Page 121 of Bad Words

“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 nephrologist, 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 Her high school teachers describe her as withdrawn, brilliant, and socially troubled, a description that would follow Chan into her years at Columbia University.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 repercussions 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.

@LolaXu: 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??

@LolaXu: 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.

@LolaXu: 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 keep playing the victim and destroying the reputation 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.

@LolaXu: Yeah, things are hard out there for Asian writers! And no wonder, when this is what Asian authors keep 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)

@LolaXu: 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)

@LolaXu: Latinx-Americans aren’t closed-minded racists. They understand racism, even if Parker Navarro doesn’t. (4/7)

@LolaXu: But wait, there’s more! Here’s what Navarro has to say on the topic of depression and being suicidal: