Parker I stayed at Selina’s right through the weekend, unable to make myself leave. Every time I considered going back to my apartment, this urgent, irrational feeling stopped me, as if the instant I walked out the door, what was happening between us would collapse, and she would snap out of some hypnotic trance and remember that she didn’t need me, maybe didn’t even want me the way she seemed to want me. But she did seem to want me. On her bathroom sink, and against the wall, and tangled in the bedsheets that smelled like her grapefruit body wash, she seemed to want me. “I can go, if you need,” I said, Saturday night, lying strewn across the bed. She’d reappeared in the illuminated doorway wearing a nightrobe of emerald satin, her hair tousled. “Do you want to go?” she asked, pausing in the doorframe. “No.” I felt so free, saying even something as simple as yes or no to her, undefended, unjustified. She came to the bedside, knelt down, and kissed me. “Then stay,” she said. Part of me still couldn’t believe any of this. The idea that Selina Chan looked at me like I fascinated her. The sheer fact of waking up to her head upon my shoulder, and the way I’d started to see her laugh, always turning away to do it, her eyes sometimes straying back to me. The days felt bizarre and giddy, cut with too-bright sun. She took me to her favorite dive bar, where a steel-eyed Russian bartender scanned me in
obvious judgment, and to her local bookstore, owned by a graying, motionless man who looked as though he hadn’t left the desk in fifty years, and who, when Selina asked if he had a copy of Can Xue’s Frontier, grunted, “Shelf 113,” immediately, without checking. We bought coffee from a hole-in-the-wall whose brick interior hung dozens of portraits of Victorian women, painted over to imagine them holding steaming mugs. Selina and I cooked in between, simple, hearty meals with whatever she had in her pantry, one of us sitting on the counter while the other stirred at the burner. We walked fifty minutes to the riverfront on Sunday, a bitterly cold afternoon we spent shouldering between the intermittent slaps of wind off the water. When we got back to her place, we stripped off our freezing coats and flung them in no direction and burrowed back into her bed, making each other laugh and jerk with our icy fingers against each other’s backs and stomachs. “Parker, stop,” she gasped, her eyes tearing, as I touched the back of her neck. “That’s awful.” She tried to retaliate, but her hand was growing warm against my chest, and I pushed closer to her, gliding my other hand up the smooth curve of her back, hoping her thoughts were steadily turning the way mine had been, nonstop, for two days. And soon enough her laugh faded, her eyes dipped to my mouth, and she pushed me onto my back and I grappled her on top of me, hungry for the sweet slip of her lip balm, and time slid out from under me again. Ok where are you, Arthur texted me several hours later. Sorry, I said, I met someone. Bro who?? A bank robber in charge of a hostage situation?? Lol, I said, I’ll explain later. That night, Selina warned me her alarm would go off at seven on the dot, but at two in the morning we were still whispering. I couldn’t help it. I wanted another day of this, and another after that. As the night de epened, I began to think exactly how much more I wanted; how, if Selina had touched me in that unexpectedly gentle way and said, Let’s go somewhere, I would
have canceled my launch event, ignored everything Coronation sent my way, and walked onto a plane with her. But I didn’t want to crowd her. I had this feeling as though I’d held out my hand and a bird had landed there in my palm, and if I tried to bring it too close to myself, it would realize what I was and startle, flying off for good. I woke up to her appalling radar alarm at seven the next morning. It was so awful, I started laughing, bleary-eyed, into the pillow. “Jesus Christ,” I said, “is there not, like, a birdsong or string instruments option?” Selina, already brushing her hair at the side of the bed, gave me an amused look over her shoulder. “I assume you live a life completely without alarms?” “Y ep.” I stretched out in her bed and folded my hands behind my head. I liked the way her eyes played over my arms when I did that. “I wake up with the sunrise, most of the time.” “Of course you do. Parker Navarro, at one with nature.” Selina moved to her dresser and snapped on one of her lace bras. “And today?” “I should probably go home. Maybe go to the gym.” She zipped up a crisp sheath dress. “What are you going to tell Arthur?” I stood, stretching. “What makes you think I won’t tell him the truth?” “A hunch.” She approached and gave me a lingering kiss. “I know you like a well-k ept secret.” I caught her before she could st ep away, held her beautiful face in my hands, lowered my mouth to hers again. “Are you going to tell Jacob and Cassie?” “We’ll see. They’re traveling to Thailand in a couple of weeks, so maybe I shouldn’t distract them ... Also, they’ll be insufferable about
it.” “Did they give you a hard time about New Year’s?” “Of course. I k ept telling Cassie how much you hated me and that she was making something out of nothing.” I ran my hands down over her waist and felt an unwelcome quiver in my chest. I had hated her. The pain and anger I’d felt as recently as a few weeks ago, rereading her reviews, had been real. Some unsteady part of me wanted to ask if she still felt that about me or my writing—if some part of her still thought I was contemptible. “What?” she said, her fingers st epping up the back of my neck and tangling in my hair. She’d pressed her hips forward into mine at my touch, and a hit of arousal confused my thoughts. “I don’t think you have time for what I’m thinking,” I said, squaring my hips against hers, pressing her gently against the wall. “I could be late for work for once in my life.” “What? Who are you?” I said, but instead of answering, she took my earlobe between her teeth, and I melted down toward her, drawing her into me, the cotton of her dress whispering over my chest. When she left for work, I rode the subway back home. My apartment felt different somehow when I st epped inside, its colors dim, its air quiet. But my mind felt clear. I settled down to work on the sofa and wrote carefully for unbroken hours, feeling lucid and exacting, uncompromising. When Arthur came back from work that evening, he threw his hat at my face. “Finally,” he said. “I was this close to calling the cops. Who’s this girl?” “You’ll meet her soon,” I said, spitting out wool. He flung his scarf at me too. “Bro, come on. Do I know her? Is it bookstore girl? One of your San Francisco friends?”
“You don’t know her.” Arthur rolled his eyes and grabbed his hat and scarf out of the air when I threw them back. “Fine. I hope she’s better than Kate.” “Your faith in me is overwhelming. What’d you do this weekend?” “Threw a massive rager. Reduced this place to dust and rebuilt it with these hands.” He shucked off his gloves and waved his hands at me. “So ... you phone banked, went on a bad Tinder date, and binged another season of Severance?” “Fuck off,” he said. Then, grudgingly: “Two out of three.” I grinned and keyed in a shortcut on my laptop. Arthur nodded to the computer as he picked through our snack cabinet. “How’s the writing?” “Good,” I said. “I’m going slow. It feels better.” “New book? Short story?” “New book.” He bobbed his head. “I was surprised you liked that short so much,” I said. “The one about Selina Chan.” Arthur’s eyes strayed back to me, and I wondered if something in my voice had given me away, if I couldn’t even say her name anymore without revealing myself. “It was good,” he said. “Like, I don’t know enough to say what the difference was, but it did feel different from your books.” “Better than my books, you mean.” “I liked your books. But—yeah. Maybe your books feel like they’re trying to prove something, and that story felt like it was just saying something.” I began to smile. “What?” he said. “Nothing.” I shook my head, looked back at my laptop. “I guess that’s writing for you. Spending your whole life learning how to say something.” My phone buzzed, and I grabbed for it, knocking it off the table. “Wow,” said Arthur. “Whoever this woman is, she really did a number on you.”
I laughed. “You have no idea.” I held out two more days before going back to her apartment. I barely made it through the door before needing to kiss her, needing to feel her hands on me again. Another week and a half lurched by like this, days of self- imposed d eprivation broken up by nights together. We went out dancing that Saturday night, somewhere so loud and full and young that we felt invisible. We read a new book from a writer we both liked and texted each other highlighted quotes, commentary attached. I’ve been going back to this sentence all day. The way this rhymes with the sound of the creek in chapter four? Unreal? And then, somehow, it was the week before the High and Dry launch. My City interview with Selina went live on Thursday morning, and after she got off work that afternoon, we holed up in her bedroom and looked at the reactions online together. I sat at her desk, socked feet up on the radiator, while she lounged on her bed. According to the internet, I was a sellout and Selina was a bitch. I was such a good sport, and Selina was so funny. I was insufferably pretentious, and Selina was also insufferably pretentious. It was strange to watch them at it, painting new details onto caricatures that neither of us believed in anymore. “Oh, look,” said Selina, angling her laptop toward me. “This person accused you of sle eping with the enemy.” “For real?” “I think they were being figurative.” “If only they knew.” A beat of charged silence. People would, of course, know at some point. Wouldn’t they? “Okay,” said Selina, closing her social media tabs. “I think that’s enough for me.”
Still looking at her screen, I caught sight of a half-drafted email. “Sorry,” I said, glancing back to my own computer on the desk. “Not spying.” “Aren’t you? Isn’t that the point of sle eping with the enemy?” “Good point. I think my mission got sidetracked somewhere.” “It’s to my parents,” she said, lifting the laptop closer to me. My smile fading, I hunched down toward the bed to read. Hi Dad, I “Not my best work,” she said. “Hey. It’ll come.” I hesitated. “Are you still trying to defend your career to them?” “Apparently, which is ridiculous after this long. I can’t think of a defense that could change anything.” Selina snapped the laptop shut. “For years I’ve felt like they’re just waiting for my career to collapse, so that when it all disappears on me, everything they said will be vindicated.” Frown lines curved down the middle of her forehead. “I hate being locked in this open-ended question of who’s going to wind up right or wrong. This is my life.” “What career did they want you to have?” “I was prelaw before I switched to an English major. They loved that idea.” She gave me a furtive glance from under her eyelashes. “You’re always solving things. For your family. What would you do?” “I don’t know if I solve things. Smooth them over, maybe.” I paused. “What are your parents like? Their personalities, I mean?” She drew a pillow into her lap. “They’re very risk-averse people. They’re always thinking about the future. My dad’s a n ephrologist, so they’re pretty well-off, but when I was a kid, we lived in a little rowhouse and didn’t go out to eat and only bought new clothes once in a blue moon. I know that mindset is where they’re coming from. And obviously I would also love a financial cushion and a safety net. But—” She smoothed a ripple in her silk robe against her thighs.
“This is probably ungenerous, but sometimes it seems to me like their entire life is a contingency plan.” “I don’t know,” I said quietly. “Considering what they put you through in school, I think it’s more than generous that you’re still trying to see this from their perspective. I wish they’d try to see more of yours.” Selina’s brow relaxed. She rose and, standing behind the desk chair, tucked her chin into the crook of my neck. “Thank you,” she murmured. “You’ll figure out what to say.” “Hope so.” She kissed the side of my neck, then looked unabashedly at my laptop. “The new book?” I fought the instinct to turn off my screen. Between what I’d transcribed from my journal and what I’d drafted into the Word doc, I had about twenty pages, which felt very vulnerable just then. “Yeah.” “May I read it?” I scrolled back up to the top of the document, considering. “I think so. It’s readable through page ten or so.” I stood, kissed her. “I’m going to make some tea. I’ll bring you some.” “Thank you,” she said, but she was already reading, already somewhere else. I watched the kettle come to a boil, part of me still in the bedroom with her. Mugs in hand, I returned to the bedroom doorway and watched her, seated at the desk with her head bowed over my laptop, meeting my miniaturist and my celebrity, focus making her face taut. The image I’d failed for four years to imagine. Eventually she looked up at me. “What do you think?” I asked, and the feeling of vulnerability intensified, as though I were standing naked in front of someone in plate armor. What if Selina hated this, too? What if she hated everything I ever wrote? She wouldn’t lie to
me. How could I live with that? I sipped from my mug and burned my mouth and said, trying to sound casual, “At this point I don’t know why I care.” “Of course you know why. You’re a brilliant person. You want to make brilliant work that touches people.” She arched one brow. “And for some reason, you seem to care about my opinion, specifically.” “Guilty.” The words gave me enough strength to approach her, to set the mugs on her desk. “So?” A smile touched her lips. “I like these pages, Parker.” “You do?” “Yes. I think it’s a really deft, restrained opening.” She rested her fingertips on my wrist. “It seems like you know what you want to say.” “Yeah,” I said, touching her cheek. “Yeah, I do.” I went out with my friends from San Francisco on Friday night, and Selina told me she’d be asle ep by the time we finished—Your youthful thirty-two- year-old energy, it’s too much for an ancient hag like me—and so I crawled into my own bed at the end of the night, missing her. I woke up on Saturday to my door swinging gently open, the morning light dimmed by my shades, and Arthur’s silhouette crossing from the threshold to the end of my bed. “Hey,” I said sle epily. “What’s going on? You all right?” “Hey.” I sat up and put on my glasses, and Arthur’s features clarified. He looked serious. “Look, Parker, something’s happening online. I want you to ... to kind of brace yourself. All right?” The overfamiliar feeling began in my stomach, the spiraling churn, the throb of my pulse. Arthur typed something into his phone. “There’s this article. The guy says he interviewed you?”
“Wait, the—the guy from Daly City? The Bay Now profile?” “Yeah.” “But I never heard from him. I just figured they killed the piece.” I reached for the phone. “He seemed nice. What, did he make me seem terrible?” “What?” Arthur frowned. “Parker, the profile’s not about you.” He set the phone into my palm. A high-contrast photo of Selina looked over her shoulder at me, icy and unreadable. THE DRAGON LADY OF PUBLISHING by Brian Falwell She’s influential, revered, and—for someone of her stature—young and beautiful. With an hour’s writing, she can torpedo the creative work of years. Selina Chan is, in the words of some readers, the only honest person left in publishing, but the publishing world itself tells a different story: of an overpowered, unqualified writer who, through a confluence of lucky circumstances, has come to enjoy a position of outsized control in a troubled industry. When I spoke off the record to a legendary editor who works with—in several insiders’ words—“every writer worth reading,” she told me she wasn’t surprised I’d reached out to get a fuller picture of the woman with the iron pen. “How could I be shocked?” she said. “The only question is why, in an industry that’s been quietly seething about this woman for years, nobody did this sooner.” “Oh, my God,” I said hoarsely. My hands had begun to shake. Selina Chan was born in Minneapolis, the daughter of Jianguo “Charles” Chan, a n ephrologist, and Xiuying “Michelle” Chan. The relationship between parents and daughter is a strained one; according to one source, Chan hasn’t left her perch in New York City to spend holiday seasons with her family for years. Her high school teachers describe her as withdrawn, brilliant, and socially troubled, a description that would follow Chan into her years at Columbia
University. My disbelief started to turn to panic. I was the source. I’d asked Brian not to mention my truce with Selina, but the details I’d let slip about her life —the way she spent her holidays—I’d left that on the record. How could I have been so spectacularly naive? The next nine paragraphs were filled with anonymous quotes from other writers Selina had panned, from editors airing grievances about how she’d treated their authors, even from Selina’s former Columbia classmates. Brian spent a healthy paragraph examining “the Chan phenomenon” with Christian Gatehead, who tiptoed right up to the edge of calling Selina a diversity hire. And there, at the end of the article, was my name. Chan’s highest-profile conflict has, of course, been the ongoing clash with Parker Navarro, who met with me to discuss their feud. A young, articulate writer with an evident nervous hangover, Navarro has an easy manner that turns to hair-pulling distress as he describes Chan’s first pan of his work. “I remember that day clearer than any single other day from my twenties,” says Navarro. “My college graduation, the day Bill flew out here, the actual book sale—I don’t remember any of those as clearly as the day of the review. This is the worst possible thing that could happen to you as a writer.” Navarro, whose second novel has since enjoyed strong reviews from the Los Angeles Times and The New York Review of Books, voices the frustration that unified every writer I spoke to: “What are this person’s qualifications? What kind of a person does she have to be to do this to people?” Eventually he concludes, “She’s just a person with an opinion.” The so-called Chan phenomenon is as simple— and, for the career artists devastated by her words, as brutal—as that. I looked up at Arthur, my breaths shallow. “Right, so we knew all that already,” he said, as though the article I’d just read was
something normal, and not something that would have catastrophic r epercussions for Selina. “But there’s this thread responding to it.” He tapped to a different tab and returned the phone to my nerveless hands. I stared down at the posts, each of which had thousands upon thousands of likes. The view metrics were in the hundreds of thousands. @Lola Xu: THE DRAGON LADY OF PUBLISHING? Are you fucking SERIOUS? You people are literally sharing an article with an Orientalist title that would have been offensive last century and acting like it’s some kind of gotcha?? @Lola Xu: This no-name outlet just allowed this man to write that Selina Chan got hired by City through “luck” and “circumstance” with ZERO evidence? If she doesn’t sue this guy into oblivion for libel I stfg I’m going to do it for her. @Lola Xu: I was just going to let this go, bc Selina has been quiet on socials lately and it seems like she’s been trying to move on. And y’all know I am all about lifting fellow BIPOC voices, but I can’t watch Parker Navarro ke ep playing the victim and destroying the r eputation of one of the only prominent Asian-American women in media. I got an ARC of his new book and honestly? Selina was being generous. Just look at the way he writes about mental illness and race. THREAD. (1/7) “Oh, God,” I said. Arthur settled slowly onto the end of my bed. @Lola Xu: Yeah, things are hard out there for Asian writers! And no wonder, when this is what Asian authors ke ep putting on the page just to get a deal from a major publisher! “Floating among the back rails of the bus, now, a little Chinese woman, or maybe she was Korean, Dave could never tell, but he spent a lot of time looking at their eyes, wondering if they knew
anybody in manufacturing out there, if they had some personal relationship to the preshrunk cotton T-shirts in his top drawer at home, fellow transpacific imports.” (2/7) @Lola Xu: Did you feel good writing that, Parker Navarro? Did you feel like you were helping your community, reusing stereotypes that Asian-Americans have to deal with every day of our lives? And don’t you love that he put this racist ramble in the mouth of a working-class, Latinx narrator, basically undoing decades of race and class solidarity? (3/7) @Lola Xu: Latinx-Americans aren’t closed-minded racists. They understand racism, even if Parker Navarro doesn’t. (4/7) @Lola Xu: But wait, there’s more! Here’s what Navarro has to say on the topic of d epression and being suicidal: “Sometimes he toyed with potential suicides, painted and hung them like baubles upon the unlit Christmas tree in his mind, amused himself by breaking them open, pop, pop, as he turned the corner from Pine to Seventh, electrocution with household appliance, neighbor’s gun, paint his face like a clown’s before he pulled the trigger, so whoever found him would know at least he wasn’t a dour fuck about the whole thing, not like those people who splatter-painted their misery on the internet, he’d seen them, creating anthemic slogans from their animal ability to ke ep inhaling and exhaling, as though the audience should be impressed.” (5/7) @Lola Xu: And this asshole has the nerve to paint Selina Chan as hostile and unsympathetic? When HE has no sympathy for people struggling with these REAL PROBLEMS? Honestly even Dave, worst character ever, deserves so much better. Where’s the compassion for his suffering? Also where’s the impact on the character’s relationships? But Parker Navarro didn’t give him any close friends or family, of course, because people dealing with mental illness are just here to feel like a burden and push everyone away!! (6/7)
@Lola Xu: I’m so tired. There are so many amazing books out there that show healthy and supportive angles on mental illness and this is the one Asian writer publishing decides to anoint and pay millions to, when there are so many worthy BIPOC writers who will never have a fraction of the opportunity he’s gotten? A man who thinks suicide is a joke, d epressed people who have the audacity to talk about our experience are cringe, racism is okay, and then st eps on other Asian writers in the name of his own ambition? We ALL deserve better. (7/7) @hardertimes: @Lola Xu Wow, thank you for the heads-up. If I wanted to read a book that sympathizes with racists, there are piles of fascists to choose from. @Righty Loosey: @Lola Xu Canceling my preorder, fuck this man, thank you for this @chanelfour: @Lola Xu Omg I sent him a nice message after the video and he seemed so friendly. Writers like this are so fake. Profit-driven pigs. My skin is crawling @333 marcar333: @Lola Xu Guillotine I set down Arthur’s phone, feeling sick. My skin was clammy. The air felt thick, obstructive, in the back of my throat. I looked up at Arthur. “I know,” he said. He did. Arthur knew better than anyone the tunnels in my mind that I’d been dragging myself out of for fifteen years. Arthur, who’d returned from break in the spring of our senior year to find our apartment a labyrinth of filthy dishes and unwashed clothes. Arthur, who’d tried to fix things by cleaning my room, because I was in bed fifteen hours a day, and who had found the note I’d drafted sticking halfway out of a drawer. Arthur, who must have recognized one of those lines from Lola Xu’s chosen excerpt. I don’t want you to act like I was a dour fuck about this whole thing. Do me a favor and sprinkle
some humor over it if you can. And now, a decade later, part of me thought, Why didn’t I just do it then? And another part of me thought, Has she seen this yet? And I picked up my own phone and typed her name into the app, and then I saw what was, somehow, the worst of it.