Sam
“All books in English.”
“Let’s go upstairs?” he said, pointing. “My office. My apartment.”
Roger shook his head but pulled out his phone and typed in the query. The translation popped up. “Phi-lo-so-phy,” he said.
Jenny laughed and whacked Roger lightly on his shoulder. “Ah, you! Always joke!”
Sam was stunned, though. He himself had majored in philosophy—well, double-majored with physics, but that was irrelevant right now—so how come this had never come up before?
But of course he knew. It was because he never really had long conversations with his parents.
The barriers of language and culture had kept them at arm’s length, and to be honest, Sam had been a typical kid who hadn’t really thought of his mom and dad as full-fledged people with robust histories. To him, they’d just been parents.
“How Talia doing?” Roger asked. “She make good deal, too. Omni big company.”
“You know about Talia’s deal?”
“Of course,” Jenny said. “She your friend. We use Google Alert. Very easy, Talia Morgan not popular name. Too many Sam Chang, no news about you. But lots news about Talia.”
“It’s kind of bizarre that you probably know more about my friend than about me,” Sam mumbled in English.
“What you say?” Roger asked.
“Nothing,” Sam said. But he was feeling a little stung over it, even if it was silly to be jealous over something like a Google alert.
They weren’t wrong; there were too many Sam Changs, and anyway, he didn’t do anything particularly newsworthy, other than occasional top-ten finishes in poker tournaments.
Still, he changed the subject. “Tell me about your big travel plans.”
In her excitement, Jenny quickly swallowed the bite of pineapple cake she’d been eating and whipped out her phone, swiping open YouTube with an easy flick. She really was more dexterous on the phone than Sam was on his.
“I love this channel, Libby and Jacob.”
Sam’s jaw dropped. “You follow Libby?” he said in English, and then in Taiwanese, “Libby is Talia’s sister.”
Jenny rolled her eyes. “I know that! They look same, both so pretty. You and Talia, beautiful children together.”
“Mom!”
“What? I dream be grandma.”
“Oh my god.” Sam crammed a pineapple shortbread into his mouth so he wouldn’t have to talk for a minute.
“Anyway,” Jenny said, scrolling through Libby and Jacob’s YouTube channel, “I study many, many videos. I pick best ones for me and Dad. Libby recommend, we go.”
No wonder hotel chains and tour operators loved sponsoring Libby and Jacob. Even sixty-year-old Taiwanese women hung on their every word.
Soon, though, Jenny’s energy ran out as jet lag caught up with them, and she and Roger napped for a few hours on Sam’s bed while he went back downstairs to help Kenneth in the store.
The illogical sadness of his parents knowing more about Talia and Libby, though, followed Sam as he shelved books.
Not that they knew Talia and Libby on a deep level, because the sources were all public.
But it was still more access than they had to Sam and his life.
And yet, he couldn’t change that; it’s not as if he was going to start a YouTube channel, and he certainly didn’t have a high-flying startup to make headlines with.
Very few people wanted to write articles about a man who eccentrically bought a lighthouse and filled it with books.
Sam thought about how his dad had majored in philosophy, and how he’d never known this, and he felt hollow over all the conversations they’d missed out on having over the years because they just couldn’t talk properly.
He knew his parents were smart—they’d built a hugely successful business from scratch—and they knew that he was smart, but all that intelligence was locked up behind second-grade-level language that trapped them eternally in childish chatter—
Unless…
His dad had used his phone to translate. That was a relatively basic technology, too clunky for one-off sentences here and there.
But Talia had mentioned that she used her Omni 3Ds for simultaneous interpretation with her attorneys in France! It took their voices and translated what they were saying in real time, then played it through the speakers in her glasses in English, still in the speaker’s voice.
Sam didn’t have or want Omni 3Ds, but surely this technology was also available elsewhere?
A quick search found that yes, indeed, if he bought certain earbuds, they’d be able to do the same thing.
And if he got earbuds for his parents, too…
Maybe they could actually, truly communicate for the first time. With depth and nuance. Without human barriers of vocabulary and poor syntax.
With trembling hands, he placed an order on his phone for three sets of earbuds. And then Sam tried to smother the fizzing in the center of his chest, not wanting to hope too hard that there could be a solution to the yearning he’d buried deep inside himself for so long.