I had to stop myself from immediately sending the picture to grandmother, her ninetieth birthday gift finally delivered, more of a ninety-first birthday gift. The other woman had to be Meng. How many women could have run the Phoenix Pencil Company? Only my grandmother and her cousin. But first I had to do my due diligence on this Louise character. Because deepfakes, you know? And it was hard to believe that EMBRS, this new app that ran my code, had worked when all else had failed.

I’m pretty good at knowing what sites and keywords to use to verify information. But I didn’t need any of that with Louise. She had so much about herself readily available online for browsing. It was as if she’d never heard of data privacy in her life. She was a Princeton undergrad from Cherry Hill, New Jersey. She had won some first-year award in the economics department and was a starting player on the volleyball team. The article came with pictures—I promise I did not seek them out. But it was hard to look away from her air of concentration, knees bent, arms flat together, eyes up toward the ceiling. She had a strangely captivating jawline.

Satisfied that she was real and thrilled EMBRS was working, I sent grandmother an email with the photo attached.

Wo gen Louise Sun you 3 mutual friends.

Yao bu yao connect 👩🏻➡️⬅️👩🏻?

Ever since grandmother got a smart phone, this is how we communicate. A third in a thousand-year-old language romanized in the dominant language here, a third in the dominant language when I don’t know a word, and a third in the language of the future—emojis—for when I’m afraid she might not understand the English. Grandfather calls it our little cryptography. That was his field, cryptography, but even he says it takes too much effort to read our messages, and so it’s become a language of our own.

I expected a quick reply. Grandmother and grandfather are more technically savvy than a lot of my classmates. They always have their phone volume turned way up to hear their notifications. It’s woken me a few times—relatives in Taiwan sending memes in the middle of the night—though they can sleep right through it.

When she didn’t reply within ten minutes, I started imagining all sorts of scenarios—they had been hit by a car at that bad intersection, one of them was in the hospital with pneumonia, or maybe they were sleeping in after an exciting night of mahjong with new friends.