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.