Over the Sycamore Symbol Analysis

“My debut, Over the Sycamore, written as June Hayward, was rooted in my grief over my father’s death,” I write. “The Last Front, written as Juniper Song, symbolizes a step forward in my creative journey. This is what I love most about writing—it offers us endless opportunities to reinvent ourselves, and the stories we tell about ourselves. It lets us acknowledge every aspect of our heritage and history.”

I never lied. That’s important. I never pretended to be Chinese, or made up experiences that I didn’t have. It’s not fraud, what we’re doing. We’re just suggesting the right credentials, so that readers take me and my story seriously, so that nobody refuses to pick up my work because of some outdated preconceptions about who can write what. And if anyone makes assumptions, or connects the dots the wrong way, doesn’t that say far more about them than me?

I have to steel myself before I walk through the doors. My publisher for Over the Sycamore set up a “multi-city” bookstore tour for me, but each store I visited never had an audience of more than ten people. And it is painful, truly painful, to struggle through a reading and Q&A when people keep leaving in the middle of your sentences. It’s even worse when the store manager hovers and makes awkward small talk about how it’s probably because it’s the holidays, and people are busy shopping, and they didn’t have quite enough time to advertise that the attendance numbers were so low. After the second stop I wanted to call it quits, but it’s more humiliating to cancel a book tour altogether than to struggle through it, minute by minute, your heart sinking the entire time as you realize your irrelevance, your foolishness to ever hope.

I’ve put on a stiff upper lip in public, but Geoff’s Twitter antics rattled me more than I let on. Athena Liu’s Ghost. A grotesque choice of name; surely chosen to surprise and provoke, but there’s more truth to it than even Geoff knows. Athena’s ghost has anchored itself to me; it hovers over my shoulder, whispering in my ear every waking moment of the day.

It's maddening. These days I’ve started dreading the thought of trying to write, because I can’t write without thinking of her. Then, of course, my thoughts inevitably spiral beyond the writing to the memories: the final night, the pancakes, the gurgling sounds she made as she thrashed against the floor.

I thought I’d gotten over her death. I was doing so well mentally. I was in a good space. I was fine.

Until she returned.

But isn’t that what ghosts do?

It’s hard for me to really feel sorry for Geoff. This is, after all, the same man who once threatened to leak nudes of Athena on Reddit if she didn’t back him up against a Locus reviewer. But I can see the truth in his eyes, the pain. Athena always thought that what she did was a gift. A distillation of trauma into something eternal. Give me your bruises and hurts, she told us, and I will return to you a diamond. Only she never cared that once the art was made, once the personal became spectacle, the pain was still there.