Alysa Liu was just 16 years old when she met with an FBI agent at a Japanese restaurant to find out she and her family were being spied on by the Chinese government.
It was early 2022, Liu was just about to compete in figure skating at the Winter Olympics in Beijing. It was the first time she visited father Arthur’s home country, which he fled as a refugee decades earlier. The Liu family had become targets of the country’s spies due to his involvement in the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests.
Alysa called the experience “a little bit freaky and exciting.”
“You know what I mean? It’s so … unbelievable. You know what I mean like, that’s crazy,” she said at a roundtable interview at the USOPC Media Summit on Tuesday.
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“Like, imagine finding that out at such a young age, I mean, like In a weird way, I was like, ‘Am I like in some prank show?’ Like, is this world real like I must be some movie character. But, I mean, it was like it made sense to me, you know, from like everything my dad did back in his activist days.”
She recalled sitting across the table from the FBI agent who interviewed her at a local Japanese restaurant.
“I went like to eat dinner with her a couple times I mostly talk, because like, I’m also like, really interested in what she does, like guys like, that’s so cool to me like, I don’t know, just like meeting with an FBI agent like that’s crazy work,” she said.
“You know, and I mean, like not many people can do that. So I, you know, I have so many questions and like I’ve met with, like a psychologist there, not for me like because, I was like, so curious about like what she does.”
Liu added the FBI made her feel “safe,” throughout the situation.
One of the five men who were charged Wednesday with spying on Chinese dissidents living in the US, Matthew Ziburis, allegedly contacted Arthur in November 2021, impersonating a USOPC official and asking for his and Alysa’s passport numbers, The Associated Press reported at the time.
Ziburis allegedly traveled to California’s Bay Area where the Liu family lived to surveil them and try to coax private information from the family that he could then supply to the Chinese government.
Her father told The Associated Press at the time, “They are probably just trying to intimidate us, to … in a way threaten us not to say anything, to cause trouble to them and say anything political or related to human rights violations in China… I had concerns about her safety. The U.S. government did a good job protecting her.”
Alysa still went on to compete in the Beijing Winter Games, but with heightened security assurances from the State Department and USOPC. She had at least two people escorting her at all times.
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The figure skating star went on to finish sixth in the women’s singles competition, and won a bronze team medal.
Alysa then retired shortly after the Beijing games before making a shocking comeback.
After coming out of retirement in early 2024, she dethroned three-time defending champion Kaori Sakamoto of Japan at the World Figure Skating Championships this March. She became the first American woman to claim a title since Kimmie Meissner in 2006.
Now she has her eyes set on the Milano-Cortina Olympics in February, as one of Team USA’s most dramatic stories.
She hasn’t ruled out seeing her life, and experience in an international spying incident, adapted into a movie.
Still, she has some preferences if her story makes it onto the silver screen.
“They gotta make me look like super cool hero or something. And just, I can’t just be the kid that got spied on and did nothing about it,” she said. “But Honestly, I would just have the main focus be like my dad’s story, because like his story is so cool and like also just like everything that only happened because of what he did, so, like I feel like we got to start with the roots.”
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