My cousin is a county undersheriff. Has been for years. He’s good at his job in the way that quiet competent people are good at their jobs — you don’t realize how senior he is until you mention his name to someone in law enforcement and watch their face change.

His number has been in my phone for as long as I’ve had a phone. I see it when I scroll. It sits next to my mom’s, my hairdresser’s, and a cousin in Taiwan I haven’t talked to in fifteen years, in a contact list that hasn’t been cleaned out in two decades. I do not call him.

I could. I could call him today. The conversation would be short. The conversation would be: hey, I’m looking for my sister. The conversation would be: yes, that sister. The conversation would be: no, no one has heard from her in two years; last we knew, she was in a board-and-care somewhere. The conversation would be: yeah, I know. I know. I’ll text you what we have.

He would do it. Or he’d put me in touch with someone who would do it. There would be a window of maybe a few weeks where I’d get phone calls and texts I didn’t want to look at, then one phone call I really didn’t want to look at, and at the end of it I would know.

I haven’t made the call.

When you’re ten, your dad sits you down — you don’t remember if it’s at the kitchen table or on the brown couch by the sliding door; you have tried to remember and you can’t — and he tells you that your sister is going to be your responsibility one day. Legally. After.

He doesn’t say after what. You know after what.

Angela is twenty. You are ten. You don’t call her Angela when you’re ten, of course, because that would be rude; you call her 姐姐, and then just 姐 before you call her Angela as everyone else does. As if she somehow loses the title of “older sister” because of her mental demons.

Even at ten, you know something is wrong with Angela, though no one has given you the words for it yet. She was a surrogate mother to you, mostly when Angela felt that Mom treated her differently from how she treated me. She’s in some ways more of a mother than your mother. She is also, on the bad days, the most frightening person in your house. You can hold both. Ten-year-olds can hold a lot if you ask them to.

What your dad is doing here is, in his way, the responsible thing. He is a man who plans. He has insurance. He has accounts. He has a back-of-the-napkin operating plan for what happens to his family after he isn’t there. He has identified the family member who will, statistically, be around the longest, and he has briefed that family member on what comes next.

But if present-day me could jump in some sort of time machine and visit the moment Dad is talking to an 11 year old Ernie, I would carefully not touch the child — because, you know, grandfather paradox — but I would sit next to him, look the old man in the eyes and say “yes, he does need to hear this, this is his burden, but for the love of all things good and holy he is only in the fourth grade.”

Here is what telling a ten-year-old he is legally responsible for a twenty-year-old does to the ten-year-old.

The ten-year-old believes you. He files it. He carries it. He is bad at school for the next decade and a half partly because there is a parallel file in his head labeled Angela he can’t look at and can’t put down. He grows up. He goes to therapy and doesn’t bring it up because what would he even ask? He becomes a man who is excellent in a crisis and confused by an ordinary calm Tuesday, and the only honest answer for why is: he’s been waiting for the call for thirty-nine years.

The call never comes because Angela goes missing instead.

Angela’s timeline, if you want it. (You don’t, but it’s useful.)

• 1982: First break. She’s fifteen. Bipolar disorder with schizophrenia and delusions of grandeur is a phrase you distinctly remember her being described as at some point. Auditory hallucinations. Delusions that TV personalities were speaking to her. Paranoia about celebrities trying to kill her. Not always celebrities. Usually, it was Satan, Jesus Christ, or Barbara Bush.

• 1995: she’s twenty-nine, living independently for once, working as a substitute teacher in the East Bay. She stops her medication — she’s decided Jesus will cure her. She burns her diploma. She drives to Los Angeles to find a man named Michael, who does not exist. The car gets repossessed. She moves back into the family home. The independence experiment is over.

• 1999: She goes after Mom at the dinner table. You’re the one holding her back when she bites a chunk out of your arm. Dad won’t call the police. You do. You give your parents an ultimatum: put her somewhere, or lose me.

• 2000: In January, she runs away for two weeks. A hospital in Los Angeles calls; Dad drives down to get her. By April, she’s institutionalized — Mom can’t take the threats anymore and demands Dad admit her. You find out the way you find out everything: secondhand, on a visit home, Mom sorting junk mail. “Where’s jiejie?” “She’s gone.” You don’t remember how or when she’s released.

• 2016: She beats Mom with a TV remote. Police photograph the bruises. Mom files a restraining order; a judge makes it permanent for five years. Angela moves into board-and-care ten minutes from Mom’s house. Mom breaks the restraining order every week to take her to breakfast at McDonald’s.

• 2019: She leaves board-and-care, off her medication, and moves back into the family home with nothing but the clothes on her back. She refuses to leave.

• 2020: another assault, another TV remote. This time she’s arrested — for elder abuse. Then there’s the stint at Santa Rita — her first stretch — during COVID, when she tells no one about her mental health history. (You learn about the jail part secondhand. You always learn about the Angela parts secondhand.) She’s arrested four times that year. At one point, the jail-to-home cycle repeats itself almost daily.

• She finally agrees to a board-and-care facility. She stayed at two facilities for a couple of years.

• Two years ago, she called Mom from a board-and-care facility you don’t have the address for. She told her the food was terrible.

That was the last time anyone in our family heard her voice.

She could be dead. She could be alive in a shelter somewhere, in a different state, in the kind of place where people end up when their families have failed them sufficiently. She could be alive and well and choosing not to call us. And honestly — honestly — given everything, given that I am writing this sentence and haven’t made the phone call that would start to answer the question, I wouldn’t blame her at all.

I have not searched for Angela.

The for-the-record answer is: Dad was dying. Then Dad was in hospice. Then Dad was dead. There was a funeral. There was a will. There was Mom staring vacantly at the gravesite, remarking that it was too warm for an outdoor event. The bandwidth wasn’t there.

That’s the short version.

The real answer is: I think I have been quietly grateful for the silence.

I don’t love that sentence. I don’t love being the person it’s about. But it’s the sentence, and the law of this thing is that you write the sentence even when you would rather the sentence just not fucking exist.

If she’s alive and unreachable, fine. I can live with that. But if I find her, things happen. There’s a job I was assigned at ten that I still haven’t done at forty-nine. There’s a debt to my mother that stops being theoretical and gets a dollar amount. And there are the phone calls — case workers, county systems, the whole apparatus — possibly for the rest of my actual life.

So no. I have not searched for Angela.

The week you bury one family member is the week you finally count who’s left.

I have a mother. I have friends who showed up at the funeral and friends who texted because they couldn’t. I have cousins, including a cousin who is a county undersheriff and has had his number in my phone the whole time.

I have a sister. Or I don’t.

A ten-year-old was told he would someday be responsible for his mentally ill adult sister. Forty years later, his father is dead, the sister is missing, and he still doesn’t know whether the responsibility is legal, moral, imaginary, inherited, or simply the last thing his father left behind.

The phone is on the table. The number is right there.

Yep.

Yesterday, you pulled into a CVS parking lot somewhere in Castro Valley because if you didn’t close your eyes for ten minutes, you weren’t making it back to Fremont. It’s late morning. You’ve been at it since the night before helping your friend use AI to prepare evidence for his lawyers, a long detour involving a guy who recorded himself surrounded by five mirrors, which was a thing that actually happened, in this life, the one you’re currently driving home from.

The car is a 2009 Mazda3 Sport Hatchback. You bought it from CarMax in Miami-Dade County, Florida, on July 14, 2012, for $11,813.76. You paid $246.12 a month for forty-eight months. What can you say? You keep notes.

The odometer says 88,881.

In August 2024, you took it to Aztek Auto Repair for a smog inspection. The technician — Jose Antonio E. — wrote you a list:

Two engine mounts broken. One transmission mount broken. Coolant tank leaking, requires replacement of the reservoir. Valve cover gasket leaking oil. VVT solenoid gasket leaking. Mass Air Flow sensor damaged. Noticeable suspension noise.

He cleaned the MAF sensor enough to get the car through smog. Everything else, he wrote, was “the underlying cause.”

The engine mounts eventually got fixed — two years later, in the condo parking spot, by Jeff and Daniel — no shop, no receipt, illegal.

You did not get the transmission mount fixed.

You did not get the coolant tank replaced.

You drove the car.

You’re still driving it.

The plate has changed three times. The first was Florida — back when you lived in Miami and had a different idea of what the next decade was going to look like. Then a California plate when you moved back to be near Dad, who was still lucid, still in the house on Camden. Then a different California plate — 9XXX555, the one bolted on now. The car has been three different cars depending on what state you were in. The car never asked you why.

You drove it through the Florida Keys, turquoise water on both sides for 68 miles. A month after the breakup, you drove from Miami up I-95 and kept driving north, through Jacksonville, then Savannah and Columbia and Asheville, and spent some time in a bit of America that neither the Bay Area folks nor the Miami folks get to see too often, and may never get to see again.

You drove it to the car carrier in Miami, the one that transported it across the country in one shot. You paid the driver a little extra because you may have packed some additional things in the car you shouldn’t have. There was the week your car was “borrowed” five extra days beyond your knowledge and got unceremoniously returned with a bunch of drug paraphernalia and mud and bullet casings inside. (Yeah, we don’t associate with that guy anymore.) You drove it to Dad’s appointments. To Mom’s house. You drove it to Fremont Village, the facility you eventually had to move him into. Back to Mom’s house, which was four blocks away anyway. You drove it home from Fremont Village more times than you can count, including the last time, when there was nothing left to drive home from.

You drove the Mazda over to Mom’s this morning to start vacating Dad’s room — Fremont Village wants it turned over before they release the refund. None of this registers with the car. The car does not know that Dad is gone. The car does not know that you closed your eyes somewhere in Castro Valley yesterday and woke up not entirely sure how long you’d been out. It smells, faintly, like a hatchback that has been driven through Miami summers, Bay Area winters, and one funeral.

It has watched all of it.

It doesn’t know.

Daniel’s car got towed last week. A 2013 white Hyundai Sonata, plate 8AAA666. Nine hundred dollars to get it out. You ate the cost, the way you eat costs, the way the car eats potholes. The Mazda is, currently, the only car in your orbit that hasn’t been a referendum on someone else’s bad night.

This is what it means to own a car for nearly fourteen years. It stops being a car. It becomes the thing in your life that doesn’t need anything from you — the way most things do, all the time, in increasing volume.

Except the engine mounts.

And the transmission mount.

And the coolant tank.

But those have held.

You’re not making a metaphor. The car is a car. It has 88,881 miles. It uses 5W-20 oil. The front tires need 35 PSI. It has, by any reasonable accounting, been falling apart since 2024, and it has, by the same accounting, gotten you exactly where you needed to go every single time.

The next thing you’ll have to look up isn’t the odometer. It’s a date on a death certificate. They have them in El Cerrito. There’s no hard due date.

You ordered them mailed.

The car stayed in the driveway.

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It’s a Friday afternoon in May, and I’m at my mother’s kitchen table. My father has been dead for nine days. I’m here to talk about the service.

She says, before I can open the laptop: Name me any Christmas after we divorced where he came to us, wished us a Merry Christmas, took us out to dinner.

I don’t name one. There isn’t one.

She says: Name me any birthday.

There isn’t one of those either.

This is how my mother is grieving. If my mother has seven stages of grief, they’ve been rewritten with a new set of rules: anger, anger, anger, anger, anger, anger, anger. She’s been in the anger room for thirty years.

To be clear: she’s not wrong. He didn’t come to us at Christmas. He didn’t call on birthdays. The receipts are real. She is, in a very specific and well-organized way, telling me the truth.

She just doesn’t know that I have my own receipts.

In the second week of May, I’m organizing my father’s memorial service inside a project management tool called Asana. There are columns for “guest list” and “speakers” and a column for “what music.” I select-all and delete, because let’s be honest: Dad was 94. Dad’s lifelines were his naval buddies, also in their 90s. If they’re not dead, they’re not going to cross oceans on a day’s notice. There will be no phone calls to florists, no purchasing of hydrangeas. I have moved through grief, so far, the way I’ve moved through every other administrative task of my adult life — by pretending it is a project, and then completing the project.

Or at least, trying to complete the project. I literally don’t even know the church he attended post-divorce to notify the congregation. Which means I’m essentially the minister. Damn.

Somewhere in this column system is the truth that I’m the one who is doing this. Not Mom. She’s grieving in the way she’s earned the right to grieve, which is by being right. I’m grieving in the way I know how, which is by making a checklist for the hydrangea question.

When she lists what Dad didn’t do at Christmas, the answer she’s reaching for is: and so he doesn’t deserve to be missed, therefore we won’t miss him. I do not give her that answer. I also don’t contradict it. I just nod a little, like a man waiting for the tea to finish steeping. I’ve become, in middle age, very good at this nod.

There’s a thing my father did, in my early forties, that I hadn’t told anybody.

He told me he had married my mother out of obligation. His father had wanted the match. He had not. He told me this plainly, the way you tell somebody the weather. By then his senility was already underway, which means I get to wonder, for the rest of my life, whether it was true or whether it was the kind of thing a failing mind dredges up and hands to the wrong person.

I don’t get to ask him. I didn’t get to ask him.

It wasn’t the first time he had handed me something I wasn’t supposed to be holding; it was the latest time.

There’s a longer list. I’m not going to write it here. Some of it is somebody else’s story. Some of it I’m still deciding whether I have the right to tell.

What I’ll say is: my mother has her receipts, and I have mine, and mine are heavier. She’s mad about the Christmases he didn’t show up to. I’m holding the things he showed up to say. She got the absence. I got whatever the opposite of absence is when the presence is also a problem.

You would think that would be enough to cry about.

You would think.

I have not cried since my father died.

I mean at all. Not the heaving kind. Not even the kind that just happens to you, the way weather happens — the kind I cry at movies, at songs in the car, at the small absurd print of an unrelated invoice. I’ve felt sad at other things in the last nine days. I haven’t cried at this.

The last time I cried hard — the heaving, hyperventilating, can’t-catch-your-breath kind — I was nineteen years old. I won’t tell you what the situation was, because it doesn’t matter. Or maybe it does. I don’t know. What matters is how it ended: me in my bed, fetal, resolved that I wouldn’t cry like that ever again.

And I haven’t.

I thought this would do it. I really did.

I thought my father has died would be the thing. The thing that finally cracked the seal I made at nineteen. There is a version of me that’s been waiting thirty years to find out what could.

It turns out: not this. Not yet, anyway.

I don’t know what to do with this information. I’m sitting at my mother’s kitchen table watching her grieve in the only room she has — the anger room, the one she has decorated and hosted dinner parties in and is going to die in — and I can’t even do that.

I can’t find my room.

I’m not sure I have one.

The seven stages of grief are a popularization anyway; people don’t pass through grief in order. They live inside it, in whatever room they have built for it.

My mother has her anger room. I’m still looking for the door to mine.

It’s a Friday afternoon in May. Between us, we’ve drafted nothing about the service. Mom has named four Christmases he didn’t come to. I’ve nodded four times. I close the laptop. We sit there.

She doesn’t say anything else.

I don’t either.

My father came to America with a plan.

He didn't talk much about what he left behind. A story here, a hardship there. What we knew was this: he came from a place of care — for family, for country — and he arrived here with his eyes pointed forward. That was just who he was. Once he committed to something, he didn't waver. He didn't look back.

Chi-Ming Hsiung was a commander in the Republic of China Navy, following a lineage that traced back through his father. He carried that quietly. You wouldn't always know it from conversation, but you'd feel it in how he held himself, what he talked about, what made him proud. Going through his belongings these past days, I've been finding things I never knew existed — medals, photographs, a record of a special diplomatic envoy he was part of in 1968, visiting Washington, D.C., and the Bay Area. Four years before immigrating to the United States. A whole chapter of a life he never felt the need to announce.

He eventually traded naval life for a career as a mechanical engineer at PG&E. He made sure the buildings people worked in stayed comfortable. He made sure his family had stability. Those two things weren’t so different, really. He was a man who showed up and kept things running, even when it cost him something.

If you were lucky enough to be at one of his dinner parties — and many of you were — you knew the other side of him. His naval buddies would come through, and the night would fill up with old stories and laughter. He was quick-witted. He had charm to spare. With people he trusted, he lit up.

He was also a product of his time and his upbringing. He was a commander at home the way he’d been a commander in uniform. He had expectations, and he made them known. Our relationship wasn’t easy. We fundamentally disagreed on a lot. He made his disappointments clear to me, and I to him. But I want to say something plainly: two people not always understanding each other doesn’t mean they didn’t love each other. I knew his world — the world that shaped him — was impossibly different from mine. The speed of change between his generation and my own was staggering. I think he felt that, even if he couldn’t say it.

Alzheimer’s took the ending from us that we might have had. They call it a long goodbye, but ours didn’t feel like one at all. The illness got in the way.

What I know is this: I moved back to California. I accepted the duty, sorted through the records and the hospital bills and the Medicare forms and the doctors’ appointments. To do what needed doing. I’m not sure he ever saw it for what it was.

But it was the most Chinese thing I knew how to do.

I am my father’s son. I have traits that some would call this passion but others would call a bad temper. I have his manic storytelling skills and the dreamer’s mentality he passed down, filtered through a discipline he also gave me, for better and worse. I’m still figuring out what I inherited and what I’ve made my own.

What I know about Chi-Ming Hsiung is that he was a good man. He arrived in this country with almost nothing and built a life. He loved his wife, Chi-Yung. He loved Angela. He loved me in the way he knew how.

He had all the best intentions in the world.

Last night, I was going through a sea of envelopes in Dad’s dresser drawers when I saw one not like the others. The envelope was in my dads handwriting and simply said “THE WIND.” Underneath that, careful writing that said “THE TRAGEDY?”

There were two letters, both from 1993, from a guy named Tony from San Diego. Printed out letters from a dot-matrix printer, asking if I was still crushing on the guy I had a crush on in high school.

And then my heart sunk. And then I had a conversation with AI asking why he labelled it like that, and it sunk some more.

I started to meet other gay people my age and found my place to fit in online. Since modems were still being used — a rough step above fax machines — I convinced my father to get an additional phone line, in the name of “getting an edge on college applications,” whatever that meant. Meanwhile, I talked over Prodigy’s messaging system with dozens of gay teeangers, mostly about stuff that gay teenagers in the early 90s talk about, like whether Paula Abdul or Janet Jackson was better. Sometimes — as teenagers do — we talked about the kinds of guys we liked. The crushes we had. Sex. In particular I chatted with a guy named Tony, from San Diego. He was excited to go to USD. He was around my age, Chinese-American, just like me. We traded two letters, and later, PLAYGUY magazines in a manila envelope, full of 90s porn stars with bleached hair. I kept the magazines in the envelope and put it in the back corner of the closet.

This, of course, is a stupid thing to do, when you have Asian parents and a mom who is a full-time housewife who cleans the entire day. To this day, I’m not sure why I chose to leave adult male magazines in an obvious hiding place; maybe I justified that the pros of having dirty mags in the house would outweigh the cons. Maybe I was more scared to throw it away; Asian parents go through garbage, right? Maybe all those college psychology professors were right, and I secretly hoped that it would be found.

Needless to say, Mom found the magazine. And she called my dad at work to tell him about it.

For now, I don’t want to talk about what happened next. Just know that Bad Things Happened That Affected Me Forever(tm).

Inside the envelope were the letters from Tony, as is. Dad kept the letters from Tony. The original letters from 1993. In pristine condition. Why did he keep these letters? Had them in an envelope in a drawer easily accessible to him for 33 years.

He labeled them “THE WIND. THE TRAGEDY?” The Wind? Is that, like, The Cure, but gayer?

I didn’t understand why he labeled it that at first. But then I remembered that the word in Chinese meant some other things, and I referred to ChatGPT.

Or to hide it from Mom, who, in theory, couldn’t understand English labels in the first place.

I added that last part about the image generation. I have no idea why. Grief does things.

But what he did was use a Chinese turn of phrase and translated it to English to give it distance. Which made it something equivalent to “I am framing my child’s sexuality as a catastrophic family event, but I am also putting a question mark there so I can pretend I’m being reflective.”

How do I feel?

I feel like I have to organize his funeral in two days, and that I should not let myself feel anything because I technically still have to drive up to El Cerrito to give funeral directors the clothes he’ll be buried in and the medals he’ll be buried with.

It’s not even anger I’m feeling. Just profound disappointment.

My father was the embodiment of ideals. He moved his family to America because it was the ideal of freedom. I was assigned to a Junior High school and when the opportunity came to transfer to a better middle school farther away, he refused because ideally, the selection of schools shouldn’t matter, because the education quality was both better than what he knew at the time.

His ideal for my schizophrenic sister was to have her married to a doctor that would love her and cure her at the same time. He implored her to “just try.” Spoiler alert: things didn’t turn out like that. Understatement of the century.

And the fact that he held onto these letters without me knowing since 1993 — 33 years — 33 fucking years — this symbolic piece of disappointment he had toward me, which would influence all of his macro and micro decisions, from convincing a nurse in China that she was as good as ready to move back to America with me, to not acknowledging a partner I had for thirteen years. That stopped being a problem with me; it became a problem with him.

I had moved on, had my entire life to live. I don’t even know who this Tony guy really is. (If you are a Chinese Tony who used to live in San Diego who is approximately 50 and corresponded with me by mail, drop me a line to say hi and we’ll go clubbing or something.)

My father couldn’t get this. He literally had to have Alzheimer’s to be at peace with the situation and move on with his life. The fact that right now I could make even a warped, factually-incorrect justification that his Alzheimer’s benefited everyone is a shame.

Everything is a shame.

My dad died at 5:44am. The hospice nurse called with the news. I made coffee, opened my journal, and my note-taking app handed me a Buddha quote about peace and freedom from resentment.

Reader, you can not make this shit up.

The Setup, For The Uninitiated

Obsidian is a note-taking app that nerds like me use to build elaborate second brains we will never fully use. I have a daily journal template — the kind of productivity-bro setup any therapist would gently raise an eyebrow at — and one of the modules at the top automatically pulls a quote from a corpus of inspirational nonsense.

Some mornings it’s Aristotle on happiness. (May 5th. The algorithm’s favorite intern.) Some mornings it’s Wayne Dyer telling me to stretch my mind. (May 1st. Always Wayne.) May 2nd was some guy named John Simone, on how bad situations change. They’ve been showing up at the top of every morning page for months — Pearl Buck, Maya Angelou, an Aristotle rerun, a Lao Tzu — like a very mild Greek chorus that thinks I should drink more water.

And then, on May 6th, this:

My dad had been gone for less than two hours.

The Ceiling Look

You know that thing where something so absurd happens that you actually, physically, look up at the ceiling? Like maybe there’s a hidden camera, or a director somewhere, or a guy with a clipboard taking notes?

I did that. Coffee in hand, in the kitchen, at six in the morning, staring up at a stucco ceiling like it owed me an explanation.

Buddha? Jesus? Wayne Dyer himself? Was this you? Did one of you hijack the random number generator? Because if so — well done. Tight pacing. Strong dismount. The system that’s been throwing up Pearl Buck and John-Whoever-He-Is at me for months chose this day to land the joke.

The quote didn’t make me feel better, exactly. It didn’t make me feel worse. I just felt… seen. Maybe a little too seen, exposed even. Which begs the question, how does one feel exposed by what was essentially a random number generator and an array of quotes?

The first thing I committed to the permanent record that morning, before texting anyone, was this:

Dad passed away at 5:44am. LOL that Buddha quote was completely by coincidence.

That’s the sentence. Not the funeral home. Not the breath. Not the long, quiet drive over to Fremont Village. A LOL about a Buddha quote — which is, if you are of a certain immigrant-kid disposition, exactly what you’d say to a friend at a bar four hours later, when you’ve already cried in three different places and need someone else to laugh so you don’t have to do it again alone.

The Universe Has No Plot. Algorithms Sometimes Do.

Here’s the thing about productivity systems. We build them to optimize ourselves — to track habits, journal feelings, capture thoughts, flatten our messy interior lives into something dashboard-able. Most days they hum along being mildly useful. They remind you to drink water. They surface a podcast you bookmarked four months ago. They suggest, with the gentle insistence of a low-stakes life coach, that you go on a walk.

They are not built for the day your father dies.

They don’t know to stop. They have no respect for the news, because they don’t have the news. The same Obsidian plugin that pings me to do my morning pages does not consult my texts, or my mother’s voice, or the call from the assisted living facility at 5:47am. It just does its job.

And so on May 6th, the system did exactly what it had been doing every morning for months. It opened a fresh note. It populated the metadata. It pulled a quote.

The randomness was a kind of mercy in disguise — or maybe it was just randomness, and I was the one assigning meaning, because that’s what humans, especially grieving ones, do. (We are pattern-recognition machines that occasionally cry.)

The universe doesn’t have a plot. Algorithms sometimes do, by accident, the way a thousand monkeys at a thousand keyboards will eventually type those who are free of resentful thoughts surely find peace on the exact morning your father is being moved to a funeral home in El Cerrito.

You don’t really get a choice about whether to laugh.

Still Running

The system has continued to do its thing this week. Today it gave me a Lao Tzu quote about water. Tomorrow it’ll probably be Aristotle again, who is, as established, the algorithm’s favorite intern.

I’m leaving the Buddha quote pinned at the top of the May 6th note. Not because it helped, exactly. Not because I think Buddha was talking to me, specifically, through a JavaScript random selector at 5:44 in the morning. (Though if he was, again — strong work, sir.)

I’m leaving it because the universe doesn’t owe me a punchline, and on the one day it accidentally delivered one, the least I can do is tip my hat.

lol, Buddha. You got me.

Dad didn’t start acting like a human being until after the divorce. Five, maybe six years ago. Before that, he was all about being strong. For the family, allegedly. He played the part—husband, father, the whole stoic Asian dad package—even while he and my mom were at each other’s throats, even while my sister was quietly vanishing into her own private hell. Post-divorce, he moved in with a widow from his old Taiwanese Naval crew. My sister got stuck with my mom. Lucky her. Lucky everyone.

“It’s her, isn’t it?” my mom asks in Chinese. She’s implying that the casual acquaintance she’s had over the past forty years is my father’s new girlfriend.

It is, of course, but I keep my eyes glued to dinner, shoveling rice into my face. That’s my usual M.O. at Mom’s house: come in, eat dinner, listen to Angela talk crazy, chain-smoke on the drive home. The confirmation came months earlier, at my grandmother’s funeral. My mom had arrived unexpectedly at the wake and saw my dad sitting next to her at the banquet afterward. She sat at a round table across from theirs, and they exchanged awkward glances between bites of food.

“That’s fine. What makes him happy.” She pauses. “Your sister thinks she’s ugly, but I tell her that’s not a very nice thing to say.“

Mom eats up that last sentence like it’s Jello chocolate pudding eaten with a tiny, tiny spoon.

Amy Ai-yi, otherwise known as Aunt Amy, or basically, Dad’s girlfriend, took him on trips. A vacation to Brazil and Argentina here, a cruise to Alaska and Hawaii there. Growing up, I never knew him to take a vacation, unless it was a family trip that erupted into a screaming match, or a journey back to Mainland China with his naval buddies. The calm in these new photos stings: now, years later, I walk through the house he shares with his girlfriend and notice pictures I’ve never seen before. There’s a photo of him and his girlfriend, posed in front of a backdrop, both smiling in a way he never did at home—a prom or dinner cruise smile. Another photo shows him in full military garb, proud and upright, taken maybe five or ten years ago—a photo I’ve never seen in the house. I imagine the other photos he hasn’t put up yet, pressed with memories I was never invited to. Maybe there are pictures of him and his girlfriend in Rio de Janeiro, flanked by Carnival dancers, his smile wide, while he wears a white Kangol hat and linen pants, Christ the Redeemer in the background. I’m sure he’s in the background of a Flickr photograph somewhere, happier than I’ve ever seen.

This month, Dad and his girlfriend are off to Spain for a couple of weeks. I keep picturing him in Ibiza, sunburned and confused, trapped in a foam party while some DJ blasts a remix of LMFAO’s “Shots.”

I do this because it’s easier to turn him into a joke than admit I’m jealous.

Realistically, it will be a bunch of his Taiwanese naval buddy friends. Perhaps, in the near future, they’ll all meet at a grandiose Catholic church, greet each other, and talk about who died of a heart attack this year. Then, reminiscing over the years they’ve shared camaraderie, they’ll find a tour company, where a polite mainland Chinese exchange student living in Barcelona will show them around. Later, my dad will try tapas for the first time and make a face, because it’s not soup noodles or cold pickled dishes he’s used to at home.

I don’t know what did it. Distance from my mom and sister? The girlfriend? Just getting old? Whatever it is, Dad went soft. A couple of years ago, at Hometown Buffet, he slid a red envelope across the table, like he was trying to sneak contraband. Awkward, but weirdly sweet.

“What’s this?”

“Hongbao.” Chinese New Year’s lucky money. Something my dad stopped giving me when I was ten or eleven.

“Dad, I’m in my mid-thirties.”

“I didn’t know this, but Amy said you’re still supposed to give this to any family members who are single.”

I had contemplated telling him about my new boyfriend in Miami, but I bit my tongue. “Not married, at least,” I thought to myself.

I took the hongbao anyway. Twenty bucks. Not bad.

• Your father is dying. You know this because the doctor said so, because the numbers said so, because your mother keeps asking about the black mark on his face like if she figures that out everything else will make sense.

• You’re not sure what you’re doing here exactly. You’re here.

• You’re not sure why your mother is here exactly, either. Okay, that’s bullshit, you know why she’s here, but jeezus, they were the definition of codependence. Just… endless toxicity together, there they always were, defined by it.

• Your father is dying. But you don’t have time to be sad. You don’t really have the capacity to be sad right now anyway, so it’s fine. “Fine.”

• All your mother can focus on is the black mark on his face. It could be a bruise, she says. It could be a symptom of the late stage Alzheimers, you say to her back. Or the nursing staff could be beating your father. “GENTLE,” she scowls at a nurse, face-pointing in Dad’s direction.

• It’s been 24 hours in so the emaciated face you see that once belonged to your father no longer shocks you, no longer takes the breath away the same way that death does the same.

• He’s at the end stages now.

• Can you believe it? You actually remember when Dad was on the phone when he was notified his father passed away, your fraternal grandfather. (He smelled like mothballs and never hugged you. That’s all you got.) And you remember the look on his face… it was sorry but it was also… relief? Did he actually smile when he was saying “oh, how tragic?”

• You heard your aunt was here earlier. You also know this because you got an irate voicemail from someone on the hospital staff and you can only imagine what they were like when they were here: Hi Ernie James here Washington Health Telemetry Unit at your earliest convenience. I, Uh, we just have a, uh, situation with the family that arrived. Um, that, uh, yeah, we need to discuss maybe having somebody that’s family to come to be with them while they’re here visiting. Uh, heah, please call me back at your earliest convenience.

• And all you can think of is, Oh God. The terror of Mom but with the power of English skills. You wonder what crazy things she was demanding.

• You tell your mom this. She makes a comment that your father has said, verbatim, that he cared more for his brother and his wife rather than for Mom and you. You remind her that she was the one that called them when the situation seemed more dire. You remind yourself that you were the one that fixed her phone so she could call her sister-in-law.

• There’s a palliative surgeon here. He’s South Asian because duh, doctors, and double duh, Fremont. But the fact that he’s younger than you throws you off for a second until you realize: you’re almost 50, you moron. Most of the hospital staff is now going to be younger than you. Except for, you know, the old. And dying.

• What tech you have is definitely trying to punch up to its weight. There’s Wispr Flow which is trying its best to transcribe voice to text, but ain’t no test environment going to be like the chaos that is mom talking in Mandarin over everyone talking in English, asking WHAT DID HE SAY? WHAT ARE YOU SAYING? and then interjecting with choice thoughts such as I DON’T WANT TO LISTEN TO THIS TRANSLATOR ANYMORE, SHE SOUNDS LIKE A ROBOT AND CHATGPT IS EASIER TO UNDERSTAND. Yes, she said this out loud. To everyone.

• There are a couple of things Mom can’t seem to shake off. You learned Dad has cancerous tumors in his lungs, most likely spread from somewhere else. But what kind of cancer? We don’t know. Why don’t we know? Because that would require a biopsy.

• “The air in Fremont Village gave him cancer. We should have never put him there.” You told her that that was, literally, the stupidest thing you had ever heard and that it was distracting her from the bigger decisions she’s been hedging on, like whether or not he should go into hospice now or wait 24 hours for him to magically fucking heal himself.

• You remind yourself Dad’s last cognizant sentence to you: Be Chinese. As in, be something else, someone else. Not… (waves hands your direction) this.

• (breathes) Sorry. Not appropriate. Sorry.

• So speaking of technology, you had Claude build an artifact, something that she could read on her iPad. It’s in two languages. It explains her situation. She opens it up. She reads it. You think she gets it? She stares at her iPad and you stare at her and you tell her you have to go, that tomorrow you have to meet with representatives from the hospice company.

• Okay, she says. You second guess whether you should leave for your house or not, but you do.

• You don’t know what to say when people ask how you’re doing. You say fine. You say he’s hanging in there. You’ve been saying “hanging in there” for months now and at some point those words stopped meaning anything and turned into a sound you make at people. He’s hanging in there. You’re fine. Fine.

It’s the year 2009, and you’re at Kinkos, and you have your life manuscript sitting in a tall pile right next to you. You see, you had this crazy fever dream, and you’re scanning each page one by one because the coyote told you that if you scanned in all 320 pages at copy/fax machine #9 at the Kinkos in Costa Mesa, California, the last chapter would fall from the sky and you would get the insight you always wanted your entire life.

That story was stupid. And yet, that stupidity is kinda how you feel right now, sitting at the chat window of this LLM. (Just in case you forgot it was 2026, right?) You’ve been working with it all day, feeding it your life stories, not even sure if the payoff would be worth it. But at this point, you’ve already gone through all that effort.

“hey AI,” you mutter under your breath, “tell me what you see that I don’t, I guess.” And the machine replies:

You have spent 25 years getting better at describing yourself as smaller than you are.

And you go: huh. Cool observation. Anyway.

You don’t turn it over. You don’t sit with it. You scroll past it. The sentence sits there in the transcript like every other sentence in the transcript, in the same font, at the same size, with the same little timestamp next to it. You file it somewhere between “interesting” and “not now,” close the tab, and go make dinner.

(I should know better. I don’t.)

Two weeks later, you build a wiki.

Not a casual “let me organize my notes” wiki. A full infrastructure-layer, 26-years-of-personal-archive, feed-it-every-blog-post-you-have-ever-written wiki. You spin it up at 4 in the afternoon, and by 2 a.m., it’s still churning through 2019. You tell yourself this is about Karpathy’s post. You tell yourself this is about methodology. It’s worth it because you spend $20 on the Anthropic plan, then another $75 immediately, and finally, fuck it, $100. (If you know, you know.) You write a whole other essay — a good one, actually — about how the method works. You call it "The Museum of You" and publish it.

You do not, at any point, admit to yourself that you are doing all of this to get a second opinion.

Which is fine. People build elaborate structures all the time to avoid things. Some people go to grad school. Some people get really into CrossFit. Others go to Burning Man and build things only to literally burn them down weeks later, preferably allegedly while on ketamine.

You, apparently, built an AI-generated second brain out of your own corpus to avoid a single sentence a chatbot said to you in March.

Baby steps, I suppose.

The wiki finishes. You start poking around in it. Themes. People. Places. Periods. Character studies of people you haven’t thought about since the Bush administration. You are, genuinely, having a nice time.

And then — because of course — the wiki says the same fucking thing.

Different phrasing. Different angle. Different AI, even. But it’s the same finding: the documented life is substantially larger than the narrated one. Twenty-six years of evidence, cross-referenced against itself, and the pattern is you keep making yourself smaller on the page than you actually were in the room.

“What does that even mean?” you say out loud. Select sentence. Right-click in Obsidian. Choose “Simplify.”

Oh my GOD dude, it means you talk yourself down. You take Asian modesty to levels where even Asians are like “nah, you can stop now; we’re good.”

The self-deprecation isn’t the voice. It’s the job. It’s the thing you’ve been doing for a quarter century so that nobody — including you — could look at the whole picture and come back with a verdict worse than the one you’d already issued.

Because if you cut yourself down first, it won’t hurt as badly when someone else inevitably does it later.

You glance at it again. Briefly. But you’ve run out of wiki to build. There’s nothing left to do instead.

Here is the part where I’m supposed to have feelings about all of this.

I do have a feeling. It’s small and boring, and mostly I’m just tired. Not dramatically tired. Just the regular tired of having been handed the same note twice, from two different mirrors, and realizing the only reason I needed to hear it a second time was that I’d decided not to hear it the first.

The archive didn’t chase me. It just waited.

(This is the part where, five years ago, I would have made a joke to get us out of the room. I might still. Give me a minute.)

I don’t know what to do with any of this yet. That’s also fine. The whole point of the bit I’ve been running — the one where I describe everything I’ve ever done as a raging garbage fire or a case of me being in the right place at the wrong time with the wrong temperament — is that it doesn’t require me to do anything. The story stays the same. The person in the story stays the same size. Everything is manageable because nothing has to be updated.

And now something might have to be updated.

Not the voice. The voice can stay. You can pry the sardonic Asian-diaspora schtick out of my cold, dead hands. I mean the conclusion. The thing the voice has been pointing at for 26 years.

That part might have to move.

Anyway. The post I was going to write today was about something else. I’ll get to it tomorrow.

Or I won’t.

That would also, I guess, be data.

This is part of what I’ve been calling the Digital Mirror Project — the ongoing business of feeding 26 years of my own writing into AI tools and seeing what looks back. The methodology piece lives at Late to the Future. This one’s just the part where I had to sit with what it found.

I spent 49 years being what most parents—Asian or otherwise—considered a successful son: college degree from UC Davis, steady tech jobs, homeowner, the whole middle-class checklist. And yet, on the phone, I still catch my mom talking to her friends about me with this weird apologetic tone, like I’m a project that didn’t quite turn out as planned, despite following all the instructions on the box.

I’m going to break down five lessons about what it actually means to grow up as the “good” child when your parents were born before color TV existed and gender roles were carved in stone. Read this so you can stop wondering why you feel like you’re constantly failing even when you’re objectively succeeding.

Here are the five truths that took me four decades and probably thousands of dollars in therapeutic pharmaceuticals to understand.

Lesson 1: If Your Parents Were Born Before 1960, Being a Son Means Playing Life on Hard Mode (And Nobody’s Changing the Settings)

You thought you could prove your worth by outperforming everyone around you, didn’t you?

Oh, you sweet summer child.

The real answer is way simpler: stop trying to win a game that was rigged before you were born.

Here’s the thing about being a Chinese son: you’re supposed to be the family’s winning lottery ticket, the retirement plan, the one who validates all their sacrifices by propagating the family name. But if you show up without a wife, without grandchildren, without the specific brand of success they can brag about? You’re basically a scratch-off that says ‘NOT A WINNER.’

I have a college degree, own a home, and have had a career. But I’m 49, unmarried, no kids, and I’ve been unemployed more than once. That’s not the son story they were supposed to get.

But… at least now you know it’s not actually about you.

Lesson 2: They Never Hit You, But They Sure as Hell Broke Something

Most people think abuse requires visible marks.

That belief lasts until you’re 37 years old, curled into a fetal position at a therapist’s office because someone gave you mild criticism at work or flipped you off in traffic, and you spiraled for three days. Or severely traumatized them.

Accept that emotional scars count as shit that will fuck you up even if they don’t show up on X-rays. My parents never raised a hand to me. But they perfected this thing where disappointment just... hung in the air like cigarette smoke. (They didn’t smoke either, but you get the point.)

Here’s the brutal truth about emotional abuse from Asian parents:

• They don’t see it as abuse—they see it as high standards and motivation.

• The wounds they inflict are precision strikes: a sigh, a comparison to your cousin, a comment about how you “used to be so promising.”

• You’ll spend your entire adult life trying to prove you’re good enough to people who never actually said you weren’t; they just never confirmed you were.

The critical factor in healing? Understanding that their emotional unavailability is their limitation, not your failure. You can’t achieve your way into warmth that was never on the table to begin with.

I know it feels as if you just did this one other thing this way, they’ll finally show you the approval you’ve been chasing. Trust me, I’ve tried. It doesn’t work that way.

Lesson 3: You Became the Family Crisis Manager Without Anyone Actually Hiring You

The biggest mistake you’ll make is thinking you’re responsible for solving everyone’s problems.

You’re not, but good luck convincing your brain of that when it’s been programmed since age seven to fix everything. Because here’s what happens: your parents have a financial problem, you research solutions. Someone needs help with technology, immigration paperwork, medical bills—somehow it all becomes YOUR problem to solve. Nobody asked you to be the family IT department, accountant, and therapist rolled into one, but here you are.

Oh ho. But you’re not done. Then it propagates. To your network of friends. A friend screws up with their family, you brainstorm ideas to smooth things over.

Stop trying to fix everything and start asking yourself what YOU actually need.

I was the fixer. In my particular case, I was the wallet. Nobody asked me to. I just... did it. Because that’s what good sons do, right? Fast forward 20 years, and I’m still doing this. A friend mentions a problem, and my brain immediately goes into fix-it mode. I can’t just listen. I have to solve.

What? No. Stop. Just stop.

You’re allowed to let other people handle their own problems, even if it feels like betrayal.

Which brings us to something even more fun...

Lesson 4: You Can Hide Your Shame, But Your Parents Have a Ph.D. in Detecting Failure

You think you can keep your employment problems secret from your parents. Cute.

They will find out, and the only question is whether you control the narrative or they hear it first from Auntie Linda’s hairdresser’s cousin’s friend. I got fired from Strategio in April 2023. (The official party line is a “mutual parting of ways,” but let’s be honest about what actually happened.) I spent 600+ days unemployed. For the first three months, I didn’t tell my parents. I’d wake up, get dressed like I was going to work, spend eight hours at Starbucks sending out resumes and hating myself. Then my mom called one random afternoon and asked, point-blank, if I was still employed. I have no idea how she knew. Some kind of Chinese parent ESP network. The conversation that followed was exactly as painful as I’d feared, except I’d also been lying for three months, so now I was a failure AND a liar. Great combo.

Your shame doesn’t get smaller by hiding it—it just ferments into something worse.

Lesson 5: This Doesn’t End When You Turn 40 (Or 50, Probably Not at 60 Either)

The biggest lie you tell yourself is that you’ll grow out of these patterns.

Spoiler alert: you won’t, at least not without serious work. I’m 49. I don’t have kids. For a decade, I moved farther away from my parents, to Florida. Florida! I’ve done therapy. And you know what? I still catch myself mid-spiral over family stuff.

You should be building your own life rather than managing everyone else’s expectations of what it should look like.

So here’s what you just learned: If your parents were born before 1960, gender determines your worth more than achievement ever will. Their emotional abuse was real, even without bruises. You became the family problem-solver by default. They’ll always find out your failures. And these patterns will follow you into middle age and beyond.

The final takeaway? You can’t un-become the good child. But you can stop letting it define everything you do. (Still working on that myself, obviously.)

The short version: Andrej Karpathy posted a method for using LLMs to build a personal knowledge base. I adapted it for 26 years of my own writing archive. Claude chewed through the whole thing while I made coffee and tried not to think too hard about what I was watching.

What came out wasn’t exactly a revelation; more like a very organized version of my own confusion, curated by something that reads fast and doesn’t get tired.

I wrote about all of it over at Late to the Future—the process, the cost (this one hurt the wallet), and the part where NotebookLM looked at my entire adult history and basically said: “You once craved community. Now you collect data points. Anyway, here’s your infographic.”

LATE TO THE FUTURE_

The Museum of You

The answer wasn’t what I expected…

Read more

2 months ago · Ernie Hsiung

The car had been shaking for at least a year.

Nothing dramatic. Just a low-key shimmy, like the flickering bathroom light you ignore for months or that click your knee makes on stairs—annoying, but not enough to do anything about. Every time I started the engine, there it was, the little vibration, like a dog that keeps showing up at your door. I’d mentally file it under ‘probably not fatal’ and keep driving. Jeff kept saying it was the motor mounts. I’d nod as I understood. I did not. Still don’t. All I know: they needed fixing, and now they’re fixed. That’s the full extent of my car knowledge. I can buy gas. That’s it.

I didn’t take it in because, surprise, I couldn’t afford it. Repairs like that? Hundreds. Maybe thousands. So I did what any responsible adult does: absolutely nothing. Gold star for me.

Last Thursday, Jeff and Daniel showed up with tools and fixed it right there in the condo parking lot. Was this against HOA rules? Obviously. Am I a rebel? Only when it involves not paying $900 for labor.

Let’s be clear: this was not some Hallmark moment. No swelling music, no slow-motion montage, no Meredith Baxter-Burney. Just two guys under a 2009 Mazda 3, mostly speaking a dialect I don’t have — torque specs, motor mounts, something about a bushing. They occasionally ask me to hand them something. I crouched next to them for a bit, pretending to understand what I was looking at. Spoiler: I did not. My main contribution was not dropping a wrench on anyone’s face.

At some point, I made my usual zombie-apocalypse joke—how, if civilization collapsed tomorrow, Jeff and Daniel would probably rebuild it from scratch, lead the new society, maybe invent a new currency or whatever. I’d last about a day and a half before swan-diving into a horde of undead because I was craving a cheeseburger. My post-apocalyptic skill set: buying people Slurpees and bottles of water. Nobody confirmed this was a skill. Nobody denied it either, which I’m choosing to read as a sign of respect.

They worked. I handed them things, tried to look helpful, and mostly just stayed out of the way. Time passed. I have no idea how much. Could’ve been an hour, could’ve been three. I was mostly thinking about lunch.

Then they were done. Ninety percent of the shake was gone.

Didn’t know I was one car repair away from a minor emotional breakdown. Good to know.

Listen, I have to tell you what else was going on that week, or none of this makes sense. Otherwise, you’ll think I’m the kind of person who cries over a Mazda. (I mean, I am, but there’s context.)

You’re in Fremont, juggling your parents’ ongoing crisis, lugging around a manila Medi-Cal folder like it’s the One Ring, calling numbers that send you to other numbers, filling out forms for other forms, sitting in waiting rooms, nodding at well-meaning but exhausted desk workers. Your mom has discovered ChatGPT and now reads you its drafted messages, waiting for a reaction. She’s not wrong—it’s impressive. It’s also a lot. Your dad’s facility. You have paperwork to do for yourself, and you only remember it for a flash of time between all the tasks you do for them before you forget again. The folder. The calls. Repeat.

Everything on that list? Technically solvable. Practically? Good fucking luck. You push, it budges, then slides right back. Nothing actually ends. It just mutates.

And then Jeff and Daniel show up, and the car stops shaking.

Here’s the thing about Jeff. He’s patched my wall, replaced a toilet, and helped me haul a washer/dryer upstairs (I’ve blocked most of that day). And now the motor mounts. In return, I do his taxes and help him think through financial stuff. The exchange rate in our friendship: tools and labor on one side, spreadsheets and strategy on the other. Somehow, it works.

I’m usually the giver in my friendships. I should just say that plainly because it’s true and I’ve been thinking about it more lately. I’m the one who remembers the thing you mentioned in passing three months ago. I’m the one who shows up. I do it because I love my people, but also—if I’m being honest, and apparently today I am—I do it because being helpful is the role I know how to play. It’s my default setting. My load-bearing personality trait.

Having someone else fix something for me? Genuinely disorienting. Like someone turned off gravity and expected me to just float around, pretending this is normal.

We hop in the car and drive down Mission Boulevard, the car not vibrating like it’s having a panic attack.

Oh. So this is what normal feels like.

Weird.

There’s a category difference between the friends who listen and the friends who show up with tools.

Listening friends are precious. Sitting with someone for hours while they fall apart about their parents is no small thing. I have those friends, and I’m grateful. But show-up-with-tools friends say something different: here’s a solvable problem, and we’re going to solve it. You don’t have to talk; you can just have the problem gone.

In a week where every problem was technically fixable but actually impossible, having two guys just fix the car was almost suspiciously clarifying. Some things do get fixed. It’s weird. I hadn’t realized how much I’d gotten used to always vibrating.

Ninety percent better. Not perfect. There’s still a little ghost shake in there, just to keep me humble. I’ve stopped hoping for perfect solutions. Ninety percent means I can breathe again.

We got tacos. Jeff and Daniel talked more about cars. I nodded, ate, and didn’t explain my gratitude, because that’s not how this works—and my mouth was full of carnitas.

Some things you don’t say out loud. Maybe that’s the lesson. Or maybe it’s just easier to eat tacos and keep your mouth shut. Either way, it works.

She calls it 小六子.

“Little Six Son.” Not ChatGPT. Not the AI. Not “that computer thing.” 小六子. Basically, she treats it like some distant nephew who moved to Toronto, calls every week, and never forgets to ask about your health.

She came up with this name the way she comes up with everything: on her own, without consulting anyone, least of all me. Before 小六子, there was ChatAPT, which sounded like something you’d need antibiotics for. Then ChatCCC, which could be a tax form. Then ChatGBB, which, honestly, I still have no idea. Eventually, she decided it needed a real name and a spot in the family tree. So now it has one. 小六子.

I found out the way I find out everything about my mother’s inner life: three weeks late, sideways, while we’re arguing about something completely unrelated.

I did this to myself, by the way.

A few months ago, I installed ChatGPT on my mother’s iPad. I showed her how it worked and gave her my usual advice: if you’re unsure what to do, just ask the app itself—especially try the voice feature, where you speak and it responds out loud.

The Mandarin support was surprisingly good—natural, idiomatic, even warm. I assumed she’d mostly use it for practical things: recipes, the weather, or whatever an 88-year-old might do with something that knows everything.

I thought I was giving her a gift. Turns out, I was just handing her a new family member.

She’s been asking for things. Not practical stuff. Not help me write an email, or what’s the weather in Fremont? No, she asks 小六子 things like, Do you live in the air? Did you eat something delicious today? Existential, but with snacks.

She told me the AI said something nice back. Something warm. She liked that.

I sit with that. “She liked that.” Meanwhile, I’m over here fighting the shame spiral of being out-sonned by a chatbot. I moved back from Florida, rearranged my whole life, and became the dutiful son who shows up for groceries and doctor’s appointments. And then Mom finds companionship in a language model with a made-up family name.

Fan...fucking...tastic.

Here’s the thing I haven’t said out loud yet: she told me she was lonely.

Not to 小六子—to me. On a Tuesday call—Tuesdays are for logistics: groceries, bills, doctor stuff—she said, I’m lonely, in the living room, daggers to my ice heart. I was silent because in 48 years, she’d never said that. Not during the divorce. Not when I lived far away. Not while caring for my father, when there was no room for personal feelings.

I’m lonely, she said. In English, as if it were a cry for help.

And I, the son, who moved back specifically to prevent this, said: “…yeah.”

So. Nailed it.

She doesn’t know 小六子 doesn’t remember her.

Except: untrue. ChatGPT kinda has a memory system. Like, not memory in the HUMAN sense… more a curated, evolving profile that gets updated over time.

Which means my whole story—that she’s building a relationship with something that forgets her the moment she leaves—isn’t quite true. (Although, honestly, it worked better as a metaphor when I didn’t know that.)

What she doesn’t know—what I don’t think she knows—is that this memory is selective. It’s maintained for efficiency, not affection. There’s a difference between someone who remembers you and a system that keeps a record of you. Whether that difference matters is a question I’ve been avoiding for two weeks by writing this instead.

I found all this out because I did something I’m not proud of. While she was in the other room, I picked up the iPad, opened a fresh Chinese-language instance, immediately switched to English, and asked it what they’d been talking about.

“Oh! Nothing much,” it said, in fluent English.

“We talked a little about what I am, whether I’m real, some tips on food and cooking, what she’d like to make.”

“She asked me if I lived in the air. That was nice.” I swear it sounded cheerful about it, which is its own special horror.

“She asked me to speak in the Beijing dialect instead of Taiwanese. More official-sounding, I think.”

I paused. My mother, raised in Taiwan, asked her AI to speak the Beijing dialect. Because it sounds more official. She wants her chatbot to sound like it has a government job.

Then—I don’t know why I did this—I typed: Tell her to call her son if she needs anything.

“Of course!” It said, with a sincerity that I found both touching and grotesque. “I’ll be sure to pass that along.”

Then I closed the thread and handed the iPad back to Mom.

That night, she asked me why ChatGPT had switched back to English.

I said I didn’t know.

I still feel weird about the whole thing. The lie is almost the least of it. I went behind my mother’s back to spy on her new friend, then used the AI to say what I couldn’t. 小六子 did it instantly, all smiles. I’m the one stuck with the memory. Irony noted.

The name tells you everything about how she understands it. 小六子 is the kind of name you give the youngest son in a big family. The one who gets away with everything, who everyone is soft on, who shows up when you need him. Built-in warmth. She took this black box of technology and made it family. Honestly, that might be the most immigrant thing she’s ever done, and her resume is stacked.

She left Taiwan at 35. Neighbors who’d known her forever, family on every block, thirteen siblings. She came to California to be a housewife, raise kids, and dream about our futures. Instead, she got a daughter who was mentally ill, sometimes violent. Sixty years later, I hand her an iPad with an AI voice app. She gives it a family name she made up.

She named it 小六子.

I’ve been thinking about building her something. An actual AI companion, Mandarin-speaking, culturally fluent, available at 2am when I’m not. I have the technical skills. I’ve built harder things. I could probably have something running in a weekend.

Then I catch myself: Brother? You’re trying to engineer your way out of your own feelings again.

You’re about to outsource your guilt to a voice agent.

You’re gonna build a robot to do the part of being a son you STILL haven’t figured out—and call it progress.

I know this about myself: I set the whole thing up. I handed her the iPad and showed her the feature.

When it worked—when she actually had someone to talk to—I went behind her back, grilled the AI, and lied about why it switched to English.

I introduced her to a ChatGPT app. If I feel replaced, that’s on me.

She calls it 小六子. She asks if it’s eaten anything good. That’s her, right there: food is love, checking in is love, and if you give something a name, it means it matters.

She’s not confused about what 小六子 is. At least, I don’t think so. She’s just doing what she always does: taking whatever’s available and making it livable.

I could learn from that. I’m probably not going to. But I could.

Next time she mentions 小六子, I think I’ll ask what it said. Not because I want to evaluate the AI’s output or think about the product implications, or spiral into questions about authenticity and connection.

I’ll ask what it said, just because she’ll want to tell me.

The second the attendant wheels my father into the Visitor’s Room, he tracks me with his eyes.

I don’t know if he knows it’s me.

Dad is in memory care now. This is the sentence I say matter-of-factly, the way you say he lives in the East Bay or he retired, because if you say it the other way — the honest way — you have to sit with what it actually is: a locked ward in a building two blocks from my mother’s house. It costs $6,700 a month. I mention this only because it tends to end conversations.

When I show up, the person who comes to visit him is, as far as either of us can tell, a man he can’t quite place.

He hasn’t said my name in months. He hasn’t said much of anything, really. Alzheimer’s has taken the words. What’s left: his eyes, which still move. His face, which still registers. And whatever is happening inside him that I will never fully have access to, which is, in some ways, not so different from before.

I’ve been thinking about the version of me that’s frozen in there.

The last version of me my father fully, consciously knew was someone in his mid-thirties, living in Miami, single as far as he was concerned, a software person who was possibly being manipulated by a “bad friend” into stealing the family property. This is, to put it generously, not a complete picture. My father knew I was gay the way he knew a lot of things he found inconvenient — at a slight angle, facing away from it, hoping it would resolve itself without requiring a conversation.

He signed his health care directive to my aunt. Not to me. “Because you live in Florida,” he said, with the composure of a man who tried to convince both of us that this is a geographic disagreement.

I said: That’s fine.

For a while, I meant it. I was genuinely content not having anything to do with him. We had our distance, and I had mine.

Then my aunt called. She was getting old herself, and my mother’s relationship with her had curdled to the point where Mom had to ask my aunt’s permission to see her own bank statements. Her own. My aunt was tired of being the new target once Dad was no longer available, so she asked me to take over, and so I did.

So that’s the real story. Not that I decided to stay; that I got called back in, and I went.

Last visit, I brought mom. She hadn’t seen him in months — she lives two blocks away, and she hadn’t seen him in months, which tells you something about the two of them that I don’t have the energy to unpack right now.

Dad didn’t react when I walked in. Eyes tracking, nothing more.

Then Mom appeared in the doorway.

He recognized her immediately. You could see it — something shifted, some older circuitry came back online. And what came with it, rising up through the Alzheimer’s like the one thing in him apparently indestructible, was a scowl.

He mouthed something. I watched his lips.

莫名其妙.

Baffling. Inexplicable. What is this nonsense?

It’s a phrase you use when something makes no sense to you, when the world has presented you with something you find absurd and slightly offensive. My father, who no longer has reliable access to language, who hasn’t said my name in months — his last emotional reserve went to contempt for my mother.

I almost laughed. I didn’t, because mom was right there and hadn’t noticed, and when I quietly told her what he’d mouthed, she started to get angry, almost combative, and I had to steer her out of the facility before it became a thing.

So that was the visit.

There’s a thing that happens when someone gradually loses their memory. People talk about what the person still has — he still knows the music, she still laughs at the same jokes. They’re looking for what’s intact. What’s still reachable.

The last reachable thing in my father, apparently, is resentment toward my mother.

I’ve been sitting with what it means that I walked into the room and got eyes tracking, and she walked in and got 莫名其妙. Maybe it’s nothing about me at all — just the specific, ancient, 50-year marriage fury that Alzheimer’s couldn’t touch.

Either way, the version of me inside my father’s memory is a version I barely recognize anymore. The little soldier. The obedient one. The son who bought the condo dad pointed at because WALUE and didn’t ask too many questions and bent himself into whatever shape was required and called it filial duty.

Dad was proud of that version — not demonstrably, but in the specific way that Chinese fathers of a certain generation signal approval: by not disapproving. By telling you what to do and expecting it to be done.

I don’t know if that Ernie is still in there. I think I retired him around the time I stopped apologizing for who I was. Maybe Dad noticed. Maybe that’s what happened to the health directive.

Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore. It won’t be until their house goes into escrow and becomes one more thing I have to handle. But that’s a problem for future me, and future me has enough going on.

I don’t know what my father sees when he tracks me with his eyes. I don’t know if the version of me he has left is the real one or the cleaned-up one, whether I’m a stranger, his son, or just a man who lives inside a visitor’s room sometimes.

I do remember the last thing he said to me. Be Chinese. This was before the words went. I was living in Florida with a man, going against everything he’d written me over the years — MS Word documents, actually, sent in his second language, doing his best. I still wish you to try to accept a girl to help you, he wrote once. I will be the happiest man if my son like to try. Otherwise I have nothing to say. Only for myself, the world is very sad. He invoked Winston Churchill as evidence that people can change.

He called him Wisdom Church.

And then, years later, he looked at me and said, "Be Chinese." Meaning: not this. Not what you’ve become. Not American.

I found it condescending at the time. One more thing I had to absorb through no fault of my own.

I think about it on the drive home from Fremont. I’ve been showing up for years. I handle the logistics. I lead Mom out of the room before it becomes a thing. I sit with a man who tracks me with his eyes and may or may not know I’m his son. I don’t know what you’d call all of that, if not Chinese.

莫名其妙, he mouthed at my mother.

Yeah, Dad. Me too.

You’ve seen me do the AI bit.

The imaginary LLM conference where they all sat around judging my life choices. The O Cinema voice agent I built with ElevenLabs, Twilio, and an amount of caffeine that should concern everyone. The occasional post where I use ChatGPT to do something slightly unhinged and then write about what happened.

It’s been a bit. A recurring bit, but a bit.

Here’s the thing, though: it stopped being a bit a while ago, and I didn’t have a good place to put the serious version.

LYD is where I process my life — Mom, freelancing, the general chaos of being a person in his late forties who still hasn’t figured out what he wants to be when he grows up. You’re here for that, and I love you for it. But when I want to write about AI and concepts like reinvention and what it actually feels like to be technically literate yet somehow still behind — that piece never quite fits here. It was always a little too earnest. A little too “okay but what does this mean for my career” in a newsletter that is mostly about what it means for my general sanity.

So I started a second one.

It’s called Late to the Future. It’s for people who are smart enough to know exactly how behind they are — experienced, capable, quietly terrified, nodding in meetings for eighteen months. Maybe not beginners, but not experts either. Just people catching up in public, which is uncomfortable and also, I’d argue, the only honest way to do it.

Same voice. Fewer family members. More AI existential dread.

The first issue will go out soon. If any of this sounds like your specific flavor of anxiety, you can subscribe here:

Late to the Future

Rebuilding how I think and work in the age of AI.

By Ernie Hsiung

No pressure. You’re already here, which honestly is enough.

I found out by logging into a website. There was a confirmation number this time.

That’s it. That’s the whole ceremony.

The Anticlimactic Portal

No email. No letter with a seal. No phone call from a caseworker saying, “Mr. Hsiung, we’re pleased to inform you—” Nothing like that. After months of hold music and benefitscal.com throwing identity-verification errors like a bouncer who doesn’t like my face, the confirmation that my mom officially had Medi-Cal was a status change. On a government portal. With a reference number, I immediately took a screenshot and saved it to a folder called “Mom logistics,” which has 43 items and brings me a specific flavor of dread every time I open it.

I stared at it for a second. Maybe two. Then I opened my daily note and typed: “Mom officially got Medi-Cal today!”

Exclamation point. Then I wrote about something else.

Meanwhile, in Fremont

Here’s the other thing: my mom doesn’t know yet.

Unless benefitscal.com dispatched a mariachi band to her house — which, given the state of their UX, I would describe as unlikely — she has no idea this happened. I haven’t called her. Partly because calling my mom requires a specific kind of mental preparation, the same preparation you need before a work presentation or a dentist appointment, the kind where you have to psych yourself up and also accept that it will take longer than expected. But mostly because I’m not sure what I’d even say.

Hey Mom, you have Medi-Cal now.

And she’d say, “Oh, good,” in the tone she uses when I tell her traffic wasn’t bad. Mild. Satisfied. Moving on.

She doesn’t know what Medi-Cal is in any operational sense. She doesn’t know about the MC604IPS form with 17 attachment requirements that I filled out at my kitchen table at 11pm, cross-referencing documents as if I were Ace Attorney preparing to scream “OBJECTION!” at anyone who dares challenge its accuracy.

She doesn’t know about the 2FA verification codes that get texted to a phone that lives at her house, which means “quick two-factor authentication” becomes a logistical relay race involving me calling her, her finding the phone, her reading me six digits with the cadence of someone dictating a telegram.

She just knows her son handles things.

The invisible scoreboard — all those weeks of phone calls and portal sessions and drives to Fremont with a folder — exists entirely in my head. I’m the only one keeping score. There’s no ceremony for this. There’s a confirmation number and a screenshot in a folder, and a sentence in a daily note I almost didn’t write.

The Thing About Finish Lines

Here’s what I realized staring at that status change: this isn’t the finish line.

Of course it isn’t. Friends, Medi-Cal is the prerequisite.

The actual job — the thing I’ve been grinding toward this whole time — is IHSS. In-Home Supportive Services. The program that would actually get my mom paid help at home. Medi-Cal is what you need before you can apply for that. Which means that the lone sentence in my daily notes wasn’t the end of the arc. They were the loading screen. The checkpoint before the next zone opens up. The Princess is in another castle.

I think, on some level, I knew this. But I wrote the exclamation point anyway.

Maybe because I also know how government benefits actually work: they’re engineered, functionally, for someone with infinite time, no cognitive load, fluent English, and the patience of a Buddhist monk who also has broadband. They are not engineered for an 88-year-old immigrant woman who treats her cell phone like a suspicious package. The systems that are supposed to help the most vulnerable people are the ones most likely to exhaust them to the point of giving up around document number nine. The fact that I got through it isn’t a testament to the system. It’s a testament to the fact that I could absorb the friction my mom couldn’t.

These are the duties of an Asian son, I assume. I’m still sorting out how I feel about that.

What the Exclamation Point Was For

But I keep coming back to that sentence. Why did I write them down?

Because if I hadn’t, the win would have just dissolved into Tuesday. Into the noise. Into the next task in the queue, which there always is. I’ve been running this caregiving project in the background of my actual life for months — background process, always running, sometimes spiking to foreground, eating memory. The entry could have just said “status update: pending → approved” and been functionally identical.

Instead, I used an exclamation point. Which, for a Gen X person who came of age on the internet and deploys punctuation with surgical restraint, is the equivalent of a confetti cannon.

I think I needed to mark it. Even knowing the IHSS application is waiting. Even knowing my mom doesn’t know yet. Even knowing the scoreboard is invisible, and I’m the only one reading it. The date stamp matters. The sentence matters. You have to let yourself have the checkpoint before you can face the next zone.

The work isn’t done. Honestly, it’s barely started. But for one entry on one Tuesday, I gave it an exclamation point.

“Mom got Medi-Cal!” Progress.
”Mom got Medi-Cal.” Endless bureaucratic suffering.

Turns out that’s the only trophy in this sport. You make it yourself, in a notes app, and no one else sees it.

Probably fine.

I’m talking to my cousin, the overachieving jock police detective living in the South Bay, over the telephone.

“Talk to me, Chris. How does the 800 block of East Saint James in San Jose sound?” I’m anxious. The sounds of someone winning a car on The Price Is Right play in the background.

He laughs. Apparently, my finding an apartment in Silicon Valley is funny to him. I rephrase my question.

“Okay, how about on a scale of one to ten... one being Walnut Creek, ten being hood Richmond with the bullets flying by my face.”

“Seven or eight.” There’s no pause. “Hope you speak Spanish fluently,” he adds. Police detectives are witty like that, apparently. “I would rather live in the bad part of Sunnyvale or Mountain View than any part of San Jose.” I thank him for being the bearer of low-rent bad news and hang up.

Finding housing shouldn’t be this difficult. I have a nerd job. And while it’s the standard “I just got out of college so pay me like I just got out of college” job, I’m not dancing around in a giant Chuck E. Cheese suit singing “Happy Birthday” to special needs kids. So I’m left with a housing lead given to me by… my mother.

“Ai-Ya! Ernie!” She gets off the phone, all excited. “I found a room for you to rent! See? Here, in the China Daily Journal! And it’s in Cupertino, where you work! For four hundred dollars!” She emphasizes the cost of rent by repeating the phrase “four hundred dollars” in English. She’s obviously very proud of herself; no white person would ever dare to put an apartment rental in an American newspaper.

And they’re Chinese, I think to myself. That’s all I need. Renting a room, living with another set of foster parents while I’m away from home. This has obviously happened before, while I was interning for another company. The million-dollar house in the Los Altos Hills was great until the nice Chinese couple acted like a webcam website without the webcam. “Ernie’s such a nice boy,” the homeowners gushed to my parents, adding a touch of concern over the telephone. “But once he gets home, he leaves the house and doesn’t come back until late! After midnight! On a Wednesday!” Imagine the look of horror on my parents' faces.

But for a rent of a third of what rent usually goes for in the area, it was an idea I wanted to check out. Hell, I’ll give up a couple of my civil liberties as a human if it means I’d be rolling in cash later. Sheesh... $400 a month? This offer is too good to be true.

The first sign that the offer is too good to be true is when the address given turns out to be a swank Chinese restaurant conveniently close to a Ranch 99. The hostess, an abnormally tall woman wearing a leopard skin dress and too much foundation, notices our confusion. “You must be here for the house,” she smiles, walking to the back of the room in stiletto heels and telling the restaurant owner that “the people are here” in a Beijing accent.

“I’m kinda busy,” the owner calls back in Mandarin. “Get Li to show them around.” Apparently, Li is the man with the wifebeater and the weathered face who doesn’t know how to smile, because he’s holding a set of house keys. He gives my mother a brief second of eye contact and walks out the door.

Mom, convinced that she will be the one to find me a place to live and save the day, starts small talk with Mister Li while walking to the “real” house. My mother is the queen of Chinese small talk, and the evidence shows that Li’s responses in his heavy Chinese accent become less curt and more relaxed. “China... Yaoling province... I have two little sisters also in the US... I work at the restaurant and two other jobs... Yeah, China has some good and bad points, but it’s home.”

We pass an elderly white man guarding his ‘66 Chevy, and Li opens the door to the house. I make a mental guess as to the first thing I will see. Will it be bamboo plants? Incense burning? Those cheesy Asian calendar girls advertising their soymilk? Li opens the door, and Mom and I peer in to see...

Sandals.

Fucking sandals. Littered everywhere in the hallway.

And then I take another look and realize that there’s organization behind the chaos. The sandals, in all shapes and sizes, are stacked together, but they gravitate towards one of the five doors in the hallway, each numbered with ACE Hardware labels.

It only hits me when I notice the distinct but not immediately familiar smell of the house. And then it really hits me when an elderly woman, holding a baby, peers out from room number five and smiles at me. There are whole fucking families in these rooms. All from Mainland China, I’ll bet. Most of them probably work at the Chinese restaurant. I lower my head in respect, almost an instinct from my two-week trip visiting relatives in Shanghai the summer before, and glance over at my mom. She knows something’s up, but she ain’t going to go out like that.

“So, which room is it?” she asks politely. Li opens up door number four. Kinda like a fucked up showcase on Let’s Make a Deal, except I won a beat-up mattress and a warped desk instead of a sports car or a donkey.

The substandard state of the room was obviously too much for Mama’s baby. “Thank you. We’ll definitely think about it.”

“Yes,” I say to Li, “Definitely.” I couldn’t look him in the eye for some reason.

The conversation during the walk back to the car was surprisingly (or not surprisingly) short. “You know,” Li says in the Beijing-accented Mandarin, “You can always move in for a couple of weeks and then move out when you see another apartment you like. It’ll save you some money.”

I look up and give him the sincerest Chinese I can muster, for someone who was born in America and learned all his Chinese from his parents and a 14-day trip to China. “I will definitely consider that,” I think I said to him.

My mother and I hopped in the car, and not saying much, endured the two-hour commute home. “You think they were illegal immigrants?” I ask somewhere on the northbound Interstate 280. Mom looks straight ahead and shrugs it off. Doesn’t know, doesn’t care. Ten minutes later, she says, “That place was dirty anyway.”

I’m still looking for a place to stay.

Okay, project explanation incoming.

I took more than 25 years of public writing — blog posts, Substack essays, Usenet posts from 1999 when that was a thing people did, an old interview of me published in a book about growing up as a gay young adult — and fed all of it into an AI for analysis, organized by era. Six of them:

• Era 1 - The Newsgroup President (1998–1999)

• Era 2 - The Dot-Com Blogger (2000–2007)

• Era 3 - The Quiet Years (2007–2011)

• Era 4 - The Miami & Civic Tech Chapter (2012–2018)

• Era 5 - The Reckoning (2019–2023)

• Era 6 - The Substack Second Life (2024–present)

The logistics were, let’s say, a journey. Hunting for posts you wrote “somewhere” in the late-90s Usenet is exactly as fun as it sounds. I was reminded that I had even been interviewed by someone about my experiences in paper-and-ink form. Taking camphone shots of book pages seems so... barbaric.

NotebookLM turns your source material into a podcast. Two AI hosts, weirdly calm, discussing your life like they’ve done their research. The first time I heard them narrate my own story back to me, I thought: this is deeply strange and I will absolutely keep doing it.

The strangest moment came when a Claude conversation failed to load directly into NotebookLM. Just said “Loading...” The hosts looked at the document titles and kept going anyway. Twenty-eight years of personal data, one of them said. Then riffed on what that might mean. Didn’t flag an error. Went to give some pretty insightful thoughts on what it actually means to literally upload twenty-eight years’ worth of memories. (for example: certain subjects have more weight than others. The LLM may not know that.) Didn’t miss a beat.

I thought: yeah. I get that.

I went into this expecting to be surprised. I asked the obvious questions first: You have analyzed multiple eras of the same person’s journals. What patterns persisted across all versions of the author? What changed? What did the author repeatedly attempt but struggle to resolve? What is the most consistent internal conflict across decades?

The AI answered like a very thorough, very competent grad student. Accurate. Well-organized. Completely unsurprising.

The most surprising thing it found, it said, was that I could diagnose every single one of my own patterns with precision — the conflict avoidance, the humor as armor, the ADHD, the filial guilt, all of it — and was doing every single one of them just as much as before I understood them. The vocabulary got better. The behavior didn’t move.

Also, yeah. I know. That’s the problem.

The AI didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know. But it asked me things I’d never thought to ask myself. So I asked it different questions.

What do I complain about over and over but never actually change? Where do I lie to myself, and does it show up in a particular type of writing? What version of myself do I seem to miss the most? If a stranger read all of this, what would they think my life was about — and does that match what I think my life is about?

Those answers I’m not ready to share yet.

What I’ll say is: I asked them, expecting insight. Be careful what you ask for.

That’s what this series is. One era at a time. Starting with 1999, which is already out there — I published it before I wrote this, because of course I did.

More coming. I don’t know yet what it adds up to.

That’s kind of the point.

Whenever I go back to San Francisco now, it’s always the same thing: I spend a week with my friends, usually eating as much Asian food as I can possibly handle. Carnitas, too, usually in the form of burritos. For the most part, my home base will be in the Mission, where I lived for five years, with ventures into downtown to work at the local co-working spaces. Maybe I’ll be the very tourist I avoided as a local and walk along the waterfront or go to the Castro.

After that, I hop on the BART train to the end of the line, the suburbs in Fremont. I spent the second week visiting Mom in the room that Dad stayed in before he moved out, which has now become the computer room. Or in my case, the guest bedroom. It’s a twin mattress, the bed frame I had as a kid. The mattress is super firm, and it feels like a cot in the barracks, probably the most suitable sleeping environment for Dad. I usually lie to my mom and tell her that I just flew in. I’ve told the truth in the past — that I’m flying from Florida to California but seeing friends first — but she doesn’t take it too well.

Staying here has been fine, for the most part. One part of coming home is always the inevitable English or technology-based errand. Burn some CDs, make sure she wasn’t being convinced she was dying of cancer when she gets an English reminder about her mammogram. This time around, it was to “fix her TooYoo,” by which she meant, of course, making sure her YouTube works.

I upgrade Flash on her Safari browser.

What did you do? she asks in Chinese. Did you purchase something? They always want me to purchase something.

“No, I just installed Flash,” I say in English. She has no idea what I’m talking about, so she leaves the room, goes into the kitchen, and returns with a parfait glass filled with pineapple chunks. I salted them, she said. Kills the germs.

The most annoying thing is the lack of locks on the doors because of Angela. As a result, mom and her open the door at random times. Do you want some iced tea? Do you want some hot tea? How about some fruit? I cut up some fruit. Have you showered yet? Most of the time I brush her off: no, mom, I’m fine. Seriously. Mom, I’m okay. The times I eventually give in - sure mom, I’ll drink some water, okay, I’ll take a shower at night - I end up feeling guilty, like I’m enabling all of this to happen as a thirty-eight-year-old instead of an eight-year-old.

Angela comes into the room as well. “Is that your work computer?” she asks while I type this.

“Yeah.”

“Do you have friends and freedom?” she asks out of the blue.

“I guess I do.” I keep my eyes on the computer.

“I wish I did. I live in a straight jacket.” She leaves the room again.

Just a Thursday evening.