I didn’t want to admit it, but the fact that another person thought I was smart did make me feel a bit better.
—
An hour later I returnedto my dorm, and through Eunjin’s door, which was slightly ajar, I could hear that she and Alex were speaking in hushed, excited tones. I knocked twice, then walked in.
“Oh my god. You’re here,” Alex said, looking up. “We were just about to text you.”
I knew I should probably talk to Alex about what I had heard from Leah, but I could tell I was about to get some juicy gossip, so I decided that I’d table that discussion for later.
“Did you hear that the lovely educational institution we all attend has proven its cultural relevance once again by making it onto Fox News?” Eunjin asked.
“No. What is it this time?”
“Here,” Alex said. “I’m texting it to you right now.”
I clicked on the link. It directed me to a blog post.Myblog post.
Truthfully, I hadn’t thought about the get-Laura-canceled scheme for a few days. The morning after I made the first post, I found out I had received a B on a paper. It was the first time I had gotten below an A on an assignment since freshman year. Even the pregnancy couldn’t guarantee me admission to Harvard if I didn’t meet the basic requirement of having impressive grades. You couldn’t be a Boring Asian Female, and you definitely couldn’t be a Boring,DumbAsian Female, so I had taken a break from scheming, deciding that I’d stake out the library to post the second and third blogs once I got my schoolwork back on track.
But clearly, the scheme had marinated into something fruitful even without my intervention. More than just fruitful—it had gone viral.
A feeling of nausea rose up in my stomach, making its way to my chest and my throat. I had not anticipated this outcome. If anything, I had been worried about the opposite—that no one would care about the blog post. More eyes on it also meant there was more at stake, and what if someone managed to trace it back to me? But my plan had been airtight. I used a school computer, not even from my account. I used a burner email for the author profile. And I was actively framing someone else—but subtly enough that no one would suspect it was a setup. There was no way someone could put all of the pieces together—not even the cleverest of internet sleuths.
I excused myself from Eunjin’s room and sat down at my desk. It took me thirty minutes to figure out the sequence of events that led to the post’s virality. Apparently, journalists for right-wingnews outlets regularly browsed the internet for blog posts written by students of the most liberal universities, specifically Columbia and UC Berkeley, so they could use the most extreme leftist positions they found as straw man arguments to ridicule in their blogs, podcasts, websites, news channels, and more. Except this time, they were shocked that a student at Columbia—the very university where patriotism, free speech, and common sense went to die—actually wrote an essay with some pretty stellar arguments. Arguments that they totally, 100 percent agreed with.
Of course, the author chose to remain anonymous, which posed a slight speed bump to conservative pundits being able to hold up this student as a beacon of hope for the right-wing movement. But it made sense: in an environment as opposed to free thought as Columbia University, of course a student espousing such anti-left viewpoints would want to remain anonymous. A right-wing pundit who had also attended Columbia pointed out that the sheer specificity of the references to campus life strongly suggested that this wasn’t a hoax: the post was written by a real Columbia undergraduate.
That all happened in the span of a week. The second week was when news started spreading at Columbia about the existence of this post, sparking a manhunt for the perpetrator. Infuriated students scoured the article for clues, just like I had predicted. But I overestimated the fastidiousness and imaginativeness of their research. They were supposed to narrow it down to a Columbia senior majoring in history who was living in the East Campus dorm, which they did (because I revealed all these facts explicitly in the blog post). But then they were supposed to figure out that the “wealthy suburb outside of New York City” thatthe author grew up in was Greenwich, Connecticut, because I cleverly included a reference to specialty caviar tater tots that the author stated was served by a restaurant in their hometown. Someone was supposed to search for this dish online, upon which they’d find out that there were three restaurants in the tristate area that were known for this specific menu item.
Then they were supposed to band together to document every single student living in East Campus along with their hometowns, which sounded harder than it actually was, as every student’s email profile referenced their residential hall, and most students referenced their hometowns in their social media profiles, so it would just take a simple web-scraping to consolidate this data in one place (I hired a coder from Bangladesh to do just this for a hundred dollars; that’s how I knew it wasn’t that hard). After gathering this data, they’d discover that there were exactly ten students living in East Campus who hailed from one of these three towns, and that only three of these students were studying history, one of whom was an Orthodox Jew (so he could not eat caviar), which would leave two people, Laura and a kid named Sam. But it couldn’t have been Sam, because he was a terrible writer, which everyone would figure out by reading his entertainment column for the school newspaper. The blog post, while espousing terrible beliefs, was written quite well. So that would leave Laura.
But clearly, I overestimated the capabilities of these impassioned students. That was not a problem. I would simply upload blog posts number two and number three, which would both reveal more clues, ensuring that they would set their sights on the right perpetrator.
—
For the most part, Isucceeded in keeping the pregnancy off my mind. My philosophy was to deal with one thing at a time, and the pregnancy was not at the top of the docket just yet. But sometimes I experienced a sharp pain in my abdomen, like period cramps but worse, as though the fetus were upset that I was not paying enough attention to it. The first time it happened I was sitting at my desk, reading an essay by Tolstoy, and I cried out—not from the pain, but out of worry that I was miscarrying the child, and thus, my future at Harvard. I cried out so loudly that Eunjin even texted me to ask if I was okay, and I told her that I was, that I had just bumped my knee against the corner of the desk. Fortunately, the internet told me that these cramps were normal, and I noticed no accompanying spotting, which the internet informed me would require me to see a doctor. Speaking of doctors, I knew I was technically supposed to go to one, but I was still on my mother’s insurance, and I imagined she would have some questions when she noticed I was going to regular appointments with an obstetrician. Besides, I was young, I was healthy, and literally billions of women had gone through the exact thing that I was going through. I didn’t have anything to worry about.
While I did not enjoy the cramps, I became accustomed to them after the third or fourth time they appeared. When I felt an episode starting I’d grit my teeth and try to distract myself, usually by watching “a day in my life” vlogs from students at Harvard Law. The vlogs made me feel happy the way watching Eunjin play violin made me happy: seeing someone succeed in a way that did not threaten your own self-worth. I wasn’t threatenedby or jealous of any of these vloggers because I knew I’d be one of them soon enough. I imagined them as my friends, I imagined how I’d pick the right moment on campus to say hi, say “You look super familiar, do I know you from somewhere?” upon which they’d blush and say that they sometimes vlogged, so that might be why, which was the perfect conversation starter, as they’d feel flattered I had seen their vlog, but I wouldn’t appear too much like a fan, which would immediately lower my status in their eyes and prevent a true friendship—a friendship of equals—from flourishing.
But sometimes I’d scroll to the comments section of these vlogs and feel angry. No, not just angry, but furious, the same intensity of fury I imagined the campus activists felt when readingMusings of a Freethinking Columbia Student. The troll comments didn’t get to me; they were trolls, they weren’t real, they were just trying to elicit a reaction. The ones that made me burn with rage were the long, eloquent, seemingly well-meaning posts from users claiming to be Harvard Law alumni about their own personal experience at a prestigious law school, lessons learned, all ending with some version of the message “Don’t go into big law, it’ll take a toll on your health that will take years to recover from” and “Trust me, the money isn’t worth it” and “There’s more to life than status, wealth, and prestige.”
They were like ungrateful children, given the opportunity of a lifetime and still acting like they were the victims. Didn’t they realize they had won? Didn’t they realize just how lucky they were? I was sure it wasn’t pleasant to work eighty hours a week, to defend greedy executives and shitty corporations, to be yelled at by your boss for not having enough billable hours, but it was all a small price to pay for the chance to be wealthy,successful—to be someone important, someone who mattered. I promised myself that when I got to law school, when I became a lawyer, I wouldn’t be like them. I would be grateful. I would recognize the value of what had been given to me as a result of what I had achieved.
—
Clearly, I needed to pushthe students infuriated about the blog post in the right direction. I considered going along with my original plan—releasing two more blog posts with clues to Laura as the author, but I was worried that the more posts I wrote, the greater the chance I could miss some detail that would inadvertently reveal me as the author. So I came up with a different plan that could be just as effective. I created a burner Instagram account and messaged one of the people who seemed to be leading the manhunt. Or womanhunt, if you wanted to be more accurate, but it seemed most people thought they were looking for a white man, which further demonstrated the need for me to help them out a little.
A group of students in the Columbia Students for Anti-Racism organization had been informally leading the charge against the perpetrator. The president, Amala Smith-Dupont, had penned an op-ed for theColumbia Daily Spectatorabout how the viral blog post was symptomatic of a larger problem: the university’s history of anti-Blackness and colonialism.
The burner account was easy to make. I would pose as a concerned student who wanted to remain anonymous, so I didn’t need to try to rack up followers or attempt to tie the account to a real person. I even included the phrase “burner_account” in the handle along with a string of random numbers.
Then I sent Amala a message request.
Hey, love the work you’re doing to help bring attention to the shitty right-wing blog post. I know we’re all still trying to figure out who wrote it, but when I was reading there was one person who came to mind bc they fit all the descriptions. And during private convos with this person they often said pretty sketchy things despite their online presence. Would highly recommend looking into Laura Kim.
Amala accepted my message request almost immediately. I kept the conversation open until I received a response.
Hmm…v interesting. I could actually see that. I’ll look into this some more.
