when the internet talks back (a short fiction)
Five minutes of micro-fame. One small post. A wave of strangers deciding what she meant, what she should have said, and whether she was ever qualified to speak in the first place.
Leah wasn’t supposed to be spending this much time on Xiaohongshu.
Her phone tracker told her she was averaging two and a half hours a day. Some called it doom-scrolling, but she thought of it as apocalypse-scrolling—an endless disaster unfolding in slow motion, something she couldn’t stop watching or leave. It was both indulgence and escape, a way to disappear from the burdens of real life.
She had promised herself she would stop. Or at least, if she was going to waste hours on this app, she would contribute something of her own.
That was how it started. Small posts, book recommendations, fragments of borrowed wisdom. Safe things.
And then, one night, without thinking too much about it, she wrote something different.
It all started with a post, and it should have ended there.
***
The interview at work had unsettled her.
She had been assigned to profile an Asian American writer. It wasn’t a bad interview—not really—but something about it left her feeling off-balance, like she had misstepped without realizing it.
The writer was sharp, accomplished, and guarded. Leah had asked her about regret, a question that had seemed fair at the time.
Q: Do you ever wish you had done something else with your Ivy League doctor degree?
A: I understand where you’re coming from, but why don’t you ask my parents instead?
A smooth deflection. A redirect that said more than a direct answer ever could.
There was a brief pause before Leah moved on, a silence that hadn’t seemed significant in the moment. But later, as she listened back to the recording, she heard something she hadn’t caught before: the subtle shift in the writer’s tone.
Had Leah sounded judgmental? Had she been careless?
That night, she typed out a Xiaohongshu post about the interaction. Not an article, not an official reflection—just something casual, like an afterthought.
She framed it as a moment of conflict: the writer’s sharp response, her own fumbled reaction. She made it more dramatic than it was. Then, she turned the lens on herself—how she had failed to see things from the writer’s perspective, how their experiences were worlds apart. She imagined the weight the woman had carried since childhood, the sacrifices she had made for her parents, the trauma she had learned to mask. And how she had written book after book to heal the kid inside her.
Leah chalked up her misstep to a lack of understanding, a failure of empathy.
She didn’t mention the writer’s name. She figured it was fine.
She closed the app.
Two days later, the post had over 10,000 views—a hundred times what she usually got.
***
The attention hit like a sugar rush.
Leah woke up earlier than usual, the blue light of her phone screen cutting through the half-darkness of the bedroom. 5,328 views. 17 comments. She scrolled, barely reading, as numbers blurred into meaninglessness. She told herself she wouldn’t check again. Then she checked again.
At first, it was entertaining. A few people questioned whether the post was real, debating in the comments. Others dissected her portrayal of first-generation immigrants. She clicked on their profiles—backyard gardens, supermarket beef in the U.S.—and wondered if they were first-generation themselves. She liked the idea of connecting with strangers this way.
And then, the tone shifted.
Someone told her she had framed the question wrong. That she shouldn’t have positioned herself as the judge—that it would have been more neutral to ask, “Some people might feel this way… do you?”
She took the critique gracefully, replying with a simple: Thank you, I’ve learned from you.
This was the internet. You had to be able to take a little feedback. And, honestly, they were right.
***
“See? I posted this, and people keep engaging,” she told her boyfriend at dinner, pulling out her phone.
“That’s good, cupcake,” he said, slurping tofu and vermicelli noodles.
“I barely did anything. They’re just arguing in the comments.”
He grinned. “You cracked the social media code without trying—say something controversial and let the people fight about it.”
She laughed, but then hesitated. “I guess some of the comments make me uncomfortable. I’m not used to strangers telling me what to do, even if I invited it.”
“Don’t reply to them,” he said, “it started with a post, and it should have ended there.”
That led to a conversation about the nature of the internet. She liked that about their relationship—the way their discussions could range from the trivial to the existential. And plus, he was a great advice-giver.
A meal and two drinks later, he concluded, “That’s why they call Chinese people ‘netizens.’ They live on the internet and is sensitive to everything—especially when it’s about their country!”
Leah had never thought much about the word netizen. It made sense, but she wanted to push back, to defend her fellow countrymen and women. She couldn’t quite find the words.
So she just nodded.
***
On the next day, by the time they finished their Forbidden City day tour, the comment section had exploded.
The sheer scale of the palace made her feel small—hall after hall, courtyard after courtyard, the endless red walls seemed designed to make people understand their own insignificance.It reminded Leah of the comment section. Layers upon layers of interpretation, judgment, debate.
And somewhere in the middle of it all was her post, no longer hers.
At dinner, steam clouded the air from the hotpot, her boyfriend chatted away, but his voice became background noise. Her head pounded.
“I’m sorry!” she blurted, looking up from her phone with a somewhat serious face. “I can’t give you any more attention.”
Silence.
He stared at her, expression blank, as if he wasn’t sure what he had heard. Then, like a lion shrinking into a wounded puppy, he pulled back, body curling inward.
She regretted it immediately. “Sorry, that sounded condescending. I was just—overwhelmed by all those comments.”
He crossed his arms, avoiding her gaze. “I don’t want to talk about it.” They ate the rest of the dinner in silence.
Leah let it be and turned to her friends on group chat instead. The journalists told her she should have pushed the writer harder. Her close friends asked if she was okay, suggesting she hide the post. Maybe even make your profile private for now.
She weighed their advice.
Then, quietly, she changed the post settings to “only friends.”
In the taxi home, he sat at the farthest edge of the back seat, shrinking into himself.
She reached for his leg. He shook it off. Pulled his hat lower. Pretended to sleep.
***
Leah opened DeepSeek. I told my boyfriend at dinner that I was busy and couldn’t give him attention. He took it to heart. What should I do?
The AI responded with a step-by-step guide.
She skimmed it, absorbing what she could.
When they got home, he muttered, “I need a walk,” grabbing his keys.
She let him go. Took a long, hot shower. Steam smeared the mirror. She traced a broken heart into the condensation, knowing it would vanish.
When he returned, his face was red from the cold.
“What you did was wrong,” he said, voice tight. “However you apologized, you fell silent most of the time. I won’t tolerate that.”
Leah exhaled. “Your feelings matter to me. I was overwhelmed, and I handled it badly.” The words felt robotic, borrowed from DeepSeek. But she tried.
He left to the bedroom and, after a while, poked his head out.
“Can we meet halfway?”
“I don’t want us to be that couple—silent at dinner, glued to our phones.”
She nodded. Said nothing.
***
That night, Leah opened Xiaohongshu again.
She stared at the private post, debating whether to delete it.
The internet never just listened. It interpreted. It reframed. It turned small moments into big ones, and big ones into something else entirely.
She didn’t delete it.
But she didn’t set it back to public either.
She closed the app.
And, for the rest of the night, she didn’t open it again.