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From the diary of Monica Tsai, backed up on five servers spanning three continents

August 11, 2018 (2018-08-11T22:54:30.218542)

Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

United States of America (39. 9058546,75. 3562615)

I met a girl today who gave me a pencil.

It was a real journey to get to her too.

Not only because she lived across the river in New Jersey and I had to borrow Prof.

Logan’s stupidly nice car, or because she made me nervous, in a heart-racing kind of way.

But because I had already been looking

for a year.

My goal wasn’t her or the pencil, exactly.

Really, I was trying to help my grandmother reconnect with her cousin,

the one she rarely talks about, who she grew up with at the family pencil company, back in Shanghai.

It all started a year ago, when me, grandmother, and grandfather were celebrating grandmother’s ninetieth birthday at her favorite restaurant, Arby’s.

I was feeling bummed for a couple reasons—the first being that I was leaving for college in a few days and every sort of panic was setting in: that I’d still have trouble making friends, that grandmother and grandfather would struggle without me at home, and I hadn’t been able to think of a single suitable gift for her birthday.

We go to Arby’s every year.

They have her favorite coupon—five roast beef sandwiches for the price of two, and you can use the coupon twice.

But I was really hoping to do something different, something special for this one.

Grandmother can’t stand the thought that I’d willingly hand over money for her sake, so purchasing anything was out of the

question, and our walls were already littered with the drawings I’d given her every other year.

My coupon book of chores also

went unused.

Then there was the time I tried to cook for her.

She watched so nervously as I wielded the knife that my real

gift was giving up so she could finally relax.

I knew she could tell I was feeling down that day.

She’s always been able to see right through me.

Maybe that’s why, as she

brushed the sesame seeds that had fallen from her bun onto her napkin, she mentioned Meng.

“Meng used to flick sesame seeds at me all the time back in the pencil company.” It was the most specific detail I had ever

heard about her cousin or the old family business.

I had formed this ghostly image of Meng, someone who had once been like a sister to her, who also grew up in the pencil company

and lived through two wars in Shanghai, and here she was suddenly reappearing, the answer to my predicament.

I don’t usually

press when grandmother speaks about her past.

She’ll rub the scars on her arm and change the subject to anything other than

her cousin, anything other than the pencil company.

And grandfather will shake his head, just a little bit.

But there’s clearly

a deep love for Meng hidden there, a tender pain.

I thought maybe I could help her resolve it.

So this time, I pressed.

What

if I could find Meng?

I asked.

What if she’s still alive, still in Shanghai, and there’s a chance to reconnect?

Normally, I don’t think grandmother would have agreed.

But grandfather gave her this look, and maybe since it was her birthday she realized she should do something, or she was feeling sentimental, with me leaving for college and all.

Whatever it was, she wrote down the characters for Meng’s name.

That night, I began my search, not expecting it would take me almost a year to find a lead.

Her name was Louise Sun.

EMbrS told me this a week ago.

Actually, more precisely, it said:

Sparks are flyin’, we’ve found a match!

Your query for “Meng Chen”, “ 陳夢 ”, “Shanghai Pencil Company”, “ 上海鉛筆廠 ”, “Phoenix Pencil Company”, “ 鳳凰鉛筆廠 ” has sparked a connection with Louise Sun, click to reveal.

I think we’ve made EMbrS too colloquial, but that’s kind of Prof.

Logan’s cringe style, and since I’m a lowly undergrad researcher

and he’s a hotshot professor, there isn’t much I can say about it.

The matching post was a picture of two women, one old and one young.

I zoomed in on the older woman first, searching for traces

of grandmother.

There were similarities around the mouths and how their hair grayed in specks rather than completely whitening.

Behind the women was the waterfront, Shanghai’s skyline sparkling.

Beneath the picture, a post written by Louise:

Hello from behind the Great Firewall!

Couldn’t get my VPN to work until now, but I’ve been having the time of my life in Shanghai

this summer with this absolute BOSS sitting next to me here.

She lived through the Japanese occupation of Shanghai and ran

the Phoenix Pencil Company, one of the only woman-run companies in the city at the time!

They would make custom pencils for

people all over.

My high standard for writing implements feels justified now!

#uniball4eva Two more weeks here, then I’ll

be back to the Hill.

DM if you want to catch up!

I had to stop myself from immediately sending the picture to grandmother, her ninetieth birthday gift finally delivered, more of a ninety-first birthday gift.

The other woman had to be Meng.

How many women could have run the Phoenix Pencil Company?

Only my grandmother and her cousin.

But first I had to do my due diligence on this Louise character.

Because deepfakes, you know?

And it was hard to believe that EMbrS, this new app that ran my code, had worked when all else had failed.

I’m pretty good at knowing what sites and keywords to use to verify information.

But I didn’t need any of that with Louise.

She had so much about herself readily available online for browsing.

It was as if she’d never heard of data privacy in her

life.

She was a Princeton undergrad from Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

She had won some first-year award in the economics department

and was a starting player on the volleyball team.

The article came with pictures—I promise I did not seek them out.

But it

was hard to look away from her air of concentration, knees bent, arms flat together, eyes up toward the ceiling.

She had a

strangely captivating jawline.

Satisfied that she was real and thrilled EMbrS was working, I sent grandmother an email with the photo attached.

Wo gen Louise Sun you 3 mutual friends.

Yao bu yao connect ???? ?

Ever since grandmother got a smart phone, this is how we communicate.

A third in a thousand-year-old language romanized in

the dominant language here, a third in the dominant language when I don’t know a word, and a third in the language of the

future—emojis—for when I’m afraid she might not understand the English.

Grandfather calls it our little cryptography.

That

was his field, cryptography, but even he says it takes too much effort to read our messages, and so it’s become a language

of our own.

I expected a quick reply.

Grandmother and grandfather are more technically savvy than a lot of my classmates.

They always have their phone volume turned way up to hear their notifications.

It’s woken me a few times—relatives in Taiwan sending memes in the middle of the night—though they can sleep right through it.

When she didn’t reply within ten minutes, I started imagining all sorts of scenarios—they had been hit by a car at that bad

intersection, one of them was in the hospital with pneumonia, or maybe they were sleeping in after an exciting night of mahjong

with new friends.

I hated that it had taken me this long to find Meng, that evasive woman.

There was no trace of her on the internet, at least

not with the search engines I was using.

It made some sense—she would also be in her nineties and had likely never used the

internet that much, and then there was China’s firewall to contend with.

But thanks to grandfather, I have a knack for computers,

and halfway through my first semester, I enlisted the computer science lab’s servers to help.

I configured scrapers that searched

the internet every few minutes for any mention of Meng or the Phoenix Pencil Company.

I signed up my bots for Chinese social

media sites.

I researched different search algorithms, spent hours combing through false positives.

I wasn’t supposed to use

the department’s servers this way.

It’s not like anyone told me I couldn’t, but I guess the scraping generated enough suspicious

traffic tied to my username that Prof.

Logan noticed.

I had been skeptical of Prof.

Logan, to be honest.

He’s super young for his seniority in the department, his office hours

are always full of fanboys, and computer science fanboys are kind of the worst.

But I can only say he’s been nice to me and

that instead of reprimanding me, he skimmed my code and offered me a summer research opportunity to work on his project called

EMbrS.

It stands for something stupid that I can’t even remember off the top of my head—okay, I just looked it up—Electronic Memory Bank Enabling Radical Sharing.

That’s Prof.

Logan’s thing: radical sharing.

He managed to turn this into an acronym but dropped the second E since that’s what all the cool companies are doing, and he really went all in on the fire theme.

At its core, EMbrS is a

souped-up search engine that prioritizes not finding information exactly, but “sparking connections” between people.

It doesn’t

care to index large businesses or medical terms or even news—it only cares about data written by an individual about their

own life.

Think social media posts, newsletters, blogs, that kind of thing.

And because of its status as an academic research

project, as well as Prof.

Logan’s uncanny number of connections, it has access to more social media posts than anything else

out there.

By then I was desperate for help finding Meng, so I signed on.

Prof.

Logan has this dream, which I must admit sounds kind of nice, especially for a shy recluse like me.

Right now, EMbrS

uses existing stuff people post on social media.

But his real goal is to turn it into an all-encompassing journaling app where

people write freely about their lives.

The journals stay private, just between you and EMbrS.

His voice goes all soft when

he describes this: he says to imagine you’re at a party where you don’t know anyone, but EMbrS has already compared your life

journal with everyone else’s in attendance, and can tell you that you and the guy wearing sunglasses, who you previously thought

very rude and standoffish, are actually both huge fans of the same anime, have both written mature fan fiction about the same

pairing, which is maybe something that neither of you would have admitted to a stranger at a party.

Suddenly you have this

shared interest, and just like that, a connection is sparked.

Around then is when Prof.

Logan gets on his soapbox and says

social media posts are enough for EMbrS now, but that they’re too short, too performative, and contribute to our perceived

isolation, our fractured democracy, whereas a life’s journal with only EMbrS as a reader is real and true, and all his fanboys

start singing his praises on Reddit.

I guess it’s also why I started keeping this journal, even though EMbrS isn’t a journaling app quite yet, and that’s because Prof.

Logan is maybe the only person ever to try to think through content moderation before building a product—we don’t want to be in the business of sparking connections between Nazis, after all.

While I have to respect him for this, I’m not totally sold on radical sharing yet.

I figure maybe one day I will be, though, and I’ll feed all this into EMbrS, to let it know some stuff about me, and it’ll help me make connections that I haven’t really been able to make on my own, on account of the whole recluse thing.

Each minute that passed without a reply from grandmother was killing me.

I can’t ever repay my grandparents for all they’ve

done for me.

They raised me when my parents wouldn’t, supported me in every possible way, rejected all attempts to show my

gratitude.

This was the one thing I could do for them with the skills I have.

I was about to call the landline when she finally texted back.

xiexie

Relieved, I composed a careful message to Louise Sun.