We took the train into Chinatown. Grandfather likes to point out how everything has changed since he was young, how the neighborhood was cleaved in two by the highway, one building literally truncated, all its feng shui ruined. We decided to buy one egg tart at each bakery we came across and rank them with grandmother when we got home.

As we waited for a fresh batch that would be ready in a few minutes, I asked grandfather how long he had known about the pencils.

“For years,” he said. “Decades. Seven decades, perhaps.”

“And what do you think of it?” I pressed. I wanted to hear the opinion of the smartest man I knew.

“It is nothing short of a brilliant power,” he said.

“Really? Even if no one uses pencils anymore?”

“Even so.” He was looking at the zongzi, but grandmother is picky about her zongzi, preferring the Shanghai style of marinated pork belly wrapped in glutinous rice, no peanuts, no eggs. “I think it’s about understanding, and about sharing.”

I considered his response.

“How did she share with you?” I asked.

He chuckled. “You don’t want to know. Oh, don’t pout. Tell me about your latest algorithm.”

He said it the same way he used to when I was a kid waiting at the bus stop. He’d always have me recite the multiplication table until the bus arrived. As the baker emerged with a tray full of tarts, their warm buttery flakiness filling the air, I told him about my latest effort for EMBRS. The tricky data transformations to convert a news site into something EMBRS could use to improve its understanding. After all, EMBRS will need to have some base knowledge of the world to understand what’s most significant in a blog or journal entry. As we paid, grandfather poked at my logic, asking about the size of the payload, the storage options, the efficiency, and I proudly countered until he was satisfied. He did give me an idea for an optimization that I admitted was a good one, and he remained smug all the way home until grandmother asked what had made him so happy.

“Education.” He beamed, and I rolled my eyes.

I met Prof. Logan for our weekly 1:1 meeting after that. Ever since I’ve gone full-time, he’s taken me more seriously, almost like a partner in the development of EMBRS. Maybe because I’m churning out an absurd amount of code. There’s a comforting normalcy to writing code, and I find myself working on EMBRS constantly.