30. Sam
Sam
The mail had arrived while Sam was out. Kenneth had already taken what was addressed to the bookstore and had left Sam’s personal letters and packages in his office.
Sam settled into his desk and flipped through the stack of mail, tossing most of it—ads for junk he didn’t need—into the recycling bin. But when he got to a slim brown paper package, he tore into it eagerly.
Three sets of wireless earbuds tumbled out onto his desk. They’d been a pricey investment, but he hoped they’d be worth it. They were the ones that could provide real-time translation.
Hands shaky, he ripped open the packaging on one set and popped them into his ears, at the same time pulling up YouTube on his computer.
After pairing the earbuds with the laptop and following the instructions to set up automatic, real-time translation, Sam hit Play on a Spanish-language video about book binding. (He had auto-dubbing turned off).
On-screen, the woman’s mouth was making the shapes of Spanish, but the words streaming into Sam’s earbuds—in her voice—were flawless English.
“Whoa,” he said.
But Spanish was a very popular language and relatively easy to translate. What about something harder, like… Finnish?
He searched for a video about a random topic—“best books in Finnish”—and watched as the same thing happened. On-screen, the very blond man’s mouth moved in shapes that were clearly not English, and yet, his voice came in through the earbuds in clear and perfect English.
Sam tried a video on Libby and Jacob’s channel, where they visited a Moroccan souk.
They spoke in English while in the background, the market vendors spoke Moroccan Arabic, a couple of Berber languages, and French.
The earbuds translated all of them seamlessly in English with only a fraction of a second of lag, and all in the speakers’ original voices.
Sam watched the video again, at times without the earbuds and at times with, just to double-check that the video hadn’t actually all been in English already.
He found a video in Taiwanese and confirmed that the earbuds could handle that, too.
Then he flipped the settings and watched a video in English, while having the earbuds translate the speech into Taiwanese.
It worked.
By the time Jenny and Roger walked in the door of Lighthouse Books after a day of touring Fisherman’s Wharf, Sam was practically ricocheting off the shelves, waiting to try the earbuds with them.
And yet, when his mom asked how his day had been, he hesitated. What if the earbuds worked well with videos but not as smoothly with real people?
Or… what if they worked as well as Sam hoped?
For his entire life, his relationship with his parents had been one of respect and love, but in a distant, polite way. What happened when this tech suddenly tore down those walls, those well-worn, learned paths for interacting?
How did a person handle having the ability to be close to someone if they’d always been most comfortable being far?
But then Sam thought about how close Talia and Libby were, and how he’d always envied it.
And how Talia had also reconnected with her parents in the last couple of years, after decades of their negligence.
Even with that tension in their history, she’d been happy with this new, stronger version of her family.
And Sam’s parents were nothing like Talia and Libby’s; it had only been language and an ocean that had kept them apart.
“Here—I bought something.” Sam led his mom and dad up to his apartment, then handed each a set of earbuds.
“We already have,” Roger said. “Not same. But already have.”
“These newer,” Sam said in choppy Taiwanese. “Better. You use now and… uh, listen.”
They put them into their ears. Sam had already set theirs up to translate into Taiwanese as the default language.
“Okay, this is a test,” he said in English. “I’d love to hear about your adventures today in San Francisco. You went to the Ferry Building and then walked along the piers to Fisherman’s Wharf, right? What was the most beautiful thing, the most surprising thing, and the most delicious?”
Jenny’s mouth fell open. Because—if this was working correctly—she’d just “heard” Sam speak flawless Taiwanese, with more fluidity and vocabulary than he’d ever uttered before. Sam himself certainly didn’t know the Taiwanese words for “ferry” or “pier.”
“How you do that?” she said in English.
“These earbuds use a new technology to provide real-time interpretation of any language into another,” Sam said. “So I’m speaking in English, but it’s turning it into Taiwanese for you.”
“It sounds just like you,” Jenny said, this time in Taiwanese, but the response piped into Sam’s ears in English. “When you hear my voice, is it me?”
He grinned and nodded. “Yeah, wow. It’s exactly you. Dad, do you want to try?”
Roger touched the earbuds delicately, but he shook his head and waved Jenny on. Between the two of them, she was the talker 95 percent of the time. But Sam had never known whether it was because he preferred listening, or if he just didn’t have much to say.
“What were your questions about San Francisco?” Jenny asked.
“Most beautiful thing, most surprising thing, and most delicious,” Sam said.
“Oh yes, the most beautiful,” Jenny said, “was a tiny garden we found tucked between buildings near the Embarcadero. It had these amazing flower sculptures and a little waterfall. A perfect hidden gem in the middle of the city.
“The most surprising was the microclimates. We started in fog at the Ferry Building, walked into sunshine at Pier 23, hit a wall of wind at Fort Mason, then back to warm sun at Ghirardelli Square. All within a couple of miles!
“And the most delicious thing was oysters at the Ferry Building Marketplace. I’d heard about them in one of Libby and Jacob’s videos from a few years ago.
The oysters were coming in fresh from Tomales Bay, and we just stood there at the counter slurping them down with a little mignonette sauce. Absolute heaven!”
Sam’s eyes prickled. He’d never been able to understand his mom like this. Just the insight into what piqued her interest was like opening a door into who she truly was, a personality that he’d only ever been able to observe from the outside—Jenny Chang, cheerful proprietor of a bakery chain.
“God, I’m so sorry we missed out on so many years,” he said, wiping away a tear that had escaped. “I should have worked harder to not lose my Taiwanese or Mandarin. I should’ve visited home more often, or I don’t know… been a good son and taken over your business.”
“No, Sammy, we never expected you to come back to Taiwan,” Jenny said. “We were the ones who sent you here.”
“I feel like I did a terrible job, though, of keeping my Taiwanese side alive. I mean, there was no one else like me in Mississippi, but even in college here in California, where there were a lot more Asian immigrants, I didn’t exactly gravitate toward them. I’m not Asian enough, I guess.”
Roger made a small sound, then, and laid his hand on Sam’s shoulder. “Do you know how much courage it takes to thrive as you did? You were so little when you were sent off to foreign shores alone, and you forged a whole new life in this unfamiliar place.
“I feel nothing but awe for you, Sam. And you shouldn’t cling to binary ideas of ‘Taiwanese’ or ‘American.’ You and those in your generation who were latchkey kids sent without their parents, or the children of immigrants, made a new culture here, all your own.
It is the best of both worlds. You don’t need to belong to ‘Taiwanese’ or ‘American.’ You’re simply a new version, a new iteration. It’s wonderful.”
Sam hadn’t ever heard his dad talk for even a third that long at once. Maybe Roger left small talk to Jenny, and he only spoke up when necessary. Or maybe it was just that there was finally a way to convey everything he’d wanted to say but hadn’t been able to in the past.
The disingenuous ghosts of Nowhere Cat still prowled in Sam’s memory, but it was time to move on from the technological skepticism that Nowhere Cat had left in him. He probably should have listened to Talia more often about trying out new gadgets. Because these earbuds were life-changing.