Selina I sat at the window with my head in my hands, staring down at my phone. When had Parker said this about me? This magazine was based in San Francisco. Had he talked to the writer when he’d been home last month—after all our emails, after New Year’s? I stood up abruptly. No. The interview could have happened after our panel in November, which would explain Christian Gatehead’s prominent placement. Why does it matter? I thought, rereading the paragraphs describing him. Navarro has an easy manner that turns to hair-pulling distress as he describes Selina Chan’s first pan of his work. “I remember that day clearer than any single other day from my twenties...” Who could say I hadn’t deserved this? I tipped headfirst back into social media. Every moment, Lola’s thread was picking up new traction. @Chinchillaaaa: @Lola Xu I already knew he was trash after that shit he wrote in his first book, he literally has a guy thinking about women like they’re animals. Disgusting, evil person @Sapiosapien: @Lola Xu Not to be like “I knew Selina Chan was right the whole time” but I knew Selina Chan was right the whole time Guilt rammed through the floodgates. Lola hadn’t cared about Parker until my review of High and Dry. I’d laughed with her, emboldened her. I hadn’t even tried to curtail her disdain when she’d tagged me in that post with his advance copy.
I pressed the heels of my palms against my closed eyelids, my head throbbing. I understood Lola, angry and disillusioned. I’d been each of these readers, exhausted by the exotic language that doused Asian characters, by Hollywood’s clouds of blue-tinted smoke diffusing over women in historically inaccurate hanfu, by the sensation that I had been born into a narrow and doorless room. But I didn’t see how this was r eparative. I hit Quote R eply on the post with the “little Chinese woman” excerpt, my heart in my throat. @Selina Chan: @Lola Xu Lola, respectfully, I think context matters here. Yes, this thought is racist, but the book’s primary interest is in how people fail to confront the worst patterns of their lives. Two of the most sympathetic side characters are a Chinese teenager and her elderly father, each looking for the other. Later on, Dave experiences a moment of identification with them, which complicates what you’ve quoted here. You know that I think the novel is unsuccessful, but I don’t think Asian readers have any need to take issue with it. I hit Post, and the r eplies began to arrive, in a trickle at first, then a deluge. @lemon_cello: @Selina Chan Are you brainwashed?? Did you buy everything this man said about you? You’re going to defend the “Asian people’s eyes are shaped the same” quote??? @65 tunes: @Selina Chan After that article, I was so pr epared to take your side, but wow, everybody here sucks. Yet another milquetoast liberal who thinks their respectable intellectual bona fides matter more than AAPI readers getting to read one book in their lives that isn’t teeming with dehumanization. Fuck you. @bunnbunn: @Selina Chan newsflash: racists aren’t going to love you no matter how much you hate yourself
@Jenny House Books: @Selina Chan Selina, I’ve had my gripes with your criticism in the past, but that article went way over the line. Trust me when I say that you, of all people, shouldn’t be defending this man. I looked at the last message for a little while. Jenny House. @Selina Chan: @Jenny House Books Hi Jenny, why do you say that? Five seconds passed, and then two screenshots of a group chat appeared. The title of the chat was Chan Pan Support Group. I read the two messages in gray once. Then twice. Trying to understand. Parker Navarro I don’t know why I let Selina Chan, of all people, get in my head Parker Navarro I guess I’ve just got to remind myself: I might have bad reviews, but at least I don’t have to wake up in the morning knowing my broken personality will alienate everyone in my life And the second: Jenny House Parker, you just got back from California, right? How was that? Parker Navarro Good! I did an interview with a writer back home. I think it’s probably my last word on this feud. Feel like there’s not much more to say. I felt a slow, gentle pain, as though someone were taking my heart in their hands and pushing it apart, the way you’d break bread. The week that I’d been thinking day and night about New Year’s Eve, imagining inviting Parker to City’s anniversary, checking my phone compulsively in hopes that he’d text me—this was what he’d felt, even then. None of it was real. I had invented the person I’d been falling for. And everything we’d been doing the past few weeks—what was that,
for him? A joke? Some kind of sick physical gratification? My eyes began to burn. I breathed fast, looking upward, trying to compose myself. The text he’d sent to his friends was true, anyway. I had alienated everybody but Jacob and Cassie, and someday they would be gone, too, when they were tired of putting up with me. And I would be here. The only person in the room. For a while I could do nothing but sit there and reread Falwell’s article, and as I did, my attention zeroed in on a line I’d skimmed over on that first read. According to one source, Chan hasn’t left her perch in New York City to spend holiday seasons with her family for years. Who else but Parker could have given Falwell that information? Who else was now equipped with the tools to humiliate me so completely? My phone buzzed. Parker was calling me. I hit Decline. He texted me. I watched the message previews show up on screen and didn’t touch my phone. Selina, please pick up. I have to talk to you. Please let me expla ... He called again. I let the phone ring, feeling as though I were being tugged backward by a rope down a long tunnel, watching his silhouette shrink in front of me, encircled by a mouth of light. Twenty minutes later, my buzzer sounded. I didn’t buzz him up, just looked over at the speaker from my seat at the window, but he must have rung the rest of the building, and someone must have taken pity on him, because two minutes later an urgent knock was sounding on my door. “Selina? Are you there, are you home?” I rose slowly from my chair. The burn in my eyes faded, and as I moved toward the closed door, my anger unfurled, cold and enormous.
I pulled the door open. Parker stood in the hall, panting, looking like he’d run through hell to get here. “Can I come in?” he said. “No.” “Selina—” “I said no, Parker. You can’t come in.” “That article,” he burst out. “The interviewer took me completely out of context. I swear to God, Selina. I knew him a bit in high school, and he let me think he was writing a profile of me. I had no idea I needed to have my guard up.” “You know this guy?” “Only a little! I told him I didn’t feel that way about your reviews anymore. I don’t feel that way.” “You don’t? Even though you’ve been texting your publishing friends, saying—” “No, listen. Those texts were from November. We were still saying things like that about each other in public at that point. You were still calling me juvenile and hopeless in print.” “I said those things about your story, Parker. Your fictional story. I’ve never written anything about how your family or friends feel about—” Down the hall, my neighbor stuck her head into the hallway. My hand strangling the doorknob, I st epped back. Once Parker had strode inside, I shut the door and faced him. “Let me get this straight. You came here to say this isn’t that bad? And here I thought maybe you came to say you were sorry for airing my family’s dirty laundry.” “But I didn’t mean to—all I said was that—that you spent holidays here on your own, and—” “I don’t want anyone to know that about me!” I hated how thin my voice sounded, how abruptly vulnerable. “I don’t tell people that! You know that! Why did you talk about it at all? Let alone to a media contact you haven’t spoken to in fifteen years?”
His fingers flew to his forehead, his face crumpling. “I don’t know, I—” “And what about these past few weeks? Acting like—like you really—” I felt his hands on my body, his mouth on my neck. Humiliation bloomed inside me. I was losing it. Losing my composure, my articulation, everything. “When this whole time, you’ve had this—this group chat with my name on it? Did you like checking in on how much your friends hate me? Secretly having the upper hand while we were—” “Selina, no.” He reached for me. I smacked his hand away, st epped back. “It wasn’t like that at all. The last thing I said to these people was that they had the wrong idea about you. Do you want to see the texts? I’ll show them to you.” I let out a miserable laugh. “Sure. Show me, if you want to. But I don’t know if you do.” As he looked down at his phone screen, thumbing his way up through the conversation, he swallowed, and his brows drew together. I tried to imagine Parker drawing a hard line in the sand. I tried to picture him arguing with a group of people on my behalf, risking offense or unpleasantness to stand up for me. “No,” he said, his eyes closing. He looked sick. “No, okay, I don’t.” I wanted to stifle the hurt somehow. I wanted to stop the question spilling out, but I couldn’t. “What have they been saying about me?” “Don’t,” he said hoarsely. Pain and anger twined into a hard knot in the center of my chest. “What have you been watching them say?” “Selina, it wouldn’t have mattered if I—” “It would have mattered to me.” “But they have these de ep-seated—even compared to what we were saying last year, these people are way beyond—” “I don’t care about them, Parker!” I said, halfway to a shout. “Do you think their opinions ever mattered to me? You’re the one I cared about! God knows why!”
He flinched. It felt good. My mind was a blank roar, and I smelled weakness, pain, pressed my advantage. “I should have known the whole time,” I said through my teeth, “that there would be some two-faced, cowardly shit like this with you.” Something ignited in his hollow expression. Hurt sparking against anger. “Are those texts,” he said, his voice low and restrained, “really so much worse than what you wrote about me? For years, people have been taking what you wrote about my books and turning it into an attack on who I am. And I know you think it’s different, because you didn’t talk about me directly, but Selina, it’s all the same. Nobody fucking cares that it’s fiction. They don’t care. If you say the book is idiotic, then I’m an idiot. If you say the book is a failure, I’m a failure.” “It’s not my fault that people will take criticism and expand it past its actual boundaries.” “That’s the world we live in! You knew that when you wrote what you wrote about my books!” “And I already said I was sorry for that!” “No, you didn’t.” His voice rose. “You apologized for taking an assignment. You didn’t apologize for writing that I was painful to read, or what was it the first go-around? That the book I put my whole heart into was a cruelty? Maybe if you hadn’t written something so self-satisfied, Lola Xu wouldn’t even know my name, and people wouldn’t be sending me messages saying if I think suicide is so funny, maybe I should fucking try it! This is all happening because of you!” My breathing sped. My eyes burned. In that moment of ringing silence, I knew we’d both said too much, too many things that couldn’t be unsaid.
“Thank you,” I said, quiet, my voice shaking, “for your honesty, Parker.” I opened the door. He stared at me, blinking hard, as though he’d just awoken from a nightmare. Then he looked through into the hallway. He drifted out like he didn’t know which way he was going. Glanced back at me. “I did come here,” he said hoarsely, “to say I was sorry.” He waited for me to take the last word. I didn’t want it. I stood there in the open door and watched Parker st ep into the elevator and out of my life, and then the mirrored doors closed, showing me myself, and I couldn’t stand the sight. I had to turn away.