The Improbable Comeback of Alysa Liu
Udumbara
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Just as Alysa Liu and her family boarded a plane, they got a call. It was the FBI.
A Chinese spy was on the way to their Bay Area home, the agency said.
“It was like a movie,” Alysa’s father, Arthur Liu, said in an interview with The Epoch Times.
Just 16 at the time, Alysa was on the path to her first Olympics in Beijing, unaware of a plot targeting her and her family behind the scenes.
A federal investigation later unveiled a weeks-long plot involving multiple conspirators, with one man, whom others called the “boss,” giving instructions from China.
They were after a trove of sensitive personal details about the Lius.
Red flags were already emerging before the FBI’s warning. Days earlier, a man had called Arthur claiming to be with the International Olympic Committee and asking for faxed copies of both his and Alysa’s passports in preparation for their upcoming trip to Beijing.
Arthur, suspicious of the unusual request, did not comply, and the conspirators tried other avenues to get what they wanted.
Court documents reveal they discussed placing a GPS tracker on Arthur’s car, installing hidden cameras to capture visitors, reporting on him daily, and tracking down the duo’s Social Security numbers through a contact at the IRS. With $800, they got the Lius’ passport photos and address in the name of “debt collection.”
Their neighbor later told Arthur that the man who posed as an Olympic official showed up near the Lius’ house and Arthur’s office multiple times. The neighbor recognized the man from a federal indictment.
What happened to the Lius illustrates how Beijing uses its long arm to suppress dissent.
‘In the Shadows’
The intense interest from Beijing came as no surprise to Arthur, a survivor of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, in which hundreds, if not thousands, of young people who hoped for political reform in communist China were crushed by tanks or shot.A key protest leader in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, Arthur fled mainland China after the bloodshed, escaping on a small boat to Hong Kong under the cover of night before seeking refuge in the United States.
Since rebuilding his life as an immigration lawyer, the father of five has remained a vocal critic of Beijing’s human rights record. And his eldest daughter, Alysa, now skating back into the international limelight, has been among his top supporters. At one point, she shared a social media post highlighting the abuse of Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region, he said.
In the 1990s, the Chinese Communist Party sent a man to befriend him and collect his information.
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Arthur had treated the man as a genuine friend, helping him settle down in the Bay Area. Years later, perhaps out of guilt, the man opened up about the secret mission.
Knowing Beijing’s penchant for deploying covert tactics, Arthur said he has learned to keep worries out of his mind and take things as they come.
More Peculiarities
Beijing’s COVID-19 pandemic restrictions largely shut out international spectators from the 2022 Winter Olympics, which meant that Arthur could not accompany Alysa, even though she was underage.Alysa called often, and both the State Department and the International Olympic Committee worked to ensure her safety; two people escorted her during events.
However, early one morning, when the escorts were not with her and she and a friend were having ice cream in the Olympic Village, a stranger sat close to them. The man followed them around and invited them to his residence.
Alysa reported it to Olympic officials. Despite the dense array of cameras and sensors within the area, surveillance footage failed to capture the man, which struck Arthur as odd.
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“We can only guess what happened,” he said. He speculated that the regime might have erased evidence in a cover-up.
Alysa once said she found the whole spying incident so “unbelievable” that she felt like a movie character.
But if her story ever becomes a movie, she said, its main focus should be her father, because everything else “only happened because of what he did.”
Soaring Back, Her Way
The 2022 Olympic experience was going to be Alysa’s last—or so people thought.Alysa—the youngest U.S. champion at age 13 and the first American woman to land a quadruple jump at 14—finished seventh in the women’s singles in Beijing. A few weeks later, after winning a bronze medal at the 2022 World Figure Skating Championships, she walked away from skating.
She had been on the ice for 11 years since she started skating at 5, and she was ready to move on, Alysa said at the time.
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Thirteen-year-old Alysa Liu practices on the ice in Oakland, Calif., in February 2019.
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For 2 1/2 years, she stayed off the rink, exploring life outside of the skating world.
She trekked in the Himalayas, attended concerts, tried other sports, and started school at the University of California–Los Angeles.
Then, an early 2024 ski trip to Lake Tahoe changed her mind. Sliding down the hill, she had an urge to get back on the ice. Soon, she was on a call with her former coach, Phillip DiGuglielmo, to talk about the idea.
DiGuglielmo later recounted that he poured himself a big glass of red wine and spent more than two hours trying to talk her out of it. Instead, she convinced him and everyone else. She then hopped on an evening train to her father’s office in Oakland, California, and broke the news to him.
She did it her way. No longer was Arthur her manager. She controlled what program music to use, when to train, what to wear, and what to eat. She chose her coaches and drove herself to the rink.
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Arthur said he was all for it.
“I’m so thrilled for her as a parent,“ he said. ”I want her to be happy.”
Alysa exploded back onto the scene, catapulting her return by taking gold at the 2025 World Championships.
“My family is out there. My friends are out there. I had to put on a show for them,“ Alysa said afterward. ”When I see other people out there smiling, because I see them in the audience, then I have to smile, too. I have no poker face.”
She addressed her newfound fame with a laugh.
“I have no idea how I am going to deal with it,“ she said. ”I'll probably wear some wigs when I go outside.”
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Tears and Joy
Perhaps the only entity unhappy with the outcome is the Chinese communist regime.During the Olympics, as Alysa’s name became one of the most-searched words in China, Chinese state-run media were quiet.
Few mentioned the Olympian at all. Several other articles, featuring photos of a younger Alysa grinning next to her father, evaporated off the Chinese internet as quickly as they had appeared.
Beijing will try its best to erase the Lius’ names, because to talk about them could trigger memories of a dark past that the regime would rather forget, said Chinese poet Jiang Pinchao, a friend of Arthur and a fellow student leader during the Tiananmen Square protests.
“The communist party’s power is fragile,” Jiang told The Epoch Times. Because it “stands on blood,” any sunlight poses a threat, he said.
In Italy, Alysa received her medal as the American flag was raised and “The Star-Spangled Banner” played.
Arthur, watching her from the audience, could not suppress his tears.
After partaking in the Tiananmen democracy movement, Arthur said, he had no regrets in life. Now, Alysa has exceeded his biggest dreams.
Whatever the regime does cannot intimidate him, he said.
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He said it was a firm “no,” no matter the pay.
Elite figure skating is expensive. Arthur estimates that he put between $500,000 and $1 million into supporting Alysa’s career. To cut costs elsewhere, he and the children once squeezed into a one-bedroom apartment, with the siblings sharing bunkbeds, he said.
Still, he said, there are things money cannot buy.
“I’m pretty stubborn,“ he said. ”Once I commit to a principle, it’s hard to sway me.”
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