middle name to signify a fresh start”), my research process (I have a standard bibliography that I rattle off now), and my engagement with the Chinese American community (here, I trot out the Athena Liu Scholarship I fund at the Asian American Writers’ Collective’s summer workshop). Then a girl in the front row takes the mic. I know before she opens her mouth that this will go badly. She’s dressed like a right-wing meme of a social justice warrior—dyed purple hair buzzed into an undercut; floppy beanie, knit arm warmers, and a dozen pins and badges on her vest proclaiming her loyalty to BLM, BDS, and AOC. (Look, we’re all liberals here. But come on.) She’s got this breathless, wild-eyed look on her face, like she’s been waiting her entire life for this chance to take me down. “Hi,” she says, and her voice wavers for a moment. She’s not used to picking fights in front of a live audience. “I’m Chinese American, and when I read The Last Front, I thought . . . I mean, I found a lot of deeply painful histories. And I wanted to ask you, why do you think it’s okay for a white author—I mean, an author who isn’t Chinese—to write, and profit from, this kind of story? Why do you think you’re the right person to tell it?” She lowers the mic. Her cheeks are flushed. She’s gotten a big rush from this. No doubt she thinks that this is some grand public callout, that this is the first time I’ve ever heard this objection. No doubt everyone’s riveted, glancing between her and me as if expecting us to go to blows.