Chapter Thirty-Six #2
“Chinook Shore. It’s on the Oregon coast, an hour or two away from Portland.”
He does this half grunt. “Never heard of it.”
It’s a small town, for sure. The job opportunities aren’t gilded with money and prestige the way they might be in Silicon Valley or Manhattan. But that doesn’t mean that the people who live there don’t dream as brightly and love as ferociously as they would anywhere else.
I know that. But some part of me still wishes I were from a specialized STEM magnet school, or a posh New England boarding school, or an intense Bay Area public school. Some place that would automatically let people know that I am smart and tough and capable.
I swallow. “Um, right. So both Khoi and I have immigrant parents. We both know the struggle of finding solid footing in a country that doesn’t understand you. So we decided to build Hello World—an app for newcomers to America to connect with one another and discover community.”
I flip through some of our Figma designs, highlighting my favorite features—the language toggle button, the automatic discovery based on geotagging.
“I don’t know,” one judge cuts in. “It looks cluttered.”
I blink. “Oh. How do you mean?”
“Well, you don’t have that much white space. And there isn’t a lot of attention paid to text hierarchy. You could’ve just used a search feature instead of automatic discovery.”
I want to tell him that Chinese apps don’t look the same as American ones. That search engines in other languages are often hard to navigate. That just because our app doesn’t look like the ones he uses every day doesn’t mean that it’s inferior.
But I’m pretty sure we’re not supposed to argue about feedback.
“Um, okay.” I move on to the next slide, which describes our back end. Khoi was supposed to present this part.
It’s this stereotype in tech that girls gravitate toward “softer” design and front-end work, while guys do the more “hardcore” stuff in the back end. But I worked on the back end just as much as he did. I hooked everything up to our databases, I wrote the search algorithms.
But maybe that judge’s comment threw me off my flow, because now I’m second-guessing how good I’ll be at explaining this slide. God, I wish Khoi was here right now.
No. I know our project. I’ve spent weeks mucking elbow-deep in this code.
I’ve debugged at three a.m., I’ve fine-tuned models for language translation, I’ve read research papers on performance optimizations, I’ve dreamed in SQL queries.
I’m just as good as the dudebros here who don’t shower. No, better. Because I also shower.
And I can’t mess this up for Khoi, either. He deserves a shot at the top prize.
I dig into some of the technical difficulties and questions we considered while building. A few slides flash by, but to be honest, they’re not visually interesting—just snippets of code to explain our ideas.
Once I reach the end, one of the judges asks, “Great. Now here’s a question for you. Why do you think you deserve to win?”
I stare at him. My mind feels so blank. Truth is, I don’t know if we deserve to win. Our project is cool but all the other projects are amazing too. Well, maybe not all of them. I think that one guy who wants multiple girlfriends built a polyamorous version of Tinder.
Anyway, I’m not sure what makes us special.
We don’t incorporate any groundbreaking technology, and we aren’t using blockchain or whatever the latest buzzword is.
Our algorithm isn’t particularly sophisticated—just filtered searches with some basic recommendation logic.
Most decent mobile programmers could make something similar.
But then I think about my mom, about the times she wished she had someone to ask about American school forms or credit card applications.
About Lola’s mom struggling through health care paperwork in English.
About all the families like ours, stumbling into vast, faceless systems that weren’t built for them.
“Hello World has the potential to be a lot more. If it were launched as an actual platform for immigrants, it could help so many people.”
Edvin Nilsen nods, like he totally buys into the vision. The actual judges seem confused.
“Did you raise venture capital already?” one of them asks. “Because if you did, that would be in violation of the competition rules.”
I blink. “Uh, no?”
“So are you planning on making this a real app?”
“Uh…” Khoi and I haven’t discussed that at all. That sounds like exactly the sort of conversation that would lead to talking about the FutureTM, which is, like, the problem in our relationship right now. “Maybe?”
I can tell from their expressions that this is the wrong answer. My heart plummets. Maybe I should’ve bullshitted about blockchain instead.
Did I just kill our chances at winning?
“Sounds good,” another judge says after a beat. “Well, this was a pleasure. Hope your teammate feels better soon.”
I might thank them. I’m not sure. My mind is all a jumble. And as I walk out of the room, my legs feel like lead.
After the presentation, my phone is all lit up with notifications. There’s a flurry of texts from Khoi, fresh out of MIT Medical, spamming apologies for missing the presentation. I’ve never seen someone use that many loudly crying emojis in a row.
My thumbs freeze over the blank text box as I try to figure out what to say. I want to check in about his health, but once we start a back-and-forth, he’s going to ask about how things went. And I don’t want to admit that I blew it.
But before I can type a word, he double texts that he’s going to hit the Walgreens pharmacy and then crash before the awards ceremony.
I go back to the dorm and start packing up. We have to check out tomorrow. Mom is nowhere to be found—who knows where she disappeared off to. I don’t put too many brain cells toward that. I’m too busy freaking out about, like, survival stuff.
So yeah. I flubbed the presentation and we’re not winning.
No, maybe we still have a shot. We got first place on the second checkpoint and our test scores on the first checkpoint were decent.
The final score is based on all three. But I’m not counting on that.
That’s like buying a lottery ticket as your retirement plan.
What are Mom and I going to do?
When I was six, we stayed at a shelter for a little while. Not sure how we ended up there. It might’ve been around the time her boyfriend Zhao got deported and we had to move out of his apartment.
It’s been a decade, so my memories of the shelter are fuzzy.
Besides the constant noise and occasional fights between grown-ass women, it was kinda fun.
There were other kids around, so it was like a never-ending sleepover.
We had these chaotic Wii bowling tournaments.
But after, like, two weeks, Mom caught me playing with an empty syringe I found on the ground, and the next day we moved in with one of her grad school classmates.
I’m not six years old anymore, so maybe we can give a women’s shelter another shot.
I spend the next few hours packing our things and researching nearby options.
There are eight shelters in the Boston area and I call up each one.
But they’re all full. And the receptionist at Roxbury Sanctuary hears my surname and starts ranting about how “you people eat raw bats and bring disease everywhere.”
I resist the urge to tell her that I like my bats sautéed, thank you very much.
Anyway, so that’s a total bust. I guess we’re sleeping on the sidewalk tomorrow night. Maybe I should dig through the recycling to snag the comfiest piece of cardboard.
But I can’t keep fretting over this, because the award ceremony is at four. At three fifty I go to Khoi’s room and shake him awake. He’s bleary eyed and I feel bad for disrupting his nap.
“How are you feeling?” I ask.
He goes, “Hnnnnrgh.”
“Do you need anything from me?”
“Grrrrrmf.”
Despite my many years living with Michael, I’m not fluent in Neanderthal. I give up on the conversation. But I get Khoi dressed and out the door, so that’s a win.
When we sneak into Kresge auditorium, HellomynameisCourtney is already onstage, so we sit down quietly in the back.
“This year we had nearly forty wonderful entries,” she’s saying. She goes on about how each submission was marvelous and so impressive for something hacked together in one summer. How we’re the next generation of leaders, which is honestly terrifying, considering some of the kids I met this summer.
“But enough about that. Here’s what you’ve all been waiting for. I’m so excited to present this year’s winners.”
She goes through the special sponsored awards.
There’re some pretty big names here—Apple gives out a Best Hardware prize, and Oculus has something for virtual reality.
The twins win scholarships from Niantic, the company that makes Pokémon Go.
For her app that generates outfit ideas using diffusion models, Stella snags a cash prize from OpenAI.
Even Haru gets recognized for his anonymous compliments app.
Then it’s time for the overall winner, and there’s this insane electricity in the air—that heart-pounding, forgetting-to-breathe anticipation. And even though I logically know the odds are against us, I can’t help but hope.
Because if we win, it would solve all my problems.
HellomynameisCourtney removes a card from an envelope and reads, “The grand winner of this year’s Alpha Fellows hackathon is the team comprising of Obi Udechukwu, Diego Rodriguez, and Jenni Wheeler for an innovative portable solar power generator.”
Of course.
I mean, it’s not surprising. And I know I should be happy for my friends. They deserve the win. But… fuck. What am I going to do now?
My heart hurts.
Next to me, Khoi slumps down in his seat.
Obi rushes to the stage, pumping his fists in the air like an Olympic runner doing a victory lap, and wraps HellomynameisCourtney in a bear hug, which makes everyone laugh. Diego and Jenni-with-an-i follow with slightly embarrassed expressions. Cameras flash.
I force myself to applaud even though I feel sick.
After the team returns to their seats lugging their huge, one-hundred-thousand-dollar cardboard check, the room quiets down again.
“I say this every time, but it remains true year after year—I’m so blown away by your creativity and dedication,” HellomynameisCourtney says.
“It’s been an honor to host a hundred of the nation’s brightest young minds this summer.
In a world where technology is so often used for frivolous or downright dangerous affairs, I urge you to apply your talents to building a better future for all.
I hope to see every single one of you again. ”