If President Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address leaves you concerned for the union’s actual state, you can reassure yourself by watching a clip of 20-year-old Alysa Liu skating with her individual gold medal across the ice at the Winter Olympics, an American flag around her shoulders.
She is incandescent with a joy that transcends simply besting the other skaters. She is not so much about being a winner as simply being herself in the fullest, most exultant sense, then conveying it to others.
And for her to wear the Stars and Stripes is not about America First before everything else, but about America Foremost as an exuberantly grateful example that everyone is invited to follow in their own chosen way.
“The most important part of my story is human connection,” Alysa Liu told the press. “That’s all I want in my life, human connection.”
She won a second gold medal as a member of Team USA, but by another measure, her biggest achievement was outside the rink. She proved to be one person who can unite the divided union, connecting with what is human in the right as well as the left. She even drew cheers from MAGA despite having spoken out in the past against Trump’s immigration policies, despite being herself the daughter of a political refugee.
Her China-born dad, 61 year-old Arthur Liu, was in attendance at her triumph in Milan along with the younger four of the five children he has raised as a single parent. He is a lawyer who has seen firsthand the conditions in an ICE detention center and handled enough immigration cases on Zoom to worry for our democracy. He also knows what it is to be forced to flee a totalitarian regime. He sat in the spectator seats as a true American patriot as well as a proud dad.
“I had an American flag in my hand the whole time,” he told the Daily Beast on Sunday evening. “I love America. America gave me a second life.”
His first life had begun in poverty in a mountain village in the southwestern province of Sichuan during the darkest days of communist China.
“When I was growing up, you were lucky if you have food,” he said.
But whatever the hardships, Arthur Liu’s mother, Shu, and father, Caifu, exhibited a wealth of decency.
“One thing I remember about being raised by my parents is both of them were super, super nice people,” Liu recalled. “They treated people with care, and they were always helpful to other people, and my mother always said, ‘To lift your finger to help people doesn’t cost you anything.’”
And the mother matched that philosophy with a buoyant spirit.
“She’s always very optimistic, she’s always laughing,” Liu said. “She’s the kind of people, you hear their laughter before you see them.”
Liu inherited the laugh while also possessing a serious, determined side in the classroom.
“I was good at school from a very young age, so I was always like the top student in the class,” he said. “Only 5 percent of high school graduates in China at that time could go to college. And I was one of them. I worked very hard.”
He has to be nudged to allow that, along with being disciplined. “I think I am fairly smart.”
He went to college at 16 and graduated with a degree in English language and literature. He was a graduate student in 1989, when a pro-democracy movement swept through China’s campuses.
“Because I studied British and American literature, western culture, history, religion, so I had already formed the ideas that… everybody in the country should have the basic human rights, should be able to participate in the political process instead of a dictatorship,” he recalled.
He became a leading pro-democracy activist in the same time period as the massacre in Tiananmen Square.
“I was one of the most wanted students who organized the demonstrations against the government back in the spring of 1989,” he recalled. “But I managed to get away from them and I was smuggled into Hong Kong.”
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees arranged for him and a number of other fugitive Chinese students to be settled in America. He was flown to Seattle to begin a new life at age 25.
“I described myself [as] half dead when I arrived in America because of what had happened to me, during that democracy movement,” he recalled.
He remembers being beyond exhausted both physically and mentally.
“I had nightmares every day, [the] same dreams of escape from the police, running from the police,” he remembered. “It was a very, very difficult time, but I was determined to rebuild myself, go to school, get my degrees, and work at the same time to support myself. And that’s not easy. “
He and a number of fellow refugees then proceeded down to Los Angeles and the biggest Chinese Buddhist temple outside China. The food there was plentiful, but exclusively vegetarian.
“After like two weeks, some of us couldn’t bear it anymore,” he recalled.
He moved on to the First Unitarian Church in Berkeley, where he was assisted by people as kind as those at the temple in Los Angeles, who were as kind as those who had helped him in Hong Kong. But he could not wait to start working and supporting himself. He started at a Chinese restaurant.
“I was a busboy even though I spoke pretty good English at that time,” he remembered. “The position of a waiter is coveted… because you get tips.”
The hours were long and he had still not recovered from the ordeal that forced him to flee his homeland.
“I was just very tired at the end of the day,” he recalled “in bed, I was thinking, ‘What is democracy? What could I do for China?’ laying here half dead, dead tired, in America.”
But he reminded himself that he was taking the first steps toward a new future, however small the wages. He was making his own living and was even able to send some money to his parents in China.
“I was happily making $4.75 per hour,” he recalled. “I was very happy.”
He was unable to get his university transcripts from China, but Cal State Hayward allowed him to enroll in its MBA Program on the strength of his standardized test scores. He aced all his classes, even statistics.
“Nobody aces statistics,” he recalled. “I was a very good student.”
He proved it again at UC Law Hastings, now UC Law San Francisco. He passed the Bar in November of 1998 and joined another attorney in opening their own firm, Inter-Pacific Law. He initially specialized in immigration, but expanded his practice to include everything from civil litigation to criminal cases to divorce.
In 2005, Alysa was born. She, like all of his children, came via an anonymously donated egg fertilized with his sperm and implanted in a surrogate mothers. He had a second child, Selina, two years later and decided to have one more. He then got a surprise.
“Triplets,” he said. “Julia, Joshua and Justin.”
He added, ”I was so busy. Imagine having five children under four years [old] and I personally fed them, changed diapers, gave them baths, sent them to school.”
He was assisted by his ex-wife, Qingxin Yan. And his super, super nice mother traveled from China to assist, complete with her laugh. There was also a nanny at the start.
“I had a lot of help,” he allowed. “But I was the main provider of care for those children. And so I was super tired.”
He drove his crew around in a 11 seat passenger van, snacking to stay awake at the wheel.
His office happened to be two blocks from the Oakland Ice Center. Alyssa was five when she started skating there and it seemed like nothing but pure fun.
At 13, Alysa became the youngest national champion figure skater ever and she continued to win, win, win until all that mattered was the skating itself and what she brought to it.
“She really doesn’t care about matters and placements because she has had so much success at a very young age,” Lu said. “She’s just having fun, and getting everybody to enjoy what she can do.”
She was preparing for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing at 16, when three FBI agents met with Liu at a Starbucks near his office. The agents told him that he and Alysa were among the targets of a Chinese government spy operation of intimidation and harassment.
“I was like, ‘Wow!’” Liu recalled,
He was not particularly alarmed for himself.
”I’ve always felt like if they wanted to do harm to me, they can do it any time,” he told the Daily Beast. “I can’t prevent it.”
But even the chance that Alysa could be harmed prompted him to move her from California to Colorado. Alya was initially just amazed that a 16-year-old California ice skater would be the subject of a Chinese espionage operation.
“‘I was like, ‘Am I like in some prank show?’” Alysa later said. “But, I mean, it was like it made sense to me, you know, from like everything my dad did back in his activist days.’”
Liu does not believe that the Chinese spying distracted Alysa and caused her to go without a medal at the Winter Olympics in February of 2022. But the move to Colorado separated her from her family and Liu wonders if it influenced her decision to announce two months later that she was retiring from competitive skating. She said that she missed her family and wanted to have a more ”normal” life. She also said skating had come to feel less fun and more like something she had to do.
At the approach of this year’s Olympics, she had regained her love for skating and made it known she intended to compete in the 2026 Winter Olympics. The refugee’s daughter seemed to have become joy itself as she skated with her individual gold medal, the Stars and Stripes resplendent on her shoulders.
And to the millions of Americans who saw her, she brought union to an otherwise divided Union.
“What I heard is that the left and the right and the independent they all embraced her, which is great,” Liu told the Daily Beast. “She’s a very charming young lady who won two medals from the Olympic games, so she has some magic.”
He added, “MAGA loves her…What’s not to love about her? She is a pride of America."
Liu returned from the Olympics on Saturday and was of course back at his office when he spoke to The Daily Beast on Sunday.
“Getting organized, looking at my schedule for tomorrow and the week, you know, just to be prepared,” he said. “And a client just showed up at the door.”
That client is seeking a divorce, but there are others in immigration who give Liu cause for concern about the behavior of our own government.
“My clients are complaining how bad it is and some of them need medical assistance and they are not receiving proper care,” he said.
Despite Alysa’s magic, the memory of his previous life under tyranny causes Liu to worry for the state of the union presently led by a divisive president determined to bend the world to his will.
“With my experience, I fear for democracy,” he said. “We’ll see what Trump does in the next few years.”
He added, “Hopefully, he doesn’t send me back to China.”
“We’ll see what Trump does in the next few years,” Liu said.
