Page 33

From the diary of Monica Tsai

November 30, 2018

I’ve had more time to think about grandmother’s words, and Meng’s.

A number of things became clear to me after I bled out

Meng’s pencil heart.

First, I stopped feeling quite so bad for myself.

I made myself get up and go to the hospital.

Grandmother’s

surgery went well.

Still, it is alarming how quickly she’s fading.

Maybe it’s the unfamiliar environment or the fact that

she is writing less and less, or the pain is getting to her.

She is only present half the time when I visit.

The day after her surgery, she was remarkably lucid.

She smiled when grandfather said he was going to help himself to more

of the cafeteria’s General Tso’s chicken to support their diversity initiatives.

And she complimented the lion’s head meatballs

I made for her, even though they were flat and dry.

I asked her what kept her writing.

Her pencil is so short now.

One of the nurses asked me if grandmother was writing a novel, to which I could only say no, I didn’t think so, and really, I had no idea what she was writing.

Could she have that much to say to Meng?

“It’s not only for Meng,” she said.

She tapped her pencil against her chin.

“I suppose it is for me, too.”

“Your memory?” I asked.

I pictured her as Penelope, weaving her shroud each day, unraveling it each night to keep the suitors

at bay.

Grandmother was writing to keep the fog away, and once she allowed herself to finish, she would be lost.

She denied it, though, insisted it wasn’t to help her memory.

“To make myself more palatable. To start forgiving myself.”

It’s made me rethink all this journaling that I’ve been doing.

At first, I journaled for EMbrS, thinking it would help me

form connections in the future.

I guess I never really thought about just having this for myself.

To help me reframe my story

as something more palatable.

One where I’m strong and independent and not a heartbroken recluse.

One where I’m more like Meng

and grandmother, capable of surviving so much.

“There’s nothing to forgive,” I said.

“Not anymore. You left the pencils behind.”

“But what of all the lives and stories I betrayed?”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

It reminded me of the articles Prof.

Logan sent around, the big tech employees wondering

what role they played in our fractured democracy, our polarized political body, and media, when they had believed they were

regular people with a particular talent, something unique to offer.

“I don’t know about their stories,” I said.

“But you made mine better than I could have ever asked for.”

Her eyes went soft for a moment, then faded into blankness.

I held her hand for a bit longer.

She idly traced the scar Meng’s

words had left on my arm.

I told her I would be back, that I had to speak to my professor, and she gave a confused nod.

After the fight with Louise, I had returned to EMbrS, hoping I could drown myself in code.

Instead, I ended up digging through Prof.

Logan’s internal documents.

You can’t say he’s a total hypocrite—he even shares these kinds of sensitive investor business plans freely with the team.

I was just never brave enough to look.

They confirmed what I already suspected and wouldn’t let myself really consider.

The plan to make EMbrS profitable was simple.

It followed every other tech product model.

Offer the tool for free.

Let users experience the wondrous connections it could

make.

Then sell the journal data, the richest kind of data there is—stories of how we perceive ourselves, perfect for targeting

ads, for language models, for letting us think we’ve automated something as important as human connection.

Since grandmother’s fall, Prof.

Logan messaged a few times, telling me to take it easy, to only log back on once everything

had settled down.

He even sent flowers.

In so many ways, he and EMbrS saved me this past semester.

Not only the money, or

the mentorship, or even having something productive to work on, to keep my mind busy.

But all the journaling he so wholeheartedly

recommended is finally making things clear.

It became too obvious what I had to do.

It took me the whole afternoon to devise what I wanted to say in the first and only journal entry I would submit to EMbrS.

I wrote that I was an EMbrS engineer, the one with the grandmother.

I wrote the truth about how Louise and I had connected,

how it had all been through social media data and quite a bit of luck, how there hadn’t been a journaling component at all.

How that data was technically private and not something EMbrS would have access to after it went for-profit.

How Prof.

Logan’s

pitch was built on a lie.

How my father had found Meng years ago without using any new-age technology.

I submitted the entry, then hard-coded other branches to ensure EMbrS matched my entry to all the investors who were testing

the product.

I had to commit the code to deploy it.

My commit message: I’m sorry .

I only had to wait eight minutes before he called me.

“Monica.” His voice was strained, the complete opposite from his smooth presenter voice.

“What have you done?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it.

It was not his fault, really, not entirely.

I had gone along for so long.

“I know you

and the team mean well. But I don’t believe in it anymore.”

“So you’d burn us to the ground?” he asked in a way that made me flinch.

“EMbrS was only ever supposed to share between two people. Not data brokers and, and—”

He made a strangled sound.

“Don’t you see data selling is the only kind of business model that works these days? A critical

mass of people will only use EMbrS if it’s free. Otherwise, there aren’t enough nodes to make meaningful connections, like

you’re paying for a telephone that no one else uses. But someone needs to pay. The server costs alone are huge. This was the

trade-off. The connections formed are priceless. I thought you understood.”

It was so practiced.

I wondered how many times he had told himself these very same words.

“I understand,” I said.

“But that doesn’t mean I’ll continue working on it. You could just go in and delete my entry.”

“You and I both know data is never really deleted on the internet,” he said.

“Those investors received notifications as soon

as you linked your entry. If I delete now, they’ll find it even more suspicious.”

“Maybe they’ll still back you.”

“Well, you’ve made it really fucking hard now, haven’t you? After all I have done for you?”

He had saved me from a semester of languishing, believed in me and my abilities when I could have easily been cast aside and

forgotten.

Had really been nothing except kind, looking out for my future when I did not believe I had one.

Was this how Meng felt when she started the fire that burned down the Phoenix Pencil Company?

Did she hesitate to burn her family’s legacy once she recognized its danger?

Her pain echoed.

Of course it hurt.

As her mother screamed at her, trying to run into the building, and Meng held her back, wrapping her arms around her mother’s flailing body, until the flames were all-consuming and her mother turned limp in her arms, as if Meng had destroyed her, and not a building.

My actions were trivial in comparison.

Still, it hurt.

To set fire to everything I had built the last year, to burn this bridge

with him.

“I’m grateful. Really, I am.” It was all I could say.

He gave a shaky sigh, bordering on a laugh.

“I knew it was a mistake to work with idealist undergrads.”

“I am sorry things turned out this way.”

“I’m mad, Monica. In fact, I’m furious. Part of it is because I know you are at least partially right, and I can’t stand it.

Do me a favor. If you come back next semester, don’t sign up for any of my classes.”

“Yes, Professor.”

He hung up.

When I tried to refresh EMbrS again, I received an access-denied page.

For a while, I sat at my desk, trembling.

I even spiraled a bit, thinking of Prof.

Logan’s many connections, wondering if

he would tarnish my name, turn the other professors against me, place me on a do-not-hire list.

I now realize it was the first

time I had truly taken a risk in sharing how I felt.

With grandmother, I had only done so when she forced the truth out of

my pencil—and with Louise, it was only after I learned her motivations and I had nothing left to lose.

I shuddered, and wondered

what she would think of me now.

But it doesn’t matter what she thinks, does it?

She tried to call me, text me, until I told her to please stop, not right

now, I need time, I need to take care of grandmother, and she had gone silent.

That night was grandmother’s last in the hospital.

Grandfather was already asleep, and I still didn’t want to talk to Louise.

I was tired and drained after my call with Prof.

Logan, but found I wanted, needed, to talk to someone.

Meng’s message made the answer obvious.

I called my father.

One of the most surprising things I learned was that he had spoken with Meng.

We always knew she was likely in the same city,

but it was a large city, and he did not care enough for his family here, so why would he seek out this distant relative?

That

I could have called him, that he could have simply told me how to reach Meng—compared to the way I went about searching, setting

up internet scrapers, driving to meet Louise, retrieving Meng’s pencil from her, learning how to Reforge, having my heart

broken—it was almost laughable, the simplicity of the alternative.

But maybe that’s just the way of the women in our family,

for everything to involve a pencil and a broken heart.

“Monica!” he exclaimed, genuinely surprised.

We had not spoken since I called him from the hospital.

He had written a few

emails to me, which I had skimmed, then ignored.

“Is everything okay? Grandmother should be coming home soon, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“No, she’s fine. I just... I wanted to see how you were doing.”

He blinked.

Then he told me things were going well, he would be able to wrap up loose ends more quickly than he thought.

He

didn’t realize until hearing about grandmother’s fall how bad things had gotten, and he would try to get home as soon as possible.

“In fact, I should be able to return before your spring semester. So you can go back to school.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said, surprising myself with how much I meant it.

Even if I had to avoid Prof.

Logan, I wanted to go

back to school, to keep learning.

“But how about you come to Shanghai first? While I still live here. You can come before your semester starts, and I can show

you around. I think you’d like it here.” For the first time, I heard the pleading in his voice.

“I can’t just leave grandmother and grandfather here.”

“Well, why don’t you ask them? I think they might like the idea of you coming here.”

I said I would, though I did not actually intend to.

Still, it was difficult not to envision myself in Shanghai, walking along

that same skyline that had been in Meng and Louise’s picture.

“Do you have Meng’s contact info?” I asked suddenly.

“Who?”

“Grandmother’s cousin’s.”

“Oh! I—I would need to look for it. I probably lost it though, I’m sorry to say.”

“That’s alright.” It was such a typical answer from him that I was not even disappointed.

“But how did you find her in the

first place?” I could not help asking.

“Oh. I met her in a mahjong hall. She’s a fiend.”

I smiled.

“Of course she is.”

We talked for a little longer, mostly about logistics—when grandmother was coming home, when my spring semester was starting,

what flights he should look into.

And it was nice, to be able to speak to him normally, to begin to allow some of the old

resentment to fade.

The next day, grandfather and I went to the hospital to take grandmother home.

We rented the nicest car we could afford.

Grandmother

came out in a wheelchair.

She will need it for a while.

Grandfather insisted on tying a balloon to the arm even though the

first thing we did, once grandmother was safely in the car, was collapse the chair and throw it in the trunk.

But when we

got home and opened the trunk, the balloon eagerly floated to attention, and grandmother laughed in delight.

She was not totally

present, but it was wonderful to see her happy, to see her at home.

I had a whole setup waiting in the living room, which we had converted into her bedroom.

We helped her onto her bed, and I gave her an old tablet.

I showed her how to navigate through the apps, as grandfather booted up his desktop.

And once grandmother was set up, I grabbed my laptop, and we all signed in to the mahjong app.

A mahjong LAN party.

We needed the app so that our fourth player could be the computer.

But it took both grandmother and grandfather a while to

understand how the game worked in a virtual setting, and it didn’t help that the rules were slightly different from the variant

we played.

The computer would play its tile immediately, but grandmother and grandfather played slowly, so different from

their usual cavalier tossing of tiles.

The patterns on the tiles were different than ours and grandfather had a hard time

discerning the flower tiles from the wind tiles, and grandmother would pause for long periods.

I would go over to help, explaining

how to play a tile and reach for one a player threw out, but it never seemed to stick, and by the end I knew her whole hand.

We had a few good rounds, even if grandmother was never fully present.

“Maybe we try again another day,” grandfather suggested gently.

Grandmother looked relieved when I took the tablet out of

her hands.

That was when everything caught up to me.

A nurse will be coming by for the next few weeks to aid grandmother in her recovery.

It felt like the last day it would be only us.

I had wanted it to be special.

But the weight of the previous weeks, Meng’s

letter, grandmother’s fall, confronting Prof.

Logan, Louise’s betrayal, and now grandmother, home but barely remembering,

all came crashing down.

I hung my head and tried not to let them see.

But of course, they noticed.

“Oh, it’s okay to cry, 寶貝 ,” grandfather said immediately.

He rested his hands on my shoulders, and we sat with grandmother on the bed.

“It has been

such a hard semester for you, hasn’t it? But you have been so strong and good.”

Grandmother nodded.

She wasn’t fully present, I knew, but even this version of herself that could not remember where she was, or maybe even who I was, still frowned, a pained arch to her eyebrow, as she saw my tears.

I swallowed.

“What hurts?” she asked.

Everything hurts, I thought.

I wanted, more than anything, someone to talk to, someone other than them, someone who would

listen to the highs and lows of my day and help me process this slow, cruel loss.

“What about that girl?” grandmother suddenly asked.

“You were so happy when that girl was here. Invite her back.”

I managed a shaky laugh.

I tried to catch grandfather’s eye, to have a moment where we could agree she was talking nonsense.

Instead, he looked as sincere as she did.

“You don’t remember how she hurt you?” I asked.

Grandmother shrugged.

“I forgive,” she said, as if it were the simplest thing to do.

And maybe it was, for her.

She, who had wanted Meng’s forgiveness for so long and who now finally had it.

“Grandmother and I talked earlier today,” grandfather said, “and we want you to go to Shanghai.”

“Shanghai? But I can’t leave you two here.”

“We’ll have the nurse. And it might only get harder for you to leave us. Grandmother wants to give her pencil to Meng. She

wants you to meet her.”

“Are you done writing?” I asked grandmother.

She picked a pencil up from her bedside table.

It was always with her, the one possession she never forgot.

She held it out

on the palms of her hands.

I took it gingerly.

At night, I found a box to store it.

I wondered about the story inside and how it ended.

What kind of ending would grandmother

write for herself?

I closed the box and tucked it in my suitcase.

I drafted a message I knew I would not send:

: grandmother is finally home!

: she is getting worse and I miss you but I don’t know if I should and it’s only going to get harder here.

she can barely

move on her own and I miss her, even though she’s still here, and I have never been surer of myself yet also more alone

I deleted the draft.

Then I began looking up flights to Shanghai.