Chapter Twenty-Four
For the rest of Saturday, we make the high-level decisions for our project. The proposal is due on the Fourth of July, which is next Friday. We have to deliver a pitch, wireframes, and design documents.
We decide to name our app Hello World. I like the layered meaning—it’s a reference to the first program every developer write but also evokes the excitement of moving to a new country.
Next we decide on the functionality. I’m thinking something similar to Nextdoor or Reddit, with forum discussion as the main conceit, but with a strong translation feature, since the language barrier gatekeeps immigrants who would otherwise use those websites.
We argue playfully over the tech stack—Khoi is a fan of Flutter since it’s cross-platform, but I’m more familiar with Swift.
He wants to use MongoDB to host our databases, but I prefer PostgreSQL.
I let him win most of the arguments because he knows way more than me, but he can pry SQL from my cold, dead hands.
Those relational databases are giving the only relationships that actually make sense.
Sunday is for product research. Khoi and I brainstorm questions to ask, print out a sign and an information sheet, then claim a table in the MIT main lobby for better visibility.
Curious passersby begin to wander up to us, but nobody agrees to a research interview.
One tourist asks us where the John Harvard statue is.
After ten minutes go by without yeses, I’m starting to fret. “Maybe we should offer an incentive for talking to us. Besides the inherent joy in getting to interact with our wonderful selves, obviously.”
“Obviously.” Khoi drums his fingers against the table. “How about… a compliment?”
“Huh?”
“At the end of the conversation, we give each interviewee a heartfelt compliment. Like this.” He takes my hands into his and stares into my eyes. “Char, you have irises the color of Earl Grey tea.”
God save me from this strange boy and his idiosyncrasies. I pull my hands away and break our shared gaze. “Khoi, don’t flirt. Just friends, remember?”
“People love compliments! Haru is making an app for anonymously complimenting your friends.” Oh, Edvin’s going to love that.
I puff my cheeks out. “Also, my eyes are not the color of Earl Grey. They’re the first strong steep of pu’er.”
“A storm in a teacup,” he mutters, but I pretend not to hear him.
A moment later, one man licking a Popsicle stops by. “Are you an immigrant?” he reads. “I’m here to get my PhD and then I’m going back to Pakistan. Do I still count?”
Honestly I’m unsure, but I nod anyway. It makes sense that we’re going to get grad students, since we’re on campus. “Sit down! We’d love to chat with you.” I pat the chair beside me.
He plops down. “You have until I finish this Popsicle.”
Turns out he really likes talking about himself. Once his Popsicle is gone, he sticks around until I’ve finished all the questions.
For the next few hours, more interviewees trickle in steadily.
There are all sorts of people passing through MIT.
A college student from New Zealand with the coolest accent.
A Syrian refugee who’s waiting for a Tinder date.
A Filipino man who fell in love with a New York lawyer.
A few people who are second-generation immigrant kids, like me.
There’s only one tense moment. At around eleven a.m., while I’m interviewing a teenager whose parents were born in Istanbul, a woman comes up to our table, reads our sign, and wrinkles her nose.
“This app isn’t right,” she says. “You’re excluding people like me.”
The teenager cuts in. “So what? It’s not built for you. But the rest of this country is.”
“You know, technically, everyone is an immigrant,” she says.
“Were Native people immigrants? How about slaves? And are we really going to call colonial settlers immigrants?” The questions spray out rapid-fire.
Khoi and I exchange startled glances. I feel like we should step in before this escalates into a full-blown shouting match, but I don’t know what to do.
To my relief, the woman only nods. “I suppose I haven’t thought of that before.” And then she trots off.
When we break for lunch, I’m overwhelmed.
Some people said they didn’t feel out of place at all in America, while others said they could never quite fit in.
People cited myriad reasons for coming here: more job opportunities, a better life for their children, civil unrest or war in their birth countries, or just a fresh start.
They struggled with divorce, coming out, grief.
And I… I have no idea how to distill all these experiences down into a single app.
As we devour pizza—pineapple for him, sausage-and-pepperoni for me because I don’t hate my taste buds—I say, “Most of my town is white. I’ve never met so many immigrants with all these different stories.”
“Same. My family’s from a very white suburb.” He chews thoughtfully. “Honestly, I don’t know if I count as an immigrant.”
“But you’re Vietnamese?”
He lifts a shoulder. “A lot of the people we spoke to talked about feeling torn between the country of their birth and the country they now reside in. But I’ve never felt like I had to choose. My mom was adopted. I’ve been to Vietnam plenty of times, but it never felt like home.”
“I don’t remember anything about China,” I say. I’ve visited Beijing once, for a funeral when I was four years old. Maybe it’s bad, but I don’t even remember whose funeral it was.
When someone once told me to “go back to my own country,” the comment didn’t piss me off. It confused me. I was born and raised in America. What other country could I ever possibly call home?
Monday morning, Khoi shows me how to use Figma, a software for creating design mockups. We want the app to be intuitive, simple, responsive. I choose a sky-blue palette since that’s Mom’s favorite color.
We each assign ourselves to designing two pages that our app will have—login, user profile, discussion forum, private messaging—and work side by side.
Khoi begins playing something orchestral and cinematic from his laptop speakers. The cellos slide into crescendo. There’s a swell of woodwinds punctured by timpani.
“Really?” I give him a look.
He pauses the symphony. “What’s wrong with Beethoven?”
“Nothing’s wrong with Beethoven. I’m sure he’s a cool guy—”
“He’s not. If he were alive today, he’d totally get canceled for being an asshole.”
“I’ll take your word for it. Anyway, outside of movie scores and concert halls, his music is low-key pretentious. Don’t you have anything more… recent?”
“How recent are we talking? Like Liszt? Tchaikovsky? We’re already deep into the romantic era, Char. There’s not much more recent we can go.”
“Recent like… Cardi B?”
He tilts his head in confusion. “Cardiovascular disease?”
“No, B, not D… never mind.” I turn my attention back to my computer screen. Khoi unpauses the symphony.
A few minutes later, he says, “Let’s play a game.”
“Maybe later.” If this is another one of his tactics to winning over my heart, it’s not going to work. I am totally immune to his flirting.
“Like a game while we code. It’ll make the time go by faster.”
I don’t look up from my laptop. “How’s that work?”
“We ask each other questions and respond with the first thing that comes to mind. The idea is that you exert almost no mental effort into responding.”
“So all my responses are thoughtless?”
“So all your responses are honest.”
Sure, whatever. “Fine. Go ahead. Ask something.”
“You first.”
I narrow my eyes.
“What? You can learn a lot about a person by what questions they ask.”
Okay. I’ve got something. “Would you rather fight one hundred duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck?” It’s a classic.
During our sleepovers, Lola and I kick off Would You Rather with this one.
She thinks she could destroy the horse-sized duck.
I’m a duck-sized horse truther. It’s our friendship’s longest-running argument.
“I’m a pacifist and I believe in animal rights,” Khoi says. “I don’t want to fight either of these things.”
“Sorry, dude. You’re in an empty field and both options are charging toward you right now. You only have your fists to defend you. Pick your poison.”
“I would step aside and let them duke it out with each other,” he says.
I try to arch an eyebrow at him, but I was not blessed with the lifting-a-singular-eyebrow gene. “Just answer the question.”
“Fine! Um…” He thinks for a second. “How large are these horses? Are we talking miniature pony? Thoroughbred?”
“Bruh, I don’t know. Normal horse–sized?”
“I’ll go with the second option,” he says. “I’d feel less bad fighting a monster duck than a bunch of adorable tiny horses.”
“That’s precisely why I’d choose the first. Adorable tiny horses are easier to take on than one monster duck.”
He sucks in his teeth. “Wow, that’s cold, Tang. Remind me never to get on your bad side.”
I flash him a smug smile, then go back to Figma.
“My turn. Who’s your favorite poet?”
“Dunno… maybe Pablo Neruda?” I don’t know a single Pablo Neruda poem, so I’m not sure why I name-dropped him. It just popped into my head. Isn’t he the guy that Lola’s ex Hot Sarah wanted her to read during sex? “You?”
“Ocean Vuong,” he says. “He’s Vietnamese too. Look him up.”
He spells the name out, and I google it. I click on the first link. The poem has a lot of unnecessary line breaks. Why do poets do that? It’s like they write four words and then get bored, so might as well press the enter key! At least in Python, white space means something.
“I don’t get it,” I say.
“You’re not supposed to get poetry. You’re supposed to feel it.”
According to my AP Lang teacher, you’re supposed to dissect it for metaphors and imagery, but I’m not so sure I appreciate that surgical approach to literature. “I wouldn’t have thought you of all people liked poetry.”
It’s weird. I guess I had this impression of Khoi in my head as a huge nerd who only cared about computer science. I mean, he’s still a huge nerd, but one who cares about anything and everything. I like that. I like that a lot.
“Why not? Poetry abstracts the world, just like code. It distills everything down to its purest form.” He gets this dreamy, wide-eyed expression. “Science can’t account for everything. Let me give you an example. You’re from the Oregon coast, right?”
I nod.
“Sure, the tides are caused by the moon’s gravitational pull. The blueness is due to water’s absorption of sunlight. But you know that scientifically unaccountable sense of enchantment and beauty that comes when you look at the ocean?”
Once upon a time I must’ve felt something like that.
When we first moved to Chinook Shore after Michael inherited the house, I was so excited to live right next to the beach.
I always begged my mom to let me go into the water, even though it was ice-cold.
I loved its enormity. I loved how, no matter how far it receded from shore, the sea always returned like a promise.
But nowadays, the Pacific Ocean is a constant reminder of everywhere I am not.
“Okay. Yeah.”
“That’s poetry.”
This boy. I fake gag so he won’t notice how charmed I am by his hopeless poetic wonder.
“Your turn.”
“Yep.” I try to think of a good question. “If you started a cult, what kind of cult would it be?”
“Man. I would be such a terrible cult leader.” He shakes his head. “I’d be the cult leader for, like, people with no rizz. For the introverted and the socially awkward. We’d bring cats to parties and then recruit the people who come play with said cat instead of talking to others.”
“You could pose as waiters and recruit those who say ‘you too’ when you tell them to enjoy their meal,” I suggest.
“People who get profiled by Wired magazine but their interviewer keeps referring to their app as ‘Imposter Symptom’ instead of ‘Imposter Syndrome,’ but they don’t want to be rude by correcting her.”
“Khoi, that sounds like a situation specific to only you.”
“Fair. What kind of cult would you start?”
Hm. I take a second to think. “The cult for people who shamelessly love bad pop music. I’m talking the classics.
Justin Bieber. Kesha back when she still had a dollar sign in her name.
I know it’s like junk food for your brain and I don’t care.
” When it comes to music, I’m like a little kid at the candy store: going for anything sugary sweet, colorful, and easy to reach for.
Khoi shudders. “Char. I want to respect your choices. I really do. But this is going too far.”
“Why do people hate on pop music so much? Is it because they think it’s cool to be edgy and different?”
“No, it’s because most pop music is atrocious.
Music is mankind’s most universal art form.
It exists in every known culture. There are instruments that are thousands of years old.
All of that history and lineage, and somehow the most popular song in the world right now is about how much some guy wants to sleep with a woman he met at a nightclub? ”
“Well, sex is mankind’s second-most universal art form,” I say. “Okay. Your turn to ask.”
He leans forward, resting his chin on the top of my laptop screen. “How are you doing?”
I blink, confused. Is this part of the game? “I’m fine. You?”
“Nonono. People always do that, right? They brush off the question with some generic one-word pleasantry. What’s even the point? But actually, this is my question. How are you doing?”
I cast about for a response. How am I doing? I’m…
I’m happy in a way I haven’t felt for a long while. I don’t know when that happened. Obviously the competition is stressful and half the kids here are either insanely toxic or straight-up insane, which is unfortunate, given that they’re the future leaders of Silicon Valley.
But I don’t have to be careful. I don’t have to hide money beneath my bed or watch what I say. And honestly? That’s a vast improvement from my previous situation.
“I’m happy,” I say, and when he smiles, something inside of me melts.