“You know, you were probably destined to be a lonely migrant farmer, but instead you were blessed with me, and you don’t even know how to appreciate it!”
She circled the kitchen counter and stood facing me. “Come on, I thought you’d like knowing about this,” she said as she slowly opened the bottle. “While I’m here, maybe I can take you to a wine tasting in the city. It’ll be really fun!”
“You can save your energy, Wendy. Your old baba is not fancy, and I’m not going to stick my nose in there like a pretentious snob. I have always been a simple guy, in case you forgot,” I said with a sniff, “while you were in Europe.”
I took a sip from the glass she poured for me and said, “I feel that in my experience, the best wine is wine that is over fourteen percent alcohol content, in a bottle with a wide neck, and preferably that bottle should have a large indent at the bottom.”
I thought I saw her roll her eyes at me, so I said, “When did you get so stuck up? Did you learn that from your mother?” And she turned away from me.
The previous situation can be broken down into pseudo code as:
If (daughter is frustrating) then (compare her to her mother)
While (daughter shuts up) do (change the subject)
When the doorbell rang, Wendy skipped over to answer it and I assumed everything was back to normal. She was very polite to both of them, like a good daughter. I didn’t even have to ask her to unpack the two cases of beer into the fridge. What a sight my friends must have been to her! Old Ping was as unwashed as ever, but he had at least changed out of his work overalls for the occasion. Charles still had paint splatters above his eyebrow and his hair had grown long everywhere that was not bald.
When I tried to offer them Wendy’s wine, both of them initially refused.
“I don’t know about foreign liquors. Most things white people like give me the runs,” said Charles.
“I’ll stick to my baijiu, but thanks, young Wendy,” said Old Ping, whose eyes were already rimmed with red. He must have started drinking in the car.
Wendy set the table while I finished cooking. It was one of my most sumptuous spreads. There were five dishes, fish done two ways, and a soup. All the colors satisfied, every plate still hot. Old Ping opened twelve bottles of beer and clinked them against the plates. Now we could eat.
“A toast,” Old Ping said, “for young Wendy giving us the honor of her presence. We owe it all to you for this nice meal we are having.”
“Don’t pay attention to your uncle Ping, he has no education like you,” said Charles.
Old Ping pointed a chopstick at Wendy. “Be nice to your old dad, don’t neglect him.”
“Chi, chi! Eat, eat!” I said, digging into the brisket.
The table was quiet with eating until Ping started talking again. “Say, Wendy Wendy Wendy, when are you going to get married?”
“Ah, don’t bother the girl, Ping, she’s going to get a Ph.D. Isn’t she?” Charles asked me.
“You know!” Old Ping cut in. “They have a saying in China, there are three genders: men, women, and women with Ph.D.s.”
“Well, this isn’t China, last time I checked,” she replied.
“Don’t take too long, is my advice,” said Old Ping. “Make sure you find a boyfriend before your Ph.D. scares all the boys away!”
I jumped in. “She doesn’t have to worry about that. If she doesn’t want to get married or can’t get married, or whatever, she can always live here with her old dad. I’ll pay the bills.”
Then what the heck, they decided to give the wine a shot. Charles asked her, “Wendy, you really think this tastes good? I’m not going to lie. I’m ignorant.”
“It’s from a family vineyard in Italy,” I said. But not wanting to make my friends feel out of place, I added with a laugh, “Not that I could taste the difference.”
“It’s a smidge too sweet,” Old Ping said as he wobbled toward my refrigerator and cracked a few ice cubes from the ice tray with his hands. He sauntered back to the table with a fistful of ice cubes and I reached out my glass.
I drank a big gulp and gave a satisfied sigh.
It happened sometime after that. Charles had made us all take some shots of baijiu and we were still cracking jokes when I noticed Wendy had stopped eating. She pushed her bowl away from her and was blinking at the ceiling light.
“Have some fish,” I said to her.
Her eyes glistened. “Dad, why am I here?” she said, getting up from the table. “I flew back just to spend time with you, but it’s like you don’t need me at all. You have no interest in me. It’s like I’m…”
“Oh, so if you’re going to have to spend time with me, it should be all about you.”
“I’m not saying that.”
“I should be honored that you came back.”
“Jessica’s dad said her first verb was ‘scurry’! What was my first verb?” she asked me.
“How am I supposed to remember a word from twenty years ago?” I laughed. I should have just made something up on the spot, like “eat”! “Don’t be a brat, Wendy, we have guests here.”
“Come on, calm down,” Charles said. He had his own grown daughter that he was afraid of.
Knocking against the table, she struggled to put on her jacket. “Hey, you can’t be mad at your dad,” I said. “I raised you, you can’t just throw a tantrum over nothing.” Somehow I accidentally ripped a few hairs from her head in trying to stop her from putting on her jacket and getting up.
She yanked away from me and went into the kitchen. I got up and the ground moved below me.
“Think of all the stuff I bought you. Think of all the sacrifices I’ve made for you. Now you come home with a bottle of wine and ask me questions? Make demands on me?” I said, yelling now. “Do you know how much of my money it cost to raise a bratty girl like you all these years?”
She stopped by the kitchen door and looked at me. “You calculated the exact amount of money it cost to raise me?”
Old Ping cleared his throat. “Hey, Ma, stop it now.”
“Yeah, it’s one hundred and fifty thousand U.S. dollars not including all your tuition,” I said to her, the blood rushing to my head like I was hanging upside down. “How about I act like Jessica’s American dad and ask you to pay me back?”
She stared at me through narrowed eyes, shaking with rage.
“Yeah, why don’t you pay me my money back?” I said as I banged my hand on the table. “Why don’t you think about that?”
She didn’t even bother to close the kitchen door on her way out. Charles and Old Ping followed soon after that, too, leaving the table a mess of bottles and bones. An hour passed before I realized she was not going to take responsibility for her disrespectful behavior and return to apologize. Fine, let her have it her way. If she was going to be disrespectful and ungrateful, then that’s her code of operation. I don’t get it. My mind works best in bytes, in data, in things permanently and irrevocably true. I’m not even going to pretend that I understand women at all.
It’s possible that I might have said some things in bad taste. I might have drunk slightly too much as well. Thus, I had a problem on my hands.
I am aware there are limits to the capabilities of the human mind. That’s why solving complicated algorithms is difficult; it requires a person to keep track of so many interrelated concepts. The solution couldn’t possibly be figured out that very night. The last of the wine tasted bitter in my mouth, but I drank it anyway. Birds went up into their nests and I went to bed.
Wendy didn’t call that night. She is still young, self-important, and takes her hurt feelings seriously. Even though she knows, or at least should know, that I’d simply lost my temper. But even though I am asleep in bed, things will start happening. That’s the phenomenon of problem-solving; the mysterious wells of inspiration will often follow a period of i
ncubation. Often the most difficult problems are solved only after one has formally given up on them.
So while I sleep, my mind will be calculating. The subconscious part of my brain will continue working on a problem previously met without success. Even after I wake up, work my joyless eight-hour shift on the assembly line at the Hillsborough computer repair shop, then watch basketball with Charles and Old Ping, I’ll be subconsciously trying to get to the mysterious inspiration to solve my not-yet-unfathomable problem. Once I do, the solution will be forced into my conscious mind.
Everything makes logical sense in computer science. Computers know not to get sentimental; they can rise above it and work in symbols and codes. The world of imagination, uncertainty, and doubt can be managed through entities and hex notations, and sooner or later everything becomes representational and quite manageable. You don’t need to worry about the specifics once you figure out the abstract.
My favorite is the nondeterministic polynomial, which is simply a case in which someone or something, a magic bird perhaps, shows up out of nowhere and gives you the “answer” to a difficult problem. The answer is “yes.” The only thing you need to do is find a way to check if the answer is correct, that the circumstances of the problem actually exist, and be able to do so in a reasonable amount of time.
At one point in the past, I thought I had all the answers already. It happened before I moved to America, before the marriage, before the daughter, before I even attended college. It was the summer I hitched a train to Guangzhou, then bought the cheapest ticket to Hainan. I was eighteen years old with a shaved head and twenty yuan in my pocket, but I just wanted to see the ocean, to float above the water and see the sand below. I still remember it now, that water reflecting a million perfectly placed petals, lifting up to meet the moon. Those birds that lined the trees like big white fruit, who transformed back into birds when I approached them, and flew away to become clouds. Those clouds reaching down to meet the sea, like a lock of wet hair on a girl’s neck.
It was then that I realized that the reflection of the water on the sand looked like the electricity in a light bulb, like the mysterious maps of marble. I thought I knew the answer to a question I hadn’t even asked, that there was some order in this universe.
Life happened so quickly. My hair thinned and I developed a paunch. The years melted and quietly pooled at my feet. Before I was at all prepared, I was married to an ambitious woman, with a precocious daughter, giving up my professorship and moving to New Jersey to become another immigrant American living an ordinary immigrant life.
Now that I think about it, those years were like watching a sunrise. It was not at all like the pleasant vision I’d had in mind. It was too much to fathom, the great sun peering out from the distance: warm and comforting for a moment and then brilliant, too brilliant to bear. The soft halo of light quickly became a flare and it stung. And yet, by the time I learned to turn away, most of my life was over.
Some nights I wake up in a panic and wonder: Why did everything that I worked for turn into what I despised? How did I become an old man? How did I end up with no one?
Algorithm discovery is the most challenging part of algorithmic problem-solving. The phases themselves are unambiguous, but it is determining them that is the art. To actually solve a problem, I must first take the initiative.
Phase 1: Define and understand the problem.
Phase 2: Develop a plan for problem-solving.
Phase 3: Execute the developed plan.
Phase 4: Evaluate the solution for accuracy, and for its potential as a tool for solving other problems.
PHASE 1: DEFINE THE PROBLEM: THE DAUGHTER HERSELF
I always knew this daughter was going to be trouble. The first inkling of it was sparked when I used to take her on my bike around my old campus. Because we didn’t have any children’s seats, I sat her on the pole directly behind the handlebars of my bike. The first thing I told her was to never, ever put her feet close to the wheels. They would get caught and the wheel would cut her feet badly.
So the first thing she did was get her feet caught in the wheel. Cold sweat beaded my face as I bandaged her bloodied little feet, but she barely cried. It was as if she was testing me. It was as though she went against my warning just to be sure I was telling the truth.
Phase 2? No, let’s go back.
PHASE 1: UNDERSTAND THE PROBLEM: IMMIGRATION
Maybe it began soon after Wendy was born, after my wife and I boarded a plane from Beijing to JFK. Probably right after I took my first bite of a ham and peanut butter sandwich and liked it. The problem might have arisen following decades of listening to the same Chinese songs, driving to Queens to be surrounded by other transplanted Chinese people, craving the same food we left behind. Perhaps it was sparked during the last twenty years of watching American TV, how I could never understand enough of the dialogue to chuckle along with the laugh track.
Phase 2: Could it have begun because TV wasn’t funny? No, let’s try again.
PHASE 1: UNDERSTAND THE PROBLEM: UNFAIR AND UNEXPECTED REVERSAL OF ROLES
When I pictured myself being a father, I’d always assumed I’d take the lead in the relationship. I’d teach her how to read, how to ride a bike, how not to talk to strangers, all of that, but a lot of these opportunities at fatherhood were co-opted from me. It was she who taught me how to read English, when she was eleven. When she was twelve, she helped me pass my citizenship exam by making up acronyms. When she was sixteen, I taught her how to drive, but it was my daughter who filled out the forms to renew my license. I never got to console her over some punk boy breaking her heart, but she held my hand when I cried after her mother left me.
Is that all there is? It can’t be. Cannot proceed to phase 2.
I must admit, there are ultimately some limitations to algorithms. A difference does exist between problems whose answers can be obtained algorithmically and problems whose answers lie beyond the capabilities of such systems.
A problem solved algorithmically would be my temperamental attitude. I have since stymied the urge to physically threaten teenage boys being assholes in public and I no longer pay for car damage due to routine road rage. It was logical reasoning.
However, there is a line to be drawn between processes that culminate with an answer and those that merely proceed forever without a result, which in this case might be:
1.The problem of wine
2.The problem of daughters
I can’t give up. There has to be a solution. Wendy and I used to have a good relationship, a great relationship, with some all-involving grace that didn’t need problem-solving. When I watched her ride away on her first bicycle, her ponytail flapping back and forth like a bird’s wing, or as I listened to her sing in the school choir, my heart skipped when she spotted me in the crowd and waved. That’s my girl! I made her! Like when I visited her third-grade open house and she showed me that in her bio she had written “hiking with father” under hobbies and “father” under heroes. That’s got to be worth something.
A portion of my unconscious mind will go on translating ideas from abstraction to pseudo code and laying it out systemically in algorithmic notations. It will be an ever-slowing process. Once I wake up, life will bring about more arguments and disappointments; small trespasses in this long life to live.
My relationship with my daughter might never fully recover from this night. We might miss a lot of holiday cooking together, and my hair will thin even more, and she will grow just a tiny bit taller. Maybe out of the blue, some years from now, she will introduce me to a boyfriend, a strange-looking but polite boy. It might take even more years, but maybe she will come home and apologize and wash my dirty pillowcases and overeat in order to please me. I wouldn’t be able to know how unhappy I had been until she returns.
She cannot abandon me. She loves me and thus will be able to anticipate my indignation and put my hurt feelings be
fore her own. Those are some of the concessions made. There will be others. These sequences of instructions are programmed within her; that is her heritage.
Ah, but the solution, and there is one, will come to me years later. Perhaps when I am on a fishing boat in Baja, or in the middle of my honeymoon with my second wife, or in the hospital room at the birth of my new baby daughter, Lana. When it comes to me, and it will, I will remember this:
One afternoon, not long after we immigrated, when my daughter was still growing out of her baby teeth, I came home from work early and found her walking alone around the dim apartment. Holding a hand mirror faceup at her waist, she walked from room to room while peering down into the reflection.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I am walking on the ceiling,” she replied.
I was about to tell her to stop fooling around, to do her homework, but instead I paused and allowed myself to go with her imagination instead. I tried to picture what enchanted beasts she might have up there walking on the ceiling with her. She still had those worried dark circles under her eyes back then and my love for her was still simple and pure. This is what I need to tell her. Not her first verb, but this, the moment I realized she was better than me. She would have both sides of this world, the whole thing.
Echo of the Moment
That morning, just before 9 a.m., Echo stood on the landing with her hair combed and her tennis shoes on, waiting for one of her neighbors to open their door. After four weeks of living in her rented apartment, she was determined to meet someone. When the wooden floors creaked across the hall, Echo pretended to take out her garbage and met a tall, angular woman named Anne-Laure.
They did the bisou on both cheeks. They did not ask about each other’s lives. They only exchanged low-level smiles, the kind you reserve for the cashier at Monoprix when you’re buying one item in a hurry. “C’est un batiment tranquille,” Anne-Laure said slowly and politely, “everyone keeps to themselves.” But that wasn’t true at all; Echo could hear Anne-Laure’s music and smell her hashish. Echo thought that if she could, she would pass through her walls and emerge through Anne-Laure’s picture frames into her living room and touch her soft, sparkling things.
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