The Many Daughters of Afong Moy(52)
She sighed as she remembered a line of poetry from Andrea Gibson and wondered if, perhaps, Louis’s mom was right: Our insanity is not that we see people who aren’t there, it’s that we ignore the ones who are.
Though in that moment Dorothy wished she could ignore certain people. Particularly Louise, who cheerfully proclaimed, “Dinner’s ready!”
* * *
Dorothy suggested that Annabel get ready for bed early. A preemptive move in case Louise, who was busy doing the dishes by hand, tried to seize the opportunity to take over yet another one of Dorothy’s motherly privileges.
“How long is Yin Yin staying?” Annabel asked as Dorothy helped her change into her favorite pair of footie pajamas. Which were green and made her look like a frog, though Dorothy called her a tadpole every time she wore them.
“Just a day or two,” Dorothy said as she envisioned her daughter living with Louise in Spokane, where she’d probably tell Annabel to call her Grandma instead of speaking Chinese. “Do you like it when she comes to visit?”
Annabel shrugged.
“Would you like to go stay with her for a few days?”
Annabel shook her head and frowned.
Dorothy sighed. Then she kissed Annabel on both cheeks, her button nose, and then her forehead, twice. She still smelled like lemons. “That’s my girl,” Dorothy said with a conspiratorial wink. “Do you want me to read you a story?”
Annabel shook her head again and curled up beneath her blankets, oblivious to the storm winds and rain that pelted her night-blackened window.
“I want you to tell me about your ah-ma.”
Dorothy smiled, but only on the outside. “Well, she was brilliant, just like you. She was very unique and saw the world differently, just like you. And she was beautiful, just like you.” She brushed Annabel’s bangs from her eyes and withheld the knowledge that Greta, like Dorothy, had always felt awkward, never able to fit in, to belong.
“Do you miss her?”
Dorothy hesitated, then nodded.
“What happened to her?”
Dorothy sighed. “She worked hard and was very successful at a very young age. All of this was before I was born, of course.” Dorothy felt as though she were opening a book, but the chapters were cold and wet and fell apart as she turned each page. “But the ah-ma I knew had become very sad. She struggled. Always searching for what she’d lost and unfortunately, she never found it again. Then she finally went away.”
“Why did she have to go away?” Annabel asked.
“Because she had a broken heart and needed to mend it.”
Annabel contemplated this. “Did they make her all better?”
Dorothy smiled, but her eyes watered.
13 Greta
(2014)
There’s our beautiful girl!” Anjalee said with arms wide open as Greta stepped off the elevator and into Syren’s modest Belltown headquarters, where she was showered with adoration in the form of cheers, streamers, and fistfuls of confetti in the shape of tiny red and pink hearts that swirled in the air as though it were gently falling snow. The women on her development team, especially those who hadn’t been invited to the awards dinner, wore T-shirts printed with the company’s motto, More Than Love?. They were all wide-eyed smiles, jumping up and down—knowing that next week when the company went public, they’d all instantly become stock-option millionaires.
Greta hugged the members of her team and shook confetti from her hair. Paper hearts stuck to the soles of her shoes with each step. “You guys, you didn’t have to do this. And this award doesn’t make…” As the crowd parted, Greta noticed the giant real-time data stream monitors in the lobby that kept track of sign-ups. Yesterday Syren was just shy of six hundred thousand users. But now…
Anjalee took Greta’s arm. “I think you’d better get used to having confetti in your hair. Because we just hit eight million users, overnight.”
“Wait, wait, wait.” This isn’t possible. Greta looked at Anjalee as though she had just said the sky was purple paisley, or 4 + 7 = blue cats. “None of this makes sense. Are you sure there wasn’t a breach?”
Anjalee brushed confetti from her shoulder. “Advertising you pay for, PR you pray for, and your prayers have been answered because we made CNN, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Wired, and even Scientific American and Psychology Today. Plus—I’m not going to name names—we paid a few celebrities to post on their social platforms as well. Oh, and we’ve run your scrubbing algorithms to weed out spam bots and other fake accounts, and it still looks like we’re easily at seven million and change. We’re going to have to post about this today, and…”
Anjali ran through her list of tasks, but Greta just tried to remain calm while quietly freaking out on the inside. She used her phone and took a video clip of the data stream as the numbers whirled by, as her coworkers laughed and took photos of her.
“I… still don’t quite believe it,” Greta said, her brows furrowed. “What’s the demographic breakdown of all the new sign-ups?”
“That’s my girl, always calculating,” Anjalee said. “You’ll be happy to know we’re now the only dating app on the planet to have more women users than men, and also a growing percentage of users who identify as queer, trans, and nonbinary—and it just keeps growing.”