Page 14

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

September 22, 2018 (2018-09-22T22:34:29.

442041)

loc: Cambridge, Massachusetts.

United States of America (42.

3721865,71.

1117091)

Grandmother is getting worse.

The other day she came into my room and looked at me curiously, almost like a child.

Her hand

wavered as she pointed at me, an overlarge tremble.

When her lip began to quiver, too, I stood up from my desk and asked what

was wrong.

She stopped pointing at me and shook her head.

“I think I have done something terribly wrong,” she said.

Words you never really want to hear from anyone, least of all from your grandmother.

I thought her memory might be playing

tricks on her and so I asked what she meant.

“Never mind. I should not be bothering you at work.”

I insisted it was fine and waited.

She remained at the door, holding her wrist, running her thumb over what I now know are

her scars from Reforging.

“I should not have Reforged your pencil,” she said finally.

“They were your private thoughts.”

I shrugged.

I had already gotten over it.

“I think you may not have been ready to share them with me. I took the pencil and surfaced everything when you did not know what would happen.”

“It’s fine,” I insisted.

“I’m glad you did it.”

She fidgeted and remained at my door.

“All those pencils...” she said, more to herself than to me.

“It was only the one pencil.” I tried to sound lighthearted.

She shook her head, vigorously this time.

“If you don’t want to learn more about Reforging, I would understand.”

“I do want to learn more,” I said.

It had not even occurred to me that I had the option.

But once she offered, I admit I hesitated.

It would indeed be no small relief for grandmother’s past to remain hidden.

I could go on seeing her as my hero—and this power

I had inherited, while remarkable, would stay dormant.

After all, I had experienced firsthand what it could unearth.

“Maybe after I think about it some more,” I backtracked.

She nodded.

“Let me know when you are ready.”

She looked like she was about to say something else, then her eyes lost focus.

A look that is becoming more common.

Her eyes

either cloud over or look at me without seeing, then she panics.

I brought her to her room, sat her down in her rocking chair.

She keeps a sack of knitting supplies there.

I dug through for a half-started project, placed the needles in her hands.

Even

though her eyes were still lost, she picked up the needles, looped the yarn around her pinkie, and began to knit.

The panic

on her face ebbed as she returned to this familiar task.

It’s happening more frequently, these moments of disconnect.

Grandfather and I have tried our best to reassure and reestablish

her routine and she always regains herself within a few minutes.

But the episodes are longer, and this time, when I checked

on her half an hour later, she was still knitting, lost in thought, or maybe lack of thought.

The forums say it’s an uncontrollable disease, that it will progress differently for everyone and there is nothing you can do except watch.

They also say it can be helpful for a caretaker to have something they can control.

So, when I’m not working on EMbrS, I clean.

Every day after work, I attack one thing.

First the rice cooker, then the air filter, the toilets, the bookshelves, the stove,

the kitchen sink.

With my first paycheck, I bought the best vacuum cleaner I could find.

I listed it as my for the day, and Louise laughed.

The next day I stumbled upon a sale for the same vacuum that included extra filters, and I cursed my luck.

Grandfather’s coping mechanism is his computer.

He claims he’s replying to correspondence from former students, when really

I know he’s taken to answering people’s math questions online.

I found his profile.

His avatar was a doodle I’d drawn of him

when I was in middle school—a stick figure wearing a tie, with square glasses and an inexplicably rectangular mouth.

He had

thousands of reputation points, and his username was “ mango_grandpa .” I swelled with pride, reading his clear answers to their algebra questions and even the occasional chemistry one, nobody

knowing that mango_grandpa was a former MIT professor desperate for a distraction, attempting to cope with his wife’s decline.

“You don’t need to clean this much,” he said as I disinfected his desk for the second time that week.

“And you don’t need to help the mango grandchildren all the time,” I countered.

He chuckled.

“There can never be too much math education,” he said.

In that moment I agreed with him, found myself thinking of the multivariable

calculus class I should have been taking that semester.

I dismissed the thought before I could linger on it too long.

On the other hand, all things EMbrS have been going super well.

I did that presentation Prof.

Logan asked me to do for the freshmen.

It was weird doing it over a video call, but at some point, I got into it, murmuring to myself as I worked as usual.

It’s a habit I picked up from grandfather.

In any case, Prof.

Logan gave me loads of compliments afterward.

“You made it very accessible,” he said from his office, during our weekly 1:1.

“The students loved it. That self-deprecating

humor really works for you.” Then he paused.

“Of course, you don’t actually feel that way about yourself, do you?”

“Of course not,” I lied.

Perhaps I had referred to my work as “trash code” one too many times.

He raised an eyebrow.

The delay in the video connection pixelated his eyebrow, making it appear fractured.

“I’m only going to say this once, Monica. You are likely the most talented sophomore I’ve ever worked with. Not only in your

code, which is clean and beautiful, but also in your communication, which is transparent and accessible. Those are really

the most important things about being an engineer. When EMbrS succeeds, it will be in large part thanks to you.”

I’m going to be riding this high for a while.

When I mentioned his compliments as my for the day to Louise, she demanded the presentation recording.

I was nervous, waiting for her reply, wishing the video wasn’t

so long, suddenly fearing she would contradict everything he had praised about me.

But she didn’t.

As soon as twenty-seven minutes passed, she replied:

wow, that was really great!

even I understood

And a few seconds later:

and damn, youre cute

I melted into my bed and couldn’t move for a while.

I lay there staring at the ceiling, at those stars that don’t light up anymore, grinning uncontrollably.

First Prof.

Logan’s compliments, then this.

It was too much.

I felt like an electron when it’s given too much energy and all it can do is vibrate over to the next orbital.

And somehow, the only thing I could think to send back was:

and you’re late with your email about your major!

Which totally killed the vibe.

But she took it in stride.

lol I know.

im terrible with deadlines.

gimme a few more days

Her email came three days later.

She BCC’d me on her message to her advisor, as she promised.

ugh stayed up all night working on it.

.

.

and it was still late!

but lemme know what you think!

!

I had been in the zone, debugging something in the EMbrS logs—and even though I needed to complete my work before the logs

rotated, I was so curious I ended up just scp’ing the logs to my own machine so I could look at them later.

Her thesis proposal was good: well laid out and convincing, with strategically placed graphics and pictures from Shanghai.

She’s a talented photographer, and I told her so.

d’aw, thanks!

It turned out her project was not archival exactly.

It had a digital spin to it, and there was a field for it out there called—what do you know—digital archiving.

But she went a little further, cited other works, and said the version she wanted to focus on was called—and I got chills when I read it—memory work.

I didn’t really understand what it meant from her proposal.

Her advisor likely knew definitions I didn’t.

So I looked up some of the works she had cited; even those had a number of technical terms.

She texted again.

well?

?

I prepared a list of questions and texted her, warning that I was about to call.

finally!

The phone did not even finish its first ring before she picked up.

“Was it okay?” she asked, breathless.

“It looks great. I didn’t understand a lot of it—”

“Oh no...”

“But it’s not my background! I only know about computers.”

“You know more than computers.”

“Not really.” I held up my first question.

Suddenly, I felt like a journalist, and so I played into it, lowering my voice

and articulating clearly.

“Memory work. That’s a very striking term.”

“Isn’t it?” There was a smile in her voice.

“Archiving has been a thing for ages now. Digital archiving, too. But memory work

takes a different approach.”

“By trying to be more ethical?” It was what one of the sources had claimed, though I couldn’t discern what made it any better.

“Maybe. The idea is that one person’s memory is never the whole source of truth. Everyone interprets what happens around them based on their own circumstances. Historians and archivists are most at fault here, since they get to decide what lives on and what doesn’t, and this also goes through the filter of their own experiences. So if you’re in archiving, you have to acknowledge the importance of your role and the impact you have for future generations referring to your work.

“Let’s say you’re an archivist for Cambridge,” she continued without pause.

I wondered if this was what I sounded like when

I was explaining EMbrS to her.

“And let’s say there’s a march demanding better roads for bikers. There are some articles about

it, and some photos, which you save to the archives. Because they are there, Cambridge suddenly has this history of having

fought for biker rights. And that helps shape the community—there’s proof this has been done before, a rung on the ladder,

so let’s build the next rung and have an even bigger march. Bike lanes show up, and the city invests in a widespread bike

share system. Now you’re a city known for biking, and it’s a source of pride. Everyone in Cambridge has different experiences

but in some way, you are all shaped by its good biking system.”

“Biking’s not that great in Cambridge,” I muttered.

She ignored me.

“But now let’s say you find out about this elderly couple who was bought out of their home in favor of installing a hub for

electric bikes. The couple doesn’t speak English, and so they were never able to advocate for themselves. How do you reconcile

that with the narrative of Cambridge as a great city for biking?”

“Did you have to make it an elderly couple with bad English?” I asked miserably.

“Sorry,” she said gently.

“But this is where memory work fits in. Now let’s say you decide you need to advocate for people like this elderly couple. You want to go back and look at this narrative from a different lens, from the perspective of a less privileged group. The great biking city narrative already exists though. And so you have to operate on the memory which the city already has of itself. If you don’t surface their voices, you’re giving tacit approval for displacing the elderly in favor of bikes. It’s about no longer excluding those who are always excluded. Not only that—it’s about actively working against it. So that the next time you’re archiving something, you automatically look for the narrative of the older population and work that into your community’s collective memory.”

I closed my eyes.

I pictured her with Meng, the picture that started it all, the one that triggered the EMbrS alert and brought

her and Meng into our lives.

Shanghai’s skyline in the background.

Someone Meng found remarkable.

“But you’re not looking at biking in Cambridge, are you?” I said.

“I know nothing about biking in Cambridge,” she agreed.

“You’re looking at Shanghai. At Meng’s generation. At my grandmother’s generation.”

“Women who survived both wars,” she confirmed.

“Especially the ones who made their way here, whose stories were never added

to the nation’s memory. Not to China’s, or Taiwan’s, or America’s.”

“My grandmother, then.”

“There aren’t many who are still alive. And people really care about recovering these stories. There’s this huge grant that

my professor wants me to go for that’s all about surfacing underheard stories like that. And your family’s story—the wars,

the pencils. It’s incredible.” She paused and seemed to swallow hard.

“If you and your family are open to that, of course.”

It was just my luck to start falling for someone who was interested in me for an entirely different reason.

I couldn’t reply,

choked up on the feeling that I was only a stepping-stone for her and that when she was through with me, she’d move on and

not look back.

And who was I, a mere stone, to ask her to linger, to squash me a little more gently?

“Hey,” she said, interrupting my thoughts.

“I’m being rude, aren’t I? Throwing my goals at you and pressuring you to help

me. Do you remember what I said last time? I really meant it. I like talking to you in a way that has nothing to do with pencils

or archiving or memory work. In fact, let’s not talk about this anymore. Let’s talk about something else.”

I wondered if this was how it would always be, a last-minute change of the subject to avoid my insecurities.

“Like what?” I managed to say.

“Hm, what do girls talk about? Tell me about your first kiss.”

The question made me flush.

“It wasn’t a good one,” I said.

“What made it bad?”

“It was with a boy,” I said before I could hesitate.

“Ah,” she said, and I wondered what that meant, what exactly it was she understood with that one syllable.

“Your turn,” I said.

“It was in one of the staircases in my high school, after volleyball practice. And it was electrifying.”

She did not elaborate, and I had so many questions.

“I’m glad yours was good, then,” I said to draw out more information.

It worked.

“Well, I didn’t make the mistake of being with a boy.”

“Ah.”

“Ah,” she agreed.

We didn’t talk much longer after that.

I was going through various highs and lows, and they were all conflicting, and she

had to go meet with her study group.

After hanging up, I came to this conclusion: There’s a power that my grandmother possesses, which she says she is willing

to teach me, and Louise is particularly interested in this power, and I am particularly interested in Louise.

Which results

in a weird dynamic that can go wrong in so many ways it is best that I don’t tempt it.

I decided I would try to distance myself from her.

I had a hopeless plan—I’d send vague end-of-day updates and eventually

phase it out completely.

I’d focus on EMbrS and my grandparents.

I’d still invite her to visit, if only to satisfy grandmother’s

end of the deal, and she could interview grandmother if she wanted, but I’d stay out of it.

The plan felt achievable until a package arrived for me.

Both grandfather and grandmother eyed it curiously.

I opened it in front of them.

Inside were two vacuum filters and a note.

don’t worry, I found a coupon ?? L

I could not stop smiling.

Grandmother noticed.

It was a good day for her.

“I miss playing mahjong,” she said suddenly.

“Why don’t you find us a fourth player, Monica?”

“Oh yes,” grandfather agreed.

“Nothing would make me happier.”

The image of the four of us playing mahjong thrilled me, a world where Louise met my grandparents and we all happily spent

time together.

A world where grandmother’s mind worked effortlessly in pursuit of a winning hand.

And so my short-lived resolve broke entirely, crushed by vacuum filters and mahjong, of all things.

do you want to come visit some time?

Her reply was exhilaratingly immediate.

id love to!

my fall break is coming up and we have a game at harvard.

would that work?

that’s perfect!

we can try out the new vacuum filters!

how electrifying

I told grandmother that I did it, that I invited her over, and so she needed to Reforge Meng’s pencil.

“What?” she exclaimed.

“Surely I said only after she came.”

I told her she definitely did not.

“Monica,” she said sternly.

“Don’t trick the elderly.”

I even showed her my journal entry where I had written it down, that all I had to do was invite Louise over.

She waved her hand.

“Words on a computer,” she said dismissively.

“The easiest thing to forge.”

I couldn’t bring myself to pout over it though.

I was too excited and eager and busy cleaning every inch of the house.

But

there are times when I pause and try to brush away this feeling that I’m standing on the precipice of something.

As if holding

a pencil to my wrist, and I can either continue using it like a regular pencil or I can stab it into me and see if some beautiful

truth will come pouring out.

Lately, I feel like I’m just sharpening the pencil, honing the tip, and waiting to see where

the impulse will take me.