Chapter Five
The Alpha Fellows application is decently straightforward, which is kind of disappointing. Like, hi, I expected at least one question to be written in binary or hidden in the page source code.
One of the short-answer questions goes like, Tell us about your first experience programming.
I respond with this sappy paragraph about writing Hello World at age six and how it felt like magic.
I don’t mention that my father was the one who taught me how to program.
That it was the last time I ever saw him.
During Mom’s pregnancy, Baba got a job in Shenzhen, China.
He moved there while my mother stayed behind in America—they wanted me to get citizenship here.
After I was born, he visited every few months, and when he came for my sixth birthday, he brought me a laptop.
It was made by the company he worked at, Huawei.
It was sleek and silver. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever touched.
“Tang Yijun.” Mom said his full name like that only when she reprimanded him. “How much did this cost?”
“Relax, Qinxu,” he said. “The boss is going to give me a big bonus this year. I can smell it.” He even sniffed the air for dramatic effect.
“She’s too young,” Mom said. “What does a child need a computer for?”
“It’s the future. Don’t you want her to be part of the future? Isn’t that why we decided to raise her in America?”
He smiled with dimples. My mother once told me that those dimples were dangerous; he could use them to get anybody to do anything.
She sighed. “Don’t show her those video games you play.”
He nodded vigorously. “Of course not. Educational purposes only.”
After dinner, he showed me how to turn on the laptop, set up a username and password, and access the Web through Internet Explorer (which was still a thing back then). We created a Gmail account for me. I thought the computer was awesome, but I was happier to have an excuse to spend time with him.
“You have to be careful on the internet,” he said. “There are a lot of bad people. A lot of lies.”
I pointed at a banner ad with a voluptuous blonde, the words Sexy singles are waiting to meet you! plastered beneath her photo. “So that’s a lie?”
My dad coughed. “Yes, don’t click on any of those. Actually, let’s install Adblock for you.”
He wanted me to learn how to code. He demonstrated how to make the computer print Hello world! in Python. He signed me up for the Art of Problem Solving, a website that had programming exercises for kids. Together, we worked through the easiest problems.
While I was puzzling over the concept of a boolean (which sounded like a good name for a stuffed animal), Mom screamed from the kitchen. “Tang Yijun! What the hell is this?” I flinched.
Dad swallowed hard. “I’m going to help your mother,” he says. “Keep going. If you get stuck, you can click on the hints.” So I did.
When my parents argued, it was like a volcano (my mom) fighting a glacier (my dad).
The volcano would spew more and more fire, and the glacier would simply evaporate into steam, which of course would anger the volcano further.
This analogy only works if you forget everything you know about geoscience.
Whatever the fight was about, it seemed to have been fixed by the day Dad had to leave.
We drove him to the airport, and before he disappeared into the security line, he squatted down such that our eyes met.
“Make sure you do the exercises while I’m gone, okay?
I’ll be checking the leaderboard for your username. ”
I nodded.
My father’s next visit was scheduled for around Christmas. It was hard for him to get away from Huawei.
Every day after school, I would complete as many problems as I could. I daydreamed about how proud he’d be when he saw how far I had gotten. Maybe it would even make him want to stay in America for longer.
The day before he was supposed to fly in, my mother sat me down. “Your father won’t be able to come tomorrow. He got busy at work.” She had this horrible, creepy wrinkle in her lips. I think she was trying to smile.
“When can he come?”
“I don’t know yet.” Which was not a satisfying answer to a six-year-old.
So every night, for maybe a week, I asked her the same question. And every night my mother would toss out the same nonanswer.
Finally one evening, she snapped. “Stop asking, Char! Stop. He isn’t coming. He has a new family now. He has a new daughter. Understand?”
I started crying because her voice was so harsh and mean. I couldn’t even process her words. I didn’t get what it meant to “have a new family” or how Dad could have a new daughter if my mother hadn’t been pregnant.
Mom’s face softened. “Oh, baobei. We will be fine without him.”
She held me as I dissolved into tears. Later, she boiled a bag of frozen dumplings (chives and pork, my favorite) and we watched Journey to the West, the nineties animated series about the monkey king Sun Wukong.
I think she assumed those things would make me feel better, but after that night, they were forever stained by the memory of Dad abandoning us.
And week after week, for years, I kept going back to the Art of Problem Solving. He said he’d be watching the leaderboards. He’d said that right before he left. Maybe he’d notice my rising score.
It’s so stupid. It’s so cringe. But deep down, I believed that if I got good enough, maybe he’d come back.