“Let’s say you’re an archivist for Cambridge,” she continued without pause. I wondered if this was what I sounded like when I was explaining EMBRS to her. “And let’s say there’s a march demanding better roads for bikers. There are some articles about it, and some photos, which you save to the archives. Because they are there, Cambridge suddenly has this history of having fought for biker rights. And that helps shape the community—there’s proof this has been done before, a rung on the ladder, so let’s build the next rung and have an even bigger march. Bike lanes show up, and the city invests in a widespread bike share system. Now you’re a city known for biking, and it’s a source of pride. Everyone in Cambridge has different experiences but in some way, you are all shaped by its good biking system.”

“Biking’s not that great in Cambridge,” I muttered. She ignored me.

“But now let’s say you find out about this elderly couple who was bought out of their home in favor of installing a hub for electric bikes. The couple doesn’t speak English, and so they were never able to advocate for themselves. How do you reconcile that with the narrative of Cambridge as a great city for biking?”

“Did you have to make it an elderly couple with bad English?” I asked miserably.

“Sorry,” she said gently. “But this is where memory work fits in. Now let’s say you decide you need to advocate for people like this elderly couple. You want to go back and look at this narrative from a different lens, from the perspective of a less privileged group. The great biking city narrative already exists though. And so you have to operate on the memory which the city already has of itself. If you don’t surface their voices, you’re giving tacit approval for displacing the elderly in favor of bikes. It’s about no longer excluding those who are always excluded. Not only that—it’s about actively working against it. So that the next time you’re archiving something, you automatically look for the narrative of the older population and work that into your community’s collective memory.”

I closed my eyes. I pictured her with Meng, the picture that started it all, the one that triggered the EMBRS alert and brought her and Meng into our lives. Shanghai’s skyline in the background. Someone Meng found remarkable.

“But you’re not looking at biking in Cambridge, are you?” I said.

“I know nothing about biking in Cambridge,” she agreed.

“You’re looking at Shanghai. At Meng’s generation. At my grandmother’s generation.”

“Women who survived both wars,” she confirmed. “Especially the ones who made their way here, whose stories were never added to the nation’s memory. Not to China’s, or Taiwan’s, or America’s.”

“My grandmother, then.”