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I asked if the woman in her picture was by any chance Chen Meng ( 陳夢 ), that if so, she was a cousin of my grandmother’s (Wong Yun 王筠 ).

Would she please let me know if it was really her?

With the time difference, I thought Louise wouldn’t respond until much later in the day.

To my delight, she replied almost

immediately.

omg!

yes, that’s her name!

ill ask about your grandmother today!

do you have a pic i could share with her?

Something about the casualness of her message, her openness, drew me in, even then.

Was it also her face in her photographs, the easy smile, the confident eyes?

Okay, maybe.

But there were so many questions I wanted to ask her.

How had she run into Meng?

Was Meng an attendee at economics conferences?

Or maybe a volleyball fan?

Was Meng a mahjong fiend?

Did they play together?

I sent her two pictures.

One was me and my grandparents outside the classroom where my grandfather used to teach.

The second

was from the summer before college, when I’d ransacked the attic and found a bag of used wooden pencils.

I brought them down,

photographed the pile, even took a few close-ups of the ones that still had their markings.

Beautiful etchings that formed

the outline of a phoenix.

When I asked grandmother about them, she said they were from the pencil company and asked that I

put them away.

I noticed that a few of them—it’s hard to explain exactly—but some were hollow, as if the lead had fallen out,

leaving only the wooden casing.

Grandmother caught me staring down the barrel of one.

She rested her hand over mine.

Her hand,

all loose, wrinkled skin, should have been soft and familiar.

Instead, there was a rigidity to her fingers as she pulled the

pencil away.

I let her, of course, and we did not talk about them again.

whoa, awesome!

will report back later today, your tmrw

I could hardly sleep that night.

Summer was ending, which meant I had to wrap up my EMbrS work in the next few days, and the

Pennsylvania humidity was awful.

It was a tossing-and-turning-and-reimagining-algorithms kind of night.

But the end of summer

also meant I would be headed home to Cambridge soon, at least for a few weeks, to celebrate another birthday with grandmother,

and this time I’d have a proper gift for her.

Louise’s message the next morning was all I could have asked for.

hey!

i spent the day with meng.

she was surprised to say the least!

she wants to send something to your grandmother and she gave it to me.

i can mail it to you when im back in the states?

ill be back in two days!

I was feeling ridiculously grateful for everything and everyone—for my grandparents, as always, for EMbrS and Prof.

Logan

making this happen, and for this girl, Louise, who would ferry the culmination of a year’s worth of effort to me.

I was even

grateful for radical sharing.

EMbrS never would have found Louise if she hadn’t been doing her own form of radical sharing.

I figured I should try to be more open, and really it wouldn’t do for whatever Meng wanted to give my grandmother to be lost

in the mail, so I asked, contrary to my nature, if Louise wanted to meet in person.

I told her I went to school not far from

Cherry Hill and wanted to thank her properly.

ooh yeah, sounds good!

would it be too much to ask you to come to NJ though?

i hate driving and id make a mess of it with

jet lag

I agreed, and it wasn’t long before we were setting a date at a frozen yogurt shop.

Which brings me to today.

It wasn’t hard to convince Prof.

Logan to lend me his car.

I told him the truth: I had been using

EMbrS, or eating our own dog food, as they say in the industry (though Prof.

Logan prefers “drinking our own champagne”),

and it had sparked a connection for me, the potential to reunite my grandmother with her long-lost cousin, and the only thing

stopping me from making this connection a reality was however would I get to New Jersey?

He practically threw his car keys

at me.

“A real-life connection sparked by EMbrS!” he cried.

“You must go!”

For better or worse, on the forty-five-minute drive, I was too nervous about messing up Prof.

Logan’s car to overthink the upcoming encounter.

I relaxed only after I pulled in to the strip mall and saw it had amazingly wide parking spots.

Louise had offered to meet me halfway, said she could get a ride, but I insisted she was the one doing me a favor.

lol you’re worse than my parents

I had laughed alone in my dorm room at that.

She was already at the frozen yogurt shop when I arrived, easy to recognize since she was the only other Asian person there.

She looked up from her phone when the door opened and broke into a wide smile, standing.

She was much taller than I imagined,

though really I shouldn’t have been surprised, knowing she was on the volleyball team.

She had shorter hair than in her profile

picture, stopping right above her shoulders.

She wore turquoise running shorts and a T-shirt of a band I had never heard of.

We had a good conversation.

A really good one, actually, and I’m not sure why that is, given I’m normally not great at conversation.

But she was so easy to talk to, open and curious and quick to laugh.

The first thing she insisted on doing was paying for my frozen yogurt.

“You drove all this way,” she said.

Even when I repeated that she was the one doing me a favor, she ignored me, barreling

her way to the register, the teenager manning it happily going along with her demands.

As I reluctantly ate my free green

tea yogurt, she told me she hated driving, was terrible at it.

“A walking stereotype, I know,” she laughed.

“Luckily I can walk here. Can’t go a mile in Cherry Hill without running into

a froyo shop.”

Because I was raised by my grandfather, I really could not take her buying my froyo that easily, so I made a fuss that seemed

to amuse her, until finally she said:

“Well, there’s a favor you can do for me, too. Maybe.”

But when I asked her what that might be, she changed the subject.

“Tell me about yourself,” she said, eyes bright.

“Where do you go to school?”

“A small school outside of Philly,” I said, my usual vague answer.

Not out of any sense of privacy this time, but because

most people had never heard of my school.

“Oh.” Her eyes grew real wide.

I thought she was about to guess the school.

But instead, she said, “Swing state.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“Are you registered to vote?”

I told her I had mailed in some form but didn’t know what became of it.

Which made her face go through all these endearing

contortions.

Her inner debate was so clear to me: not wanting to come off as pushy but also not willing to relent on something

this important.

“I’d encourage you to check,” she finally said in a forced light tone.

Amused, I promised her I would.

Then I returned her question, asking where she went to school.

“A small school in New Jersey.” She winked and I laughed, even though it might’ve given away that I already knew she went

to Princeton, a school everybody has heard of.

Grandmother would like her, I thought.

I asked what she studied.

Economics, I already knew.

But she surprised me.

“I’m thinking of switching majors. I thought econ made sense and was practical and I’d be a big banker or something in New

York. Then I changed my mind last semester.” When I asked her what she wanted to do now, she clammed up, her eyes wandering.

“I’m not sure how to explain it yet. But I went to Shanghai to get started.”

So I asked her what she was doing in Shanghai.

Maybe I was too eager, but it was exciting to discover her in real life, this

version of herself that did not exist on the internet.

“I wanted to...” She shifted again.

There was a sudden shyness.

“Actually, let me give this to you before I forget.”

That was when she gave me the pencil.

It was just like the ones I had found in the attic, the wood a striking black.

The point

wasn’t sharp, yet the lead still shone.

At the opposite end of the point was a carving of a phoenix, wings raised.

And though the pencil was elegant, I could not help feeling disappointed.

I had more tact than to demand if that was it, if

really all Meng could think to give grandmother after seventy years apart was a single pencil that was just like the ones

she already had in her attic.

Instead, I asked if there might’ve been a note with it.

Louise gave me a curious look and said

no, it was only the pencil.

I tried to hide my dismay (I’m not totally socially incompetent!

), thanked her, and changed the subject, asked how she met

Meng in the first place.

She said it was through a program that connects older people in Shanghai with those who want to hear

and archive their stories.

I told her that was amazing.

She didn’t seem to believe that I meant it, waving her hand and reddening

a bit, but I insisted.

I told her about EMbrS.

How it was also in the business of connecting people through stories, that it was how I had found

her.

“Oh? Is it a dating app?” she asked, which made me flush.

I tried to explain that it was a new kind of search engine, a really

good one, with more integrations to social media than anything else out there.

That one day it would hold our life stories

and connect people who did not even know they were looking for connections.

“Oh,” she said, and I couldn’t tell the emotion behind it at first—skepticism, or wonder?

But she continued.

“We have quite

a bit in common, don’t we?”

Thinking back on those words still gives me this silly, fuzzy feeling.

I didn’t want to linger over this too much, so I made my usual jokes about Prof.

Logan, his pitches and cheesy product names, and when she laughed, I felt really, really good.

I asked her what Meng was like, and she took her time responding.

“I mean it seems like a cliché to say she’s wise, but that’s really the best word. And she has a biting wit—she’d always make

these snarky comments about what she called my ‘elite education.’?” She smiled wistfully, and I got the sense that no matter

how pleasant our conversation, New Jersey was not where Louise wanted to be right then.

She recounted how she and Meng met

at a park, how hearing Meng’s story made her rethink her own.

When she spoke about stories, her eyes glossed over, like she

was in a dream.

“Is that what you want to change majors to?” I asked.

“Something to do with archiving stories?”

She looked surprised, as if I had unearthed a secret.

“Yeah,” she admitted.

“Which is actually the favor I wanted to ask you.

I’d love to interview your grandmother. Do you think she’d be up for it?”

“To archive her story?”

“I guess so.” She smiled sheepishly.

“Well, I don’t really know what I’m doing yet. Let me figure that out first, and then

can I reach out to you again?”

“Of course.”

I scraped the bottom of my frozen yogurt cup.

I regretted not getting more.

Not because there was anything special about Cherry

Hill frozen yogurt.

I just didn’t want to leave yet.

I wanted to ask her if maybe we could keep in touch even if she didn’t

figure out her major.

Or maybe I could help her figure it out?

Even if she didn’t want to interview grandmother, she could

still come up to Boston before the school year started and meet her and grandfather.

In short, I wanted to ask her to be friends,

except the lines of our lives were already curving away from each other.

I thanked her again for the yogurt and for the pencil.

“Stop thanking me,” she laughed.

“It was nothing.”

We left the shop, loitering for a bit in the parking lot.

I asked if she wanted a ride.

She said she’d walk and pointed to the neighborhood across the street, huge houses with two-car garages.

All I could do was thank her again for the yogurt.

She laughed again.

And when she did, her hand reached out, brushing the inside of my left wrist.

“You’ll never forgive me for that, will you?”

My wrist has been tingling ever since.

Back on campus, I’ve been examining the pencil, hoping it might show me some sort of hidden message.

It really is just a pencil,

though, from any way I look at it.

A nice one, to be sure.

But looking at it makes me tired, as if this whole last year of

searching is finally catching up to me.

Maybe it wasn’t worth it.

Grandfather would say to look at the bright side, to think of the journey not the destination, etc.

So I guess without the

search I never would have gotten the chance to work with Prof.

Logan or EMbrS and certainly never would have learned so much

about how to build resilient data pipelines.

And I met someone new, someone nice, someone I hope I’ll see again.

And most

importantly, in a few days, I’ll be going home to see grandmother and grandfather, and to celebrate another year of her life.

So maybe it’s a good thing, for it to have ended in this ambiguous way.

Part of me feared what I might learn about grandmother,

what this rift between her and Meng might reveal.

That she might become something other than the unfailingly supportive grandmother

who walked me to my bus stop in the worst Boston snowstorms, patiently taught me Chinese even when I was a brat about learning

it, and who held me after my father left and said over and over that she was here and she always would be.

So, it’s not all disappointment.

Still, I was really hoping for more than a pencil.