Cover

Dedication

For 外公and 外婆, grandparents extraordinaire

Chapter 1

From the diary of Monica Tsai, backed up on five servers spanning three continents

August 11, 2018 (2018-08-11T22:54:30.218542)

Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. United States of America (39.9058546,75.3562615)

I met a girl today who gave me a pencil.

It was a real journey to get to her too. Not only because she lived across the river in New Jersey and I had to borrow Prof. Logan’s stupidly nice car, or because she made me nervous, in a heart-racing kind of way. But because I had already been looking for a year. My goal wasn’t her or the pencil, exactly. Really, I was trying to help my grandmother reconnect with her cousin, the one she rarely talks about, who she grew up with at the family pencil company, back in Shanghai.

It all started a year ago, when me, grandmother, and grandfather were celebrating grandmother’s ninetieth birthday at her favorite restaurant, Arby’s. I was feeling bummed for a couple reasons—the first being that I was leaving for college in a few days and every sort of panic was setting in: that I’d still have trouble making friends, that grandmother and grandfather would struggle without me at home, and I hadn’t been able to think of a single suitable gift for her birthday. We go to Arby’s every year. They have her favorite coupon—five roast beef sandwiches for the price of two, and you can use the coupon twice. But I was really hoping to do something different, something special for this one.

Grandmother can’t stand the thought that I’d willingly hand over money for her sake, so purchasing anything was out of the question, and our walls were already littered with the drawings I’d given her every other year. My coupon book of chores also went unused. Then there was the time I tried to cook for her. She watched so nervously as I wielded the knife that my real gift was giving up so she could finally relax.

I knew she could tell I was feeling down that day. She’s always been able to see right through me. Maybe that’s why, as she brushed the sesame seeds that had fallen from her bun onto her napkin, she mentioned Meng.

“Meng used to flick sesame seeds at me all the time back in the pencil company.” It was the most specific detail I had ever heard about her cousin or the old family business.

I had formed this ghostly image of Meng, someone who had once been like a sister to her, who also grew up in the pencil company and lived through two wars in Shanghai, and here she was suddenly reappearing, the answer to my predicament. I don’t usually press when grandmother speaks about her past. She’ll rub the scars on her arm and change the subject to anything other than her cousin, anything other than the pencil company. And grandfather will shake his head, just a little bit. But there’s clearly a deep love for Meng hidden there, a tender pain. I thought maybe I could help her resolve it. So this time, I pressed. What if I could find Meng? I asked. What if she’s still alive, still in Shanghai, and there’s a chance to reconnect?

Normally, I don’t think grandmother would have agreed. But grandfather gave her this look, and maybe since it was her birthday she realized she should do something, or she was feeling sentimental, with me leaving for college and all. Whatever it was, she wrote down the characters for Meng’s name. That night, I began my search, not expecting it would take me almost a year to find a lead.

Her name was Louise Sun. EMBRS told me this a week ago. Actually, more precisely, it said:

Sparks are flyin’, we’ve found a match! Your query for “Meng Chen”, “陳夢”, “Shanghai Pencil Company”, “上海鉛筆廠”, “Phoenix Pencil Company”, “鳳凰鉛筆廠” has sparked a connection with Louise Sun, click to reveal.

I think we’ve made EMBRS too colloquial, but that’s kind of Prof. Logan’s cringe style, and since I’m a lowly undergrad researcher and he’s a hotshot professor, there isn’t much I can say about it.

The matching post was a picture of two women, one old and one young. I zoomed in on the older woman first, searching for traces of grandmother. There were similarities around the mouths and how their hair grayed in specks rather than completely whitening. Behind the women was the waterfront, Shanghai’s skyline sparkling. Beneath the picture, a post written by Louise:

Hello from behind the Great Firewall! Couldn’t get my VPN to work until now, but I’ve been having the time of my life in Shanghai this summer with this absolute BOSS sitting next to me here. She lived through the Japanese occupation of Shanghai and ran the Phoenix Pencil Company, one of the only woman-run companies in the city at the time! They would make custom pencils for people all over. My high standard for writing implements feels justified now! #uniball4eva Two more weeks here, then I’ll be back to the Hill. DM if you want to catch up!

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.

I hated that it had taken me this long to find Meng, that evasive woman. There was no trace of her on the internet, at least not with the search engines I was using. It made some sense—she would also be in her nineties and had likely never used the internet that much, and then there was China’s firewall to contend with. But thanks to grandfather, I have a knack for computers, and halfway through my first semester, I enlisted the computer science lab’s servers to help. I configured scrapers that searched the internet every few minutes for any mention of Meng or the Phoenix Pencil Company. I signed up my bots for Chinese social media sites. I researched different search algorithms, spent hours combing through false positives. I wasn’t supposed to use the department’s servers this way. It’s not like anyone told me I couldn’t, but I guess the scraping generated enough suspicious traffic tied to my username that Prof. Logan noticed.

I had been skeptical of Prof. Logan, to be honest. He’s super young for his seniority in the department, his office hours are always full of fanboys, and computer science fanboys are kind of the worst. But I can only say he’s been nice to me and that instead of reprimanding me, he skimmed my code and offered me a summer research opportunity to work on his project called EMBRS.

It stands for something stupid that I can’t even remember off the top of my head—okay, I just looked it up—Electronic Memory Bank Enabling Radical Sharing. That’s Prof. Logan’s thing: radical sharing. He managed to turn this into an acronym but dropped the second E since that’s what all the cool companies are doing, and he really went all in on the fire theme. At its core, EMBRS is a souped-up search engine that prioritizes not finding information exactly, but “sparking connections” between people. It doesn’t care to index large businesses or medical terms or even news—it only cares about data written by an individual about their own life. Think social media posts, newsletters, blogs, that kind of thing. And because of its status as an academic research project, as well as Prof. Logan’s uncanny number of connections, it has access to more social media posts than anything else out there. By then I was desperate for help finding Meng, so I signed on.

Prof. Logan has this dream, which I must admit sounds kind of nice, especially for a shy recluse like me. Right now, EMBRS uses existing stuff people post on social media. But his real goal is to turn it into an all-encompassing journaling app where people write freely about their lives. The journals stay private, just between you and EMBRS. His voice goes all soft when he describes this: he says to imagine you’re at a party where you don’t know anyone, but EMBRS has already compared your life journal with everyone else’s in attendance, and can tell you that you and the guy wearing sunglasses, who you previously thought very rude and standoffish, are actually both huge fans of the same anime, have both written mature fan fiction about the same pairing, which is maybe something that neither of you would have admitted to a stranger at a party. Suddenly you have this shared interest, and just like that, a connection is sparked. Around then is when Prof. Logan gets on his soapbox and says social media posts are enough for EMBRS now, but that they’re too short, too performative, and contribute to our perceived isolation, our fractured democracy, whereas a life’s journal with only EMBRS as a reader is real and true, and all his fanboys start singing his praises on Reddit.

I guess it’s also why I started keeping this journal, even though EMBRS isn’t a journaling app quite yet, and that’s because Prof. Logan is maybe the only person ever to try to think through content moderation before building a product—we don’t want to be in the business of sparking connections between Nazis, after all. While I have to respect him for this, I’m not totally sold on radical sharing yet. I figure maybe one day I will be, though, and I’ll feed all this into EMBRS, to let it know some stuff about me, and it’ll help me make connections that I haven’t really been able to make on my own, on account of the whole recluse thing.

Each minute that passed without a reply from grandmother was killing me. I can’t ever repay my grandparents for all they’ve done for me. They raised me when my parents wouldn’t, supported me in every possible way, rejected all attempts to show my gratitude. This was the one thing I could do for them with the skills I have.

I was about to call the landline when she finally texted back.

👩🏻➡️⬅️👩🏻 ☑️ 🙏 xiexie

Relieved, I composed a careful message to Louise Sun. I asked if the woman in her picture was by any chance Chen Meng (陳夢), that if so, she was a cousin of my grandmother’s (Wong Yun 王筠). Would she please let me know if it was really her?

With the time difference, I thought Louise wouldn’t respond until much later in the day. To my delight, she replied almost immediately.

omg! yes, that’s her name! ill ask about your grandmother today! do you have a pic i could share with her?

Something about the casualness of her message, her openness, drew me in, even then. Was it also her face in her photographs, the easy smile, the confident eyes? Okay, maybe. But there were so many questions I wanted to ask her. How had she run into Meng? Was Meng an attendee at economics conferences? Or maybe a volleyball fan? Was Meng a mahjong fiend? Did they play together?

I sent her two pictures. One was me and my grandparents outside the classroom where my grandfather used to teach. The second was from the summer before college, when I’d ransacked the attic and found a bag of used wooden pencils. I brought them down, photographed the pile, even took a few close-ups of the ones that still had their markings. Beautiful etchings that formed the outline of a phoenix. When I asked grandmother about them, she said they were from the pencil company and asked that I put them away. I noticed that a few of them—it’s hard to explain exactly—but some were hollow, as if the lead had fallen out, leaving only the wooden casing. Grandmother caught me staring down the barrel of one. She rested her hand over mine. Her hand, all loose, wrinkled skin, should have been soft and familiar. Instead, there was a rigidity to her fingers as she pulled the pencil away. I let her, of course, and we did not talk about them again.

whoa, awesome! will report back later today, your tmrw

I could hardly sleep that night. Summer was ending, which meant I had to wrap up my EMBRS work in the next few days, and the Pennsylvania humidity was awful. It was a tossing-and-turning-and-reimagining-algorithms kind of night. But the end of summer also meant I would be headed home to Cambridge soon, at least for a few weeks, to celebrate another birthday with grandmother, and this time I’d have a proper gift for her.

Louise’s message the next morning was all I could have asked for.

hey! i spent the day with meng. she was surprised to say the least! she wants to send something to your grandmother and she gave it to me. i can mail it to you when im back in the states? ill be back in two days!

I was feeling ridiculously grateful for everything and everyone—for my grandparents, as always, for EMBRS and Prof. Logan making this happen, and for this girl, Louise, who would ferry the culmination of a year’s worth of effort to me. I was even grateful for radical sharing. EMBRS never would have found Louise if she hadn’t been doing her own form of radical sharing. I figured I should try to be more open, and really it wouldn’t do for whatever Meng wanted to give my grandmother to be lost in the mail, so I asked, contrary to my nature, if Louise wanted to meet in person. I told her I went to school not far from Cherry Hill and wanted to thank her properly.

ooh yeah, sounds good! would it be too much to ask you to come to NJ though? i hate driving and id make a mess of it with jet lag

I agreed, and it wasn’t long before we were setting a date at a frozen yogurt shop.

Which brings me to today. It wasn’t hard to convince Prof. Logan to lend me his car. I told him the truth: I had been using EMBRS, or eating our own dog food, as they say in the industry (though Prof. Logan prefers “drinking our own champagne”), and it had sparked a connection for me, the potential to reunite my grandmother with her long-lost cousin, and the only thing stopping me from making this connection a reality was however would I get to New Jersey? He practically threw his car keys at me.

“A real-life connection sparked by EMBRS!” he cried. “You must go!”

For better or worse, on the forty-five-minute drive, I was too nervous about messing up Prof. Logan’s car to overthink the upcoming encounter. I relaxed only after I pulled in to the strip mall and saw it had amazingly wide parking spots. Louise had offered to meet me halfway, said she could get a ride, but I insisted she was the one doing me a favor.

lol you’re worse than my parents

I had laughed alone in my dorm room at that.

She was already at the frozen yogurt shop when I arrived, easy to recognize since she was the only other Asian person there. She looked up from her phone when the door opened and broke into a wide smile, standing. She was much taller than I imagined, though really I shouldn’t have been surprised, knowing she was on the volleyball team. She had shorter hair than in her profile picture, stopping right above her shoulders. She wore turquoise running shorts and a T-shirt of a band I had never heard of.

We had a good conversation. A really good one, actually, and I’m not sure why that is, given I’m normally not great at conversation. But she was so easy to talk to, open and curious and quick to laugh.

The first thing she insisted on doing was paying for my frozen yogurt.

“You drove all this way,” she said. Even when I repeated that she was the one doing me a favor, she ignored me, barreling her way to the register, the teenager manning it happily going along with her demands. As I reluctantly ate my free green tea yogurt, she told me she hated driving, was terrible at it.

“A walking stereotype, I know,” she laughed. “Luckily I can walk here. Can’t go a mile in Cherry Hill without running into a froyo shop.”

Because I was raised by my grandfather, I really could not take her buying my froyo that easily, so I made a fuss that seemed to amuse her, until finally she said:

“Well, there’s a favor you can do for me, too. Maybe.”

But when I asked her what that might be, she changed the subject.

“Tell me about yourself,” she said, eyes bright. “Where do you go to school?”

“A small school outside of Philly,” I said, my usual vague answer. Not out of any sense of privacy this time, but because most people had never heard of my school.

“Oh.” Her eyes grew real wide. I thought she was about to guess the school. But instead, she said, “Swing state.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“Are you registered to vote?”

I told her I had mailed in some form but didn’t know what became of it. Which made her face go through all these endearing contortions. Her inner debate was so clear to me: not wanting to come off as pushy but also not willing to relent on something this important.

“I’d encourage you to check,” she finally said in a forced light tone.

Amused, I promised her I would. Then I returned her question, asking where she went to school.

“A small school in New Jersey.” She winked and I laughed, even though it might’ve given away that I already knew she went to Princeton, a school everybody has heard of. Grandmother would like her, I thought.

I asked what she studied. Economics, I already knew. But she surprised me.

“I’m thinking of switching majors. I thought econ made sense and was practical and I’d be a big banker or something in New York. Then I changed my mind last semester.” When I asked her what she wanted to do now, she clammed up, her eyes wandering.

“I’m not sure how to explain it yet. But I went to Shanghai to get started.”

So I asked her what she was doing in Shanghai. Maybe I was too eager, but it was exciting to discover her in real life, this version of herself that did not exist on the internet.

“I wanted to . . .” She shifted again. There was a sudden shyness. “Actually, let me give this to you before I forget.”

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