“When she took her own life, people talked. Was whatever she had infectious? But within weeks, people boxed it away—boxed her away. When she lived, all the parents held her up as the paragon. She was what the first generation wanted the second generation to be. When she died, everyone told us to treat her as an aberration. But I don’t think she was an aberration. What happened to her was, as the people in my tech world say, a feature of the system. Not a bug.”

Anita began to recite facts and figures, things I’d heard many times by then. That parents were going hungry to pay for kids’ cram schools in Kota and Queens alike. That we, Asian Americans, dwelt in a troubling silence when it came to mental health. These stories had, through the years, filled my mother’s ears: an acquaintance of an acquaintance who had, upon receiving a 1200 on his third SAT attempt, taken himself to the Edison train station, lain down on the tracks, and waited until the Northeast Corridor train rolled in from Manhattan and over him. His father was aboard, commuting home from work. A girl in my aunt Sandhya’s chemistry class at Fremont High, threatened by her parents with a one-way ticket to Lucknow for screwing around with another girl—carbon monoxide in the garage. And others, and others.

“It’s on us,” Anita was saying, speaking with so much urgency that I wondered if someone was coming onstage to forcibly un-mic her. The person holding the phone—the person who’d decided this video ought to be “riposted”—was not steady enough to settle on Anita’s face as she concluded. Perhaps if I had seen a shade of uncertainty in her expression, I would have been less furious. But her voice was so sure as she tied up the speech, as though she were wrapping up the neatest story in the world, and in doing so, gliding into the next era with no ghosts at her back. “By it’s on us, I mean me,” she said, “and I mean you, whether you knew her or not. Us. Our community, our logics, our values. We did that to her.”