How had I forgotten? Was memory that fallible? EMBRS provided a link to the source article. It was from 1954. I calculated. Grandmother would have been twenty-seven. She would have just gotten to America. I was finding her ghost in these pixels. The article included an exact address, which I searched.

It did not take long to find a city record for the property. It included a name, a Chinese one, definitely not grandmother’s. I searched the name separately. This was the kind of thing grandmother wouldn’t understand, and neither would Louise. Even if pencils had great power, they could not compare to the power, the widespread usage, the sheer amount of data, of the computer.

The name was that of a military man, high-ranking in the Nationalist forces. I did not know much about the Nationalists other than that they were a political party in Taiwan. Did he know grandmother?

There wasn’t much detail about him available—in English, at least. Though he was not well known, the division of the government he served in was, and so I searched for that. The results returned with too many articles, all on the same topic.

An extensive intelligence network designed to purge dissidents.

I skimmed the articles and quickly shut EMBRS down, purged the data I had fed it, and closed my laptop. I was left with the laptop fan slowly whirring and the eventual silence of my bedroom. I could hear, beyond my closed door, the Taiwan news grandfather always watched, passionate voices debating one matter or another, grandfather yelling his opinion, while grandmother stayed out of it, cooking or knitting in the background.

There are a lot of things I don’t know about history, about politics, especially when my public school only covered American history for the most part. I knew America had a strong anti-Communist movement, that there had been spies, and it seemed like Taiwan had spies, too. But it all felt so foreign to me, so different from the Taiwan I knew, where I went every other summer to visit family in their air-conditioned skyscrapers. Even grandmother felt it was safe for me to explore the city on my own, take the subway and buses, decide for myself that yes, I did want to drink three bubble teas in one afternoon and be too full to eat dinner, and venture out to the night market for a midnight snack.

I couldn’t reconcile the Taiwan I knew with the Taiwan that EMBRS was trying to show me, a history of martial law and terror, its citizens disappeared or mysteriously killed for protesting, or simply for attending one wrong gathering. And of course, I could not reconcile the grandmother I knew with someone who might have had any part in that history.

For the first time, I thought, Why not let her be forgotten as she wants to be?