Page 16

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

October 10, 2018 (2018-10-10T20:11:53.

740456)

loc: Cambridge, Massachusetts.

United States of America (42.

3721865,71.

1117091)

It has been a difficult few weeks, I’m not going to lie.

I took some time off work to accompany grandmother to the doctor.

At first, she was in good spirits as we helped her with her shoes, insisting we all wear the scarves she’d knitted us last

year, now that it’s getting colder.

It was only when we stepped outside that things started to turn.

Grandfather tripped over

our porch step, and I barely caught him in time.

His palm scraped against the pavement, and he was struggling to breathe.

I sat him down, holding on to his thin torso.

But when I tried to help him to his feet, grandmother on his other side, also

fruitlessly trying to hoist him up, he kept shaking his head.

“Just give me a moment to catch my breath,” he said.

Something changed in grandmother.

She began to panic over him, speaking rapidly, except the words coming out of her mouth were neither English nor Mandarin nor Shanghainese.

I clung to a hope they were Japanese or Taiwanese, languages she might have picked up years ago, though deep down I knew that they were gibberish, as she patted grandfather’s coat down and pleaded with him.

Grandfather nodded placatingly.

It clearly was not his first time hearing her speak this way.

I ran back into the house for

something to clean his hand.

When I reached the bathroom, I gripped the sink, and all I could do was stand there telling myself

to stay calm.

Grandfather was allowed to falter.

He was not young.

Yet until right then, I had not even considered it a possibility.

He was the stable one, the one with the successful career that allowed us to never worry about money, the one who delayed

his retirement after my mother and father left, the one who was supposed to be around to help with grandmother as she faded.

I shrank into myself, wanting nothing more than to remain in place, to freeze time before things got any worse.

But we had

a doctor appointment to get to.

I reminded myself that grandfather was barely hurt and grandmother would snap out of it soon.

When I returned, grandfather was standing again.

I helped him clean his scraped hand.

Grandmother was still panicking.

We

reassured her that we were just going to see the doctor for a routine visit, and that we would be home soon.

Her Chinese returned.

I almost wished it hadn’t because she begged and begged:

“Don’t take me away from home.”

“You love Dr. Wu,” grandfather said in his most soothing voice.

“You offered to send Monica to her office to fix her computer,

remember? And she asked you all about Monica and the two of you talked forever and you didn’t even notice all the tests she

was doing on you. Afterward you said you couldn’t wait to see her again. And she is a very busy person. It is difficult to

reschedule an appointment with—”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about.” Grandmother was trembling, holding her head in her hands, trying to turn back toward

the house.

I held her arm, enough to keep her in place.

With my free hand, I called a ride share since we had missed the bus.

I attempted to reason with her, but I was even less successful than grandfather.

In the end, she fell against him and pounded weakly at his chest, crying.

“They’ll find us. Even here. Torou...”

Grandfather held her until she went limp in his arms.

I stood there, useless, not knowing how to help and too scared to even

try.

To our relief, by the time the ride share pulled up, grandmother had worn herself out.

At the clinic, Dr.

Wu greeted grandmother enthusiastically and received wide, uncertain eyes in response.

The doctor ran her

tests and talked mostly with me.

She tried to engage grandfather, too, but he was too spent.

The tie he always wore was a

little crooked, his bandaged hand resting in his lap.

When we left, Dr.

Wu pulled me aside while grandmother and grandfather walked ahead.

“Hey,” she said.

She was like me, Asian American, maybe even with a grandmother who lived with this same disease, and who

had inspired her to go into this field.

The similarities made me shy away from her, not wanting her to map onto me so cleanly,

to be able to perceive me so clearly.

She handed me a pamphlet of resources for caretakers.

“Make sure you take care of yourself, too,” she said.

I mumbled a thanks before leaving as quickly as I could.

The journey home was smooth, and the bus lulled both grandmother and grandfather to sleep.

I had to pat them awake when we reached our stop.

The bus driver lowered the landing so they could get off without having to take such a large step.

The bus was running late, and a younger man holding on to a strap hanger let out a huge sigh as we went through the slow process, grandmother and grandfather carefully stepping down.

I wanted to yell at him to please be patient with us, that we were trying our best, to stuff his sigh back in his mouth so he’d choke on it.

Instead, I said nothing, hurried off the bus, down the sidewalk, and back into the house.

Louise texted me at the end of the day, asking for my and .

I told her it had been hard, and she offered to call.

I did not have the energy.

I buried myself in EMbrS.

As my world fell

apart around me, I wrote my code.

If I could enforce enough logic there, maybe the rest would follow suit.

I coded until midnight.

When I left my room to use the bathroom, I saw grandfather at his computer, answering another math question, and another,

and another.

There are still some days when grandmother is mostly fine.

Typically, when she has a bad episode, we don’t have to leave the

house for any reason, so she passes them in relative comfort.

I almost wish there was a recognizable pattern to it, even if

that meant a steady decline.

Some mornings I wake up and stare at my ceiling, fearing which grandmother she will be that day—and

then I feel guilty because every moment I’m in bed is another when only grandfather is looking after her.

And so I haul myself

out of bed and face the day.

it sounds like things are rough up there.

if it’s too much trouble, i don’t have to visit.

or we could just meet for a quick

lunch or something

I grabbed my phone and typed the quickest reply of my life.

no.

please come.

I really want to see you

i’ll be there

I began counting down the days.

A few nights later, when usually only I am awake, I heard grandfather’s voice coming from the spare bedroom.

When I went to check on him, I recognized his tone, the mix of English and Chinese, and knew the only person he could be speaking to was my father.

“You’re selfish,” grandfather hissed.

I flinched away from the door.

He never spoke like that to me, only to my father.

And

even then, as far as I was aware, he had not spoken to my father in years, had only done so through me or grandmother.

“What

can be taking so long? You’re delaying on purpose. I know you. Making Monica do what you should be doing.” His voice broke

when he said my name.

“She should be in college learning, making friends and falling in love. Instead, she’s here because

you are not and I can’t do this by myself.” He paused to catch his breath.

“I can’t do this by myself,” he repeated, as if

realizing the truth of his words.

I leaned against the wall and slid down until I was sitting, holding my knees to my chest.

I did not even have my phone with

me.

I just waited there in the dark, listening to grandfather reply in monosyllables and grunts to whatever my father was

saying.

They ended their call.

It was a while before grandfather came out.

He saw me immediately, even in the dark, as if he was looking for me.

“I can ask Louise not to come,” I said.

I stared straight ahead as I spoke.

“I can also just work part-time.”

“No.” He looked like he was trying to sit down so I stood up.

He placed a hand on my shoulder.

“I want to meet her,” he said, then squeezed my shoulder.

“And no part-time. You’ll never properly learn computer science

that way.”

I rolled my eyes and sniffed.

“Tell me about your latest algorithm?” he asked, his voice small.

We stood together in the dark hallway.

“I had to implement a pipeline for a library’s archive today,” I said.

“That’s a lot of data,” he said.

“How did you store it?”

“Gzipped. Timestamps for filenames.”

“And how will you query it?”

We passed each other questions and answers in the dark, each offering the other a little ledge of a foothold, something to keep the other moving forward.

Soon after, the new medication that Dr.

Wu prescribed started having an effect.

Grandmother was more present, less paranoid,

and even began writing again.

how do you record the stories of someone who is losing their memory?

I asked Louise.

I wondered how coherent whatever grandmother was writing could be.

i’m not sure , she admitted.

very carefully

I tapped at my computer.

I had spent so long searching for Meng, but I had never thought to search for grandmother.

I tried

all the tricks I had learned, and the results came up similarly blank.

It was as if the world had accepted she was fading

and was prepared to let her fully disappear.

For the first time since I connected with Louise, I dove directly into the EMbrS data.

There’s a lot more now, not only social

media posts.

We’ve been building up its knowledge base as we prepare the program to better understand journal entries.

Prof.

Logan has assembled a moderation team of minimum-wage undergrad students.

They don’t have access to the journal entries themselves,

but they can approve connection topics—yes, connect mothers returning to the workforce; no, do not connect those scheming

violent insurrectionists.

Prof.

Logan’s latest pitch had been in San Francisco, and we’d recently received an influx of users from California, really

the first to use EMbrS as a journal.

Unfortunately, there had been a lot of false positives, so he had me work on ingesting

local newspaper articles and historical archives and such.

The data was meant to inform EMbrS about the region so it could

better determine a unique connection point between users.

I decided to do something I had never done before: I fed all of

my previous journal entries into the system.

I made sure it wouldn’t reach out to random test users and tell them about me.

But it would parse my entries and try to find connections for me among its data.

I didn’t think it would actually surface anything, just that my journal entries would be realistic test data.

After running for eight minutes (I know, we need to optimize), EMbrS returned a single result, from the archives of one of

the local newspapers.

The fire appears to have been a grease fire, though officials were unable to find an occupant of the house.

The fire spread

unusually quickly due to the amount of flammable material near the kitchen including paper, cardboard boxes, and, most peculiarly,

pencils.

Most of the wood of the pencils burned, leaving strips of lead at times, piles of ashes, others.

Neighbors varied

widely in their statements on who lived in the house.

Some said it was unoccupied, while others insisted a large family lived

there, and one even thought it was a restaurant.

I almost dismissed the article as another false positive.

But then EMbrS showed my journal entry that matched.

It was the

conversation between me and grandmother, when she said she’d lost most of her pencils in a fire in California.

I nearly slammed

my laptop shut.

How had I forgotten?

Was memory that fallible?

EMbrS provided a link to the source article.

It was from 1954.

I calculated.

Grandmother would have been twenty-seven.

She would have just gotten to America.

I was finding her ghost in these pixels.

The article included an exact address, which I searched.

It did not take long to find a city record for the property.

It included a name, a Chinese one, definitely not grandmother’s.

I searched the name separately.

This was the kind of thing grandmother wouldn’t understand, and neither would Louise.

Even if pencils had great power, they could not compare to the power, the widespread usage, the sheer amount of data, of the computer.

The name was that of a military man, high-ranking in the Nationalist forces.

I did not know much about the Nationalists other

than that they were a political party in Taiwan.

Did he know grandmother?

There wasn’t much detail about him available—in English, at least.

Though he was not well known, the division of the government

he served in was, and so I searched for that.

The results returned with too many articles, all on the same topic.

An extensive intelligence network designed to purge dissidents.

I skimmed the articles and quickly shut EMbrS down, purged the data I had fed it, and closed my laptop.

I was left with the

laptop fan slowly whirring and the eventual silence of my bedroom.

I could hear, beyond my closed door, the Taiwan news grandfather

always watched, passionate voices debating one matter or another, grandfather yelling his opinion, while grandmother stayed

out of it, cooking or knitting in the background.

There are a lot of things I don’t know about history, about politics, especially when my public school only covered American

history for the most part.

I knew America had a strong anti-Communist movement, that there had been spies, and it seemed like

Taiwan had spies, too.

But it all felt so foreign to me, so different from the Taiwan I knew, where I went every other summer

to visit family in their air-conditioned skyscrapers.

Even grandmother felt it was safe for me to explore the city on my own,

take the subway and buses, decide for myself that yes, I did want to drink three bubble teas in one afternoon and be too full

to eat dinner, and venture out to the night market for a midnight snack.

I couldn’t reconcile the Taiwan I knew with the Taiwan that EMbrS was trying to show me, a history of martial law and terror, its citizens disappeared or mysteriously killed for protesting, or simply for attending one wrong gathering.

And of course, I could not reconcile the grandmother I knew with someone who might have had any part in that history.

For the first time, I thought, Why not let her be forgotten as she wants to be?

But I had promised Louise I would ask about grandmother’s story.

I waited for one of her good days.

“Louise is interested in archival.” I had to use the English word because I did not know the one in Chinese.

We were watching

television in the living room, one of the Chinese singing competitions we had recently gotten into.

It was a commercial break,

and grandfather was in the bathroom.

“She’s interested in preserving stories. I think she’ll want to interview you while she’s

here. Is that alright?”

I hoped she would immediately agree, that she had nothing to hide.

But she remained silent, staring at the television.

I repeated

my question.

“I heard,” she said, voice distant.

There was a rapid ad for peanut oil.

It was louder than her voice.

“Is that not okay?” I suddenly felt very small.

Grandmother sighed.

“I have mixed feelings on recording stories,” she said finally.

“Oh,” I said quickly.

“That’s fine. I’ll just tell Louise—”

Grandmother patted my knee.

“If you trust her, then I can too. Let me think about it,” she said.

We watched the peanut oil perfectly fry a pork chop.

Only once we could hear grandfather’s footsteps coming our way did grandmother

add:

“Preserving stories is not always a good thing.”

Grandfather sat down, draping the couch throw across the three of us, and we continued watching the show.

I texted Louise.

do you think there are any downsides to archiving stories?

She began typing immediately.

if the person doesn’t want their story preserved.

or if the story lies.

or like a story perpetuating racism, bigotry, etc.

.

.

.

so yes

so it’s not about collecting all stories.

there’s some curation involved

Her thinking echoed Prof.

Logan’s content moderation policy, and yet it was so different from the tech world.

Prof.

Logan

had me reading blog posts, watching talks on best practices in dealing with large amounts of data.

The first rule as soon

as any data is received is to save it before processing any of it.

Even if it’s not used, it must be saved, in case it’s needed

in the future.

Storage is cheap, and data is king.

Most computers in the world are holding gigabyte after gigabyte of data

that’s never looked at again.

But at least it is saved.

arguable!

we don’t need more of the same stories, or at least not as urgently.

we need to find the parts history omitted and

fill those back in.

and sometimes I think we are running out of time

Halfway through the episode, grandfather began snoring.

I looked over and found they were both asleep, their hands clasped

together.

I took a picture, wanting to remember them like this, relaxed and content.

I was about to send it to Louise because I knew

she would like it, then I deleted the message and put my phone away.

I decided to keep the picture as a memory just for myself,

at least for now.