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Alysa Liu was just 16 years old when she met an FBI agent at a Japanese restaurant only to discover that she and her family were being spied on by the Chinese government.
It was early 2022, Liu was about to compete in a figure skating competition at the Beijing Winter Olympics. It was the first time she had visited her father Arthur’s home country, which he had fled as a refugee decades earlier. The Liu family had become targets of the country’s spies due to their involvement in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
Alysa called the experience “a little weird and exciting.”
“You know what I mean? It’s so… incredible. You know what I mean, it’s crazy,” she said Tuesday during a roundtable discussion at the USOPC Media Summit.
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Gold medalist Alysa Liu of the United States of America 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)
“Imagine finding that at such a young age, I mean, in a weird way, I was like, ‘Am I like on a prank show?’ Like, is this world real, like I’m supposed to be a character in a movie. But I mean, it felt like it made sense to me, you know, based on everything my dad did back when he was an activist.”
She remembers sitting across from the FBI agent who questioned her at a local Japanese restaurant.
“I’ve gone to dinner with her a few times, I talk to her mostly, because I’m also really interested in what she does, like guys, it’s so cool to me, I don’t know, just like meeting an FBI agent, it’s crazy work,” she said.
“You know, and I mean, not many people can do that. So, you know, I have so many questions and like I met her, like a psychologist there, not for me because I was so curious about what she does.”
Liu added that the FBI made him feel “safe” throughout the situation.
One of five men charged Wednesday with spying on Chinese dissidents living in the United States, Matthew Ziburis, allegedly contacted Arthur in November 2021, posing as 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 attempt to obtain private information from the family that he could then provide to the Chinese government.
Her father told the Associated Press at the time: “They’re probably just trying to intimidate us, to…threaten us in some way to not say anything, to get them in trouble and to say anything political or related to human rights abuses in China…I had concerns about her safety. The U.S. government has done a good job protecting her.”
Alysa still participated in the Beijing Winter Games, but with enhanced security guarantees from the State Department and USOPC. She was accompanied at all times by at least two people.
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Alysa Liu of the United States of America 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 team bronze medal.
Alysa then retired shortly after the Beijing Games before making a shocking comeback.
After retiring at the start of 2024, she dethroned three-time defending champion Kaori Sakamoto of Japan at the World Figure Skating Championships last March. She became the first American woman to win a title since Kimmie Meissner in 2006.
She now has her eyes set on the Milan-Cortina Olympics in February as one of Team USA’s most dramatic stories.
Alysa Liu spoke out 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 made into a film.
Still, she has certain preferences if her story appears on the big screen.
“They have to make me look like a super cool hero or something. And I can’t be the kid who was spied on and didn’t do anything,” she said. “But honestly, I just want the focus to be on my dad’s story, because his story is so cool and also everything that happened only happened because of what he did, so I feel like we have to start at the roots.”
