The Lighty Incident
The cautionary tale of what happens when your quiet cousin, who works at Google, translates your snarky blog into Mandarin and emails it to the family group thread you didn’t know existed.
“Ernie,” my cousin Chris says over the phone, his voice carrying that particular tone of dread I've learned to associate with family disasters. “We need to talk.”
It's Christmas Eve 2004, and I'm at my parents' house, mentally preparing for the usual holiday dysfunction. The last thing I need is more family drama.
“What’s wrong now?”
“Lighty1 found your... writing. On the computer.”
My stomach drops like a broken elevator. “My what?”
“She translated it. For the family. In Chinese.”
That's when I learned that my quiet, demure cousin-in-law wasn't just some grad student who giggled at everything—she was a fucking engineer at Google who spoke perfect English and had apparently been playing the long game while secretly cataloguing every snarky thing I'd written about our family dynamics.
See, let me paint you a picture of my blog circa 2003-2004.
I was writing with the confidence of someone who thought the internet was this magical place where I could document my family’s quirks with the only consequence being showered with praise. My posts read like hilarious anthropological field notes written by someone who had clearly never heard the phrase “libel and slander.”
Take this gem from Thanksgiving 2004:
Uncle Jerry's Thanksgiving Disaster, Part 47: The Adopted Daughters
There were some new additions to the family: my uncle's new wife — who, by the way, looks EXACTLY LIKE HIS OLD WIFE BUT twenty years younger— and eleven-year-old son, Horace, had recently moved to the U.S. from Taiwan. Additionally, there were two girls from mainland China in their late twenties to early thirties, who are apparently “adopted daughters” of my other college professor uncle.
I'm sorry—Horace is a horrible name. The reason why Asians choose to rename themselves to something “cooler,” like Dickey or Maverick or Yolanda, is because they were born with names like “Horace.” Would I pick two random characters in a Chinese dictionary if I wanted to give my kid a Chinese name? No? Then one of us American cousins should have been notified of the child's naming so as not to grow up with severe psychological trauma.
(Jesus, past me was a real piece of work.)
But the real content goldmine was the lunch conversation. When Uncle announced the get-together over email, he described guests by title and majors:
“Also attending lunch will be:
RHODA LI (B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Sun Yat-sen University, M.S. in Mathematical Sciences from UIUC, Ph.D Candidate in Mathematics UCSC)
LIGHTY DENG (B.S. in Theoretical Physics from Johns Hopkins University, M.S. in Data Science from NYU, Ph.D. Candidate in Mathematical Logic at UC Santa Cruz, co-advised by Uncle Hsiung)”
Oh, Rhoda and Lighty just happened to be the same ages as my cousins Bernie and Darren. What a coincidence.
The lunch itself was a masterclass in cultural performance art. Mandarin conversations are in italics:
Uncle: BuoBuo, would you like some more fish balls?
My Dad: No, thank you.
Lighty: Maybe if you called him "handsome BuoBuo", he would have said yes.
Dad: (blushing) No, no. I would have only accepted if you called me old BuoBuo.
Lighty: You're so MODEST!
Cousin's wife, who doesn’t speak Mandarin: (whispering) What's going on?
Ernie: (whispering) I'll let you know when I'm not so horrified.
I was live-tweeting family dynamics long before Twitter existed, except with fewer words and even less self-awareness.
The thing is, Lighty seemed sweet but... simple? She'd giggle at everything, defer to whatever anyone said, and had this habit of tilting her head like a confused golden retriever whenever anyone mentioned anything remotely technical. So when Uncle mentioned she worked at “some little company in Mountain View," I filed it under "probably does data entry” and continued my digital roast session.
In my follow-up post, I wrote:
I glance at my cousins—the ones with English as a first language—and telepathically ask them if we’ve been replaced by a new set of Chinese-speaking cousins, ones who are polite and respectful to elders and will marry for family appeasement. My cousin Chris glares back. “All signs point to yes,” he seems to say.
(Spoiler alert: Chris was probably thinking about how much of an asshole I was being, not commiserating with my cultural anxieties.)
But here’s the thing I completely missed: every time someone spoke English at that lunch, Lighty would get this tiny flicker in her eyes—like she was translating in real time, not because she didn’t understand, but because she was taking mental notes.
Back to Christmas Eve. Chris is still on the phone, and I'm realizing the full scope of my fuckup.
“How much did she translate?” I ask, though I already know the answer is going to ruin my week.
“All of it, Ernie. Three years. She made a... what do you call it... a PowerPoint.”
A presentation. Lighty had fucking Google Slides'd my blog.
The worst part? She'd included screenshots of my original posts alongside the translations, complete with little footnotes explaining the cultural context to family members who lived in that same cultural context. It was like having someone explain your own jokes back to you, except the jokes were about your family, and your family was the audience, and nobody was laughing.
I basically picture my then 78-year-old grandmother reading a Google Translated version of me writing off my grandmother’s depiction of my sister’s mental illnesses as “probably demonic possession” and describing my mom’s English as “charmingly incomprehensible.” My entire family’s tendency for shitty matchmaking. My dad, learning I passive-aggressively republished all his pleadings for me to just get with the program, “wake up to reality” and not be gay anymore, bad English grammar and all.
“She emailed it to everyone?”
“Everyone, Ernie. Everyone.”
Christmas dinner was a masterclass in passive-aggressive tension. Lighty sat there with this serene smile, occasionally asking me how my “writing hobby” was going. Uncle kept making pointed comments about “respecting family privacy.” My grandmother served me rice with the energy of someone who knew I'd called her cooking style “authoritarian but effective.”
But the real kicker? My dad actually liked some of the posts.
“This one about Uncle Jerry,” he said, pointing to a printout Lighty had thoughtfully provided, “very funny. Very accurate.”
“Dad, you're supposed to be mad at me.”
“Oh, I am. But also, your uncle is terrible at matchmaking.”
That's when I realized that Lighty’s revenge wasn’t just exposing my family blogging—it was forcing all of us to confront the fact that our family dynamics were exactly as ridiculous as I'd written them to be. She’d essentially held up a mirror and said, “See? This is how you look to someone on the outside.”
The woman I'd described as having “the intellectual curiosity of a houseplant” had not only found my blog (which, okay, fair—our last name isn't exactly common) but had systematically deconstructed my entire online persona and revealed it to the people who knew better than anyone that I was just as messy and complicated as the rest of them.
The aftermath was... complicated.
Some family members cut me off completely.
Others, like my dad, bookmarked my blog religiously, offering “corrections” to my observations. It got to a point where I stopped writing about family altogether—not because I was ashamed, but because I finally understood the difference between writing about people and writing for people who actually know you.
And Lighty? Lighty didn’t marry my cousin but did attend a lot of family gatherings, including my grandmother’s funeral. I’m sure she got promoted to senior engineer at Google and married someone she met through her own networks, thank you very much.
The last time I saw her, she asked me if I was still writing.
“Sometimes,” I said.
“Good,” she said, with that same serene smile. “Just... maybe ask first next time.”
Touché, Lighty. Fucking touché.
Names have been changed because I learned my lesson about writing about real people the hard way. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or brilliantly employed at major tech companies, is purely coincidental.
I don't know you or your family but I genuinely felt sick reading this whole blog. A testament to your brilliant writing!
I wouldn't be surprised if she ended up working for certain government agencies..