Page 68 of Ideal Life

“These newer,” Sam said in choppy Taiwanese. “Better. You use now and… uh, listen.”

They put them into their ears. Sam had already set theirs up to translate into Taiwanese as the default language.

“Okay, this is a test,” he said in English. “I’d love to hear about your adventures today in San Francisco. You went to the Ferry Building and then walked along the piers to Fisherman’s Wharf, right? What was the most beautiful thing, the most surprising thing, and the most delicious?”

Jenny’s mouth fell open. Because—if this was working correctly—she’d just “heard” Sam speak flawless Taiwanese, with more fluidity and vocabulary than he’d ever uttered before. Sam himself certainly didn’t know the Taiwanese words for “ferry” or “pier.”

“How you do that?” she said in English.

“These earbuds use a new technology to provide real-time interpretation of any language into another,” Sam said. “So I’m speaking in English, but it’s turning it into Taiwanese for you.”

“It sounds just like you,” Jenny said, this time in Taiwanese, but the response piped into Sam’s ears in English. “When you hear my voice, is it me?”

He grinned and nodded. “Yeah, wow. It’s exactly you. Dad, do you want to try?”

Roger touched the earbuds delicately, but he shook his head and waved Jenny on. Between the two of them, she was the talker 95 percent of the time. But Sam had never known whether it was because he preferred listening, or if he just didn’t have much to say.

“What were your questions about San Francisco?” Jenny asked.

“Most beautiful thing, most surprising thing, and most delicious,” Sam said.

“Oh yes, the most beautiful,” Jenny said, “was a tiny garden we found tucked between buildings near the Embarcadero. It had these amazing flower sculptures and a little waterfall. A perfect hidden gem in the middle of the city.

“The most surprising was the microclimates. We started in fog at the Ferry Building, walked into sunshine at Pier 23, hit a wall of wind at Fort Mason, then back to warm sun at Ghirardelli Square. All within a couple of miles!

“And the most delicious thing was oysters at the Ferry Building Marketplace. I’d heard about them in one of Libby and Jacob’s videos from a few years ago. The oysters were coming in fresh from Tomales Bay, and we just stood there at the counter slurping them down with a little mignonette sauce. Absolute heaven!”

Sam’s eyes prickled. He’d never been able to understand his mom like this. Just the insight into what piqued her interest was like opening a door into who she truly was, a personality that he’d only ever been able to observe from the outside—Jenny Chang, cheerful proprietor of a bakery chain.

“God, I’m so sorry we missed out on so many years,” he said, wiping away a tear that had escaped. “I should have worked harder to not lose my Taiwanese or Mandarin. I should’ve visited home more often, or I don’t know… been a good son and taken over your business.”

“No, Sammy, we never expected you to come back to Taiwan,” Jenny said. “We were the ones who sent you here.”

“I feel like I did a terrible job, though, of keeping my Taiwanese side alive. I mean, there was no one else like me in Mississippi, but even in college here in California, where there were a lot more Asian immigrants, I didn’t exactly gravitate toward them. I’m not Asian enough, I guess.”

Roger made a small sound, then, and laid his hand on Sam’s shoulder. “Do you know how much courage it takes to thrive as you did? You were so little when you were sent off to foreign shores alone, and you forged a whole new life in this unfamiliar place.

“I feel nothing but awe for you, Sam. And you shouldn’t cling to binary ideas of ‘Taiwanese’ or ‘American.’ You and those in your generation who were latchkey kids sent without their parents, or the children of immigrants, made a new culture here, all your own. It is the best of both worlds. You don’t need to belong to ‘Taiwanese’ or ‘American.’ You’re simply a new version, a new iteration. It’s wonderful.”

Sam hadn’t ever heard his dad talk for even a third that long at once. Maybe Roger left small talk to Jenny, and he only spoke up when necessary. Or maybe it was just that there was finally a way to convey everything he’d wanted to say but hadn’t been able to in the past.

The disingenuous ghosts of Nowhere Cat still prowled in Sam’s memory, but it was time to move on from the technological skepticism that Nowhere Cat had left in him. He probably should have listened to Talia more often about trying out new gadgets. Because these earbuds were life-changing.

Talia

On Friday, Ideal Life converted conference room A/B into Due Diligence Headquarters to manage everything that Omni’s bankers and lawyers needed to review for the acquisition. While there was a digital database online that housed all the contracts, it was still helpful to have a central location where the Ideal Life employees could stop in if they were working on acquisition-related matters. Sometimes it was to ask questions; sometimes it was just the camaraderie of being together on a project. After all, collaboration had been a core philosophy for Ideal Life since its earliest days when it was just Talia and a handful of engineers in a single room, building on an idea and a dream of a better future for humanity. Even though the company had grown a lot since then, that innate desire to work together still laced its way through the startup.

Talia had put Erin on the acquisition team for the rest of her summer, figuring it was the best way for her to be exposed to a little bit of everything. Here at Due Diligence HQ, there was talk of financial records for the investment bankers, API source code for Omni’s developers, real estate leases and licensing agreements and even office supply contracts. A tech business wasn’t only technology; there were so many underlying components that made a company run, and it was good for Erin to see all that.

“Happy Friday, everyone,” Talia said as she entered the conference room just after 10:30. There were a dozen people here, including Erin, and the long table was covered in stacks of paper, highlighters, and sticky notes.

There were greetings all around, but everyone’s faces also showed the drag of even longer hours than normal, because work on the acquisition was on top of each department’s other responsibilities. Sleep-heavy eyes were a little more pronounced, yawns were begun and not stifled, and the room was populated with three empty coffee cups per person.

Jody and Jonathan waved her over. “Hey, Talia, you feeling okay?”

“Um, yeah. Why?”

“Nothing,” Jonathan said.