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Alysa Liu was just 16 years old when she met with an FBI agent at a Japanese restaurant to find out that she and her family were being spied on by the Chinese government.
It was early in 2022, Liu was about to compete in figure skating at the Winter Olympics in Beijing. It was her first time visiting Father Arthur’s homeland, which he fled as a refugee decades earlier. The Liu family had been targeted by the country’s spies because of 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, it’s crazy,” she said at a roundtable interview at the USOPC Media Summit on Tuesday.
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Gold medalist Alysa Liu of the United States poses for a photo after winning the women’s world championship during the 2025 ISU World Figure Skating Championships at TD Garden on March 28, 2025 in Boston, Massachusetts. (Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
“Like, imagine finding that out at such a young age, I mean, like in a weird way, I was like, ‘Am I like on a prank show?’ Like, this world is really like I got to be a movie character. But I mean, it kind of made sense to me, you know, from like everything my dad did back in his activist days.”
She remembered sitting across the table from the FBI agent who interviewed her at a local Japanese restaurant.
“I liked to go to dinner with her a couple of times, I mostly talk because like, I’m also really interested in what she’s doing, like guys like, it’s so cool for me, I don’t know, like meeting with an FBI agent, like it’s crazy work,” she said.
“You know, and I mean like not a lot of people can do that. So I, you know, I have so many questions and who I’ve met with like a psychologist there, not for me like because I was like, so curious to like what she’s doing.”
Liu added that the FBI made her feel “safe” throughout the situation.
One of the five men charged Wednesday with spying on Chinese dissidents living in the United States, 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, which he could then provide to the Chinese government.
Her father told The Associated Press at the time, “They’re probably just trying to scare us, to … kind of threaten us not to say anything, to cause trouble for them and say anything political or related to human rights abuses in China … I had concerns about her safety. The U.S. government did a good job of protecting her.”
Alysa still continued to compete at the Beijing Winter Games, but with increased security assurances from the State Department and the USOPC. She had at least two people escorting her at all times.
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Alysa Liu, of the United States, competes in the women’s free skating during the 2025 ISU World Figure Skating Championships at TD Garden on March 28, 2025 in Boston, Massachusetts. (Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
The figure skating star finished 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 retiring in early 2024, she dethroned three-time defending champion Kaori Sakamoto of Japan at the World Figure Skating Championships in March. She became the first American woman to claim a title since Kimmie Meissner in 2006.
Now she has her eyes set on the Olympics in Milan-Cortina in February, as one of Team USA’s most dramatic stories.
Alysa Liu opened up about being monitored by the Chinese government. (Maddie Meyer/Getty Images, Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images, PHILIPPE LOPEZ/AFP via Getty Images)
She has not ruled out seeing her life and experience in an international espionage incident, adapted into a film.
Still, she has some preferences if her story makes it to the silver screen.
“They have to make me look like a super cool hero or something. And just, I can’t just be the kid who got spied on and didn’t do anything about it,” she said. “But honestly, I just wanted the main focus to be like my dad’s story, because like his story is so cool and like everything that only happened because of what he did, so I feel like we got to start with the roots.”
