by Kevin Nguyen
And here’s where Margo liked to deliver her point like it was a Twilight Zone plot twist, her voice raised, commanding the attention of everyone in the room.
“What does it mean that the world’s most popular devices have been designed by and for the elite white men in Silicon Valley? Is this the new colonialism, a modern form of oppression that imposes the values and perspective of white men on the world?”
The room, as usual, went silent. It didn’t matter if, by this point, the half a dozen drinks she’d had were causing her to slur. She wanted to blow everyone’s minds with this revelation (which she often did). I didn’t necessarily disagree with her perspective, but I’d seen Margo do this act enough times to find it funny. This particular time it was happy hour at the office, and she was going for it.
Margo and Jared continued to argue, to the point where most of us tuned out, myself included, and quietly retreated to gather around a game of ping pong. Likely as a means of defusing Margo and Jared’s bickering, Brandon suggested we take the drinking to a nearby bar. Margo opted out.
“You want to grab some food in my neighborhood?” she asked me.
“I actually think I might go to the bar with the team,” I said. Margo and I had gotten dinner in Crown Heights the night before. It was rare that I was invited to hang with anyone else. But I couldn’t say this out loud, not with everyone around. It would sound pathetic. Maybe it was.
“Margo, come to the bar,” Brandon said. I hadn’t realized that he was listening. “Drinks are on me.”
“I wouldn’t want to intrude on boys’ night.” She wasn’t wrong. The remaining crew was all dudes. Brandon seemed unfazed. I suddenly felt the gravity of my betrayal. Margo grabbed her coat and was out the door before anyone could say goodbye.
We went to a nearby cocktail bar, hidden in the back of an Italian restaurant. There was a rotary phone in the front, which Brandon picked up to whisper the password (“clover”). A secret door opened to reveal a dim lounge and a handful of waiters in old-timey vests. There was no menu, just a short survey you filled out asking for your favorite spirits, and a personality quiz. I couldn’t help thinking about how much Margo would have hated this place. She’d probably make a joke—something to do with Prohibition cosplay; I’d laugh. But the truth was that I kind of liked it.
The next day, Margo didn’t answer my IMs, and when I caught her in person she brushed me off, said she was really busy. (The way our desks were positioned, I could see her computer monitor so I knew for a fact she wasn’t.)
“It’s weird, you liking this place so much,” she messaged me eventually.
“I don’t like it,” I replied. “But it’s better.”
In the early afternoon she sent me a link, which I took as a peace offering after her standoffish behavior. We’d gotten into the habit of sending articles back and forth—a kind of “wow, look how fucked-up this is” rubbernecking at the world.
“This is some bullshit,” her first message said. She followed up again a few minutes later, before I’d had a chance to answer. “Did you read this yet?”
Sometimes I wished Margo understood that my day-to-day at work, though menial, had deadlines that I couldn’t blow off. Still, I felt bad about the night before, so I closed my customer service emails and clicked her link. It was a news article surrounding the data released by an online dating site. The study had ranked the desirability of men and women by race, based on their user data. According to the numbers, the most desirable people were Caucasian men and Asian women. Least desirable: Asian men and black women. In the comments of the article, readers complained that the study was racist. But the author defended himself by saying that he wasn’t projecting a value judgment. This was data. This is what the numbers said.
“Huh, yeah, that’s dumb,” I replied, not thinking much of it. Who was surprised by this information? Certainly not Margo. She didn’t say anything after that, so I assumed she’d gotten busy or had moved on. Later, when I ran into her in the kitchen, she brought up the article again. She said that we finally had something in common: we were the ones no one wanted. She dubbed us “the Undesirables” and let out a sickly laugh.
I was unconvinced by the solidarity, even if I liked the idea that it bonded me with Margo. Just because black women and Asian men were at the bottom of the data set, it didn’t mean our experiences were the same. But Margo kept pushing, drawing me back into the same conversation, trying to get a stronger reaction from me.
“Mostly, I can’t believe people would state their dating preferences,” I said. “Like, it’s one thing to only date, like, Asian women. But it’s another to click on a drop-down menu and select ‘Asian women.’ ”
“Did you read the article?” Margo said. (Okay, so I’d read it quickly so I could get back to my emails.) “It’s behavioral data. It’s not what people said they were interested in. It’s how they acted on the site. Like, dudes probably didn’t admit they were only horny for Asian chicks, but those were the only girls they were messaging.”
“I guess people assume that no one’s surveilling their dating habits?”
“Maybe they don’t care,” Margo said.
She became even more annoyed when Brandon entered the kitchen. He seemed unsure of what to do, having just overheard Margo talking about men who “wanted to fuck Asian chicks.” It looked like he was about to say something. Would he laugh along? Or scold us for speaking inappropriately in the workplace? Neither, it turned out. He pretended not to hear us, and continued on his original mission, the pursuit of a granola bar. He grabbed one and quickly left the room.
“I’ve never seen him move so fast,” Margo said.
In a low voice I said, “I bet Brandon only messages Asian women.”
“Nah, he’s secretly into black women. Trust me.”
I laughed, but when I looked at Margo, she wasn’t smiling. In fact, she looked pained. I’d rarely seen her like this. Hurt.
We went to Gainsbourg after work, and Margo drank at an even more alarming rate than usual. She wasn’t in the mood for Pac-Man. Each beer came accompanied by a shot of well whiskey. I was trying to keep up. I thought we’d talked about it to death, but she was still going on about the dating article. I finally gathered that while the piece didn’t reveal anything she didn’t already know, Margo was an engineer, and having her experience reiterated and reinforced with data felt raw and personal.
“There’s nothing new in that article,” I offered, trying to find her some closure so we could both move on and talk about literally anything else. “You don’t even do online dating. You don’t even date. What’s the big deal?”
“I don’t want a boyfriend. I don’t want a house. I don’t want a family, not that anyone is asking. I don’t want this job, but I also don’t know what better job there would be. I don’t want to live in New York, but I’ll never leave. My entire life is just things I don’t want,” she said. “It’s exhausting.”
“I feel like you’re mad I am not angrier about this article.”
“No, I want you to get why I’m so mad.”
“What about the article bothers you so much?”
Margo was immovable, but no clearer. “That kind of behavioral data—it’s quantified desire.”
“Is everything okay?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure why this is fucking me up so much. It all just feels very…” Margo searched for the right word. She was slurring again, and I couldn’t tell if she said “empirical” or “imperial.”
I thought we could reach an understanding if I explained where I was coming from: “I know Asian men aren’t exactly anyone’s ideal, for a bunch of messed-up reasons. We’re seen as quiet. We’re supposed to be meek.” It made me a little sad to admit it out loud. “That’s just how people see us, and treat us. And this data is just proving a reality we already know.”
I wa
sn’t sure Margo was listening to me anymore. “Everybody wants to fuck a black girl, but nobody wants to fuck a black girl,” she said, mostly to herself, and then downed her beer.
Clearly I wasn’t getting it. There were gaps in our experiences. I knew that. Margo might be less frustrated with me if I acknowledged that.
“Maybe this information is less troubling to me because I’m a man?”
“True,” Margo said. “Men are dumb as fuck.”
I thought I could lighten the mood, at least. I repeated a joke I’d heard recently: that the scariest thing that can happen to a man is that his heart could be broken, but for a woman, her greatest fear was being murdered by a man. Margo didn’t find it funny. She asked me what the joke even was, and I fumbled as I tried to explain that it had been funny when I heard a famous comedian say it.
Nothing I said made her less upset. In fact, it seemed like I was only making things worse. I was supposed to be the person that Margo could rely on for support. At the very least, she could sound off at me and I’d listen. But it was clear that today hearing her wouldn’t be enough. She needed me to understand, and instead I was just making gross jokes. A second disappointment in as many days.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m trying to be helpful.”
Margo looked up from her empty glass and met my eyes just long enough to register her confusion, and then disappointment. Then her face resolved back to the grimace she’d had throughout the evening, as if it was no longer even worth trying to figure out what was wrong with me. She ordered another round.
* * *
—
THE DAY AFTER MARGO died, I went into the office. I walked by her desk, where all her things remained. Her computer was there, assorted papers, an overripe banana, a book she was reading. Everything still in its place, undisturbed.
As days went by, I walked by the halal cart we’d frequent for lunch, the café where we’d grab coffee, the bar we ended up at too often after work. Everything the same, just no Margo.
I never cried. I don’t know why. I knew rationally that my best friend was dead, but my body wouldn’t acknowledge it. I tried. I even set aside time in the shower, where my roommate wouldn’t hear me. I thought about Margo. I thought about my parents, imagined their deaths. Summoned every sad thing I’d read in the news. Nothing. Instead I just felt dulled, like something was missing instead of gone.
The Monday after the funeral, though, someone cleared Margo’s desk. Apparently the banana had gone bad, so someone had taken the initiative to get rid of everything. Occasionally mail would arrive for Margo, and the office manager stashed it in a conference room.
In the office, I am assumed to be industrious, efficient, quiet—like the engine of a Prius, humming along. The strangest part of being Asian in America is that you never have to prove how hardworking you are. People just assume you were born with a great work ethic, or that your stoic, disciplinarian parents beat it into you at a young age. But the truth was that I was quiet those weeks after Margo died because I was hungover at my desk. I answered emails slowly, only half paying attention to what I was writing, waiting for the day to end. On my way home I would pick up a six-pack from the bodega across the street from my apartment, and call it dinner. It was nearly enough calories to get me through.
The first few days, Brandon was unusually kind. He told me to take as much time off as I needed, and I explained I’d rather not take any, the office was a better place to keep myself occupied, which was something I said because it seemed like something to say. But I did very little. Afternoons dragged without Margo sending me things to read; workdays felt endless without someone giving me reasons to get angry.
* * *
—
IT WAS DUMB, BUT I missed Margo most during lunch because she always wanted to eat. We worked in a neighborhood that was filthy with startups, which also meant it was filthy with “fast casual” restaurants appropriating every variety of ethnic food into a similar format: a bowl of sorts.
“There’s the Indian place, or the Greek place, or the Japanese place, or there are the three different Mexican places,” Margo said. It had been a couple months since we started at Phantom, and she’d already explored all the lunch options. She loved them all. There was an efficiency to the formula. You picked a protein, some sides, some toppings, that kind of thing. And though there were always long lines, they moved rapidly. Your lunch was sent down a production line, its preparers dialed into a tightly designed system that would deliver your food quickly, packaged in a way that was easy to carry back to the office. Also, Margo didn’t mind spending fifteen dollars every day on lunch.
“I brought lunch,” I said, attempting to avoid using my lunch hour to spend more than an hour’s wage. In reality, like most days, I’d planned to assemble a meal out of free snacks in the Phantom break room.
“Lunch is on me today,” Margo said. “Let’s do the Indian one.”
At the restaurant, after a brief wait in line, Margo picked her format (biryani), her protein (chicken), and her sauce (tikka masala). I just followed her lead and ordered the same thing. On our walk back to the office, Margo popped open the lid of her food and took a bite.
“God, I’m starving,” she said. “Did you know that chicken tikka masala is the national dish of England? But now its origins are up for debate. People aren’t sure if it’s from India or the United Kingdom.” She took a bite. “Colonialism, man.” She took another bite. “But it tastes so good.”
“Are you going to feel this way when a Haitian fast-casual place opens?” I asked.
“Of course I’d complain about it at first,” she said, “but I’d probably get over it once I realized I could have fried plantains for lunch every day.”
“It’s funny, I want people to take Vietnamese food more seriously. Like, stop thinking of it as a cheap meal and think of it as something worth paying for,” I said. “But I also sneer at any bowl of phoʼ that costs more than, like, eight dollars.”
I suggested we just eat outside, since Margo had already turned her attention to her orange bowl of food. It was nice out, so we found a bench on Twenty-third and Broadway, situated in front of the iconic triangular building for which the neighborhood had been named. At twenty stories tall, it had been a skyscraper when it was constructed at the beginning of the twentieth century. Now it was dwarfed by every other tower around it—all of them massive, devoid of any character.
Margo stopped and looked up at the building. “I read that its elevators used to be water-powered.” She turned to me and I noticed a touch of bright orange tikka masala on her lip. “The building was always flooding.”
As usual, she identified something by its biggest problem.
* * *
—
THE MONDAY AFTER THE funeral, Brandon had briefly eulogized Margo at a morning stand-up meeting. He spoke about how talented she was, and how she would be missed, before immediately proceeding with the rest of the meeting, asking each engineer for an update on the status of whatever they were working on.
With Margo’s death, the mood at the office was sullen. It largely went undiscussed, though a few coworkers did tell me they were “very sorry.” As a means of raising morale, Brandon announced that there would be an office ping pong tournament that Thursday, starting at noon. Participation was optional but strongly encouraged. Brandon was obsessed with ping pong, and almost always won. I wondered if the tournament was supposed to raise the company morale or his own.
He sent me a reminder email the day before, telling me that I was the only one that had not opted in.
“I’m not very good at ping pong,” I said, hoping the conversation would end there.
“I’m sure you’re naturally gifted at ping pong. Plus we have sixteen employees, and it would make the numbers perfect for a tournament.”
“It used to be seventeen,” I said. Br
andon was taken aback, and I immediately felt bad for snapping at him. It wasn’t his fault Margo had died, and it wasn’t fair that I was taking it out on him. “Is this ping pong tournament optional or not?”
“Of course it’s optional,” Brandon said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “But come on.”
The next day it became abundantly clear to me, again, that I was not good at ping pong. It was also a relief when I was knocked out briskly in the first round by a lanky web developer named Josh who, toward the end of the match, began clearly taking pity on me in his serve.
Once I’d been knocked out, I tried to go back to my desk to get some work done—impossible with everyone still cheering and screaming. Every point was an exercise in life-or-death decision making.
It eventually narrowed down to the finals: Brandon squared off against a server engineer named Emil. Their styles were very different. Brandon was constantly on the attack, slamming the ball with a vicious forehand to the open corner. Emil played several feet back, waiting patiently for each slam and finding ways to return them. It was sort of mystical, the way Emil played—low and steady, never striking, and waiting for Brandon to make mistakes. After enough back-and-forth, Brandon would overshoot and Emil would win the point, each of these moments punctuated by Brandon screaming, “Fuck!”
“He’s a chopper,” said Tom, another engineer, to me, pointing in Emil’s direction. “Chopper” referred to Emil’s style of play, a strong defensive backspin that slowed the game down. Brandon didn’t relent, though. He took each opportunity to speed the game up, to play it on his terms. He eventually pulled away. Emil stopped being able to return Brandon’s slams and he took the game.
* * *
—
I WAS NOT MARGO. But thankfully, computers were stupid. They had no idea who Margo was. But I did.
A secure log-in is protected by a common feature called two-factor authentication. What this usually means is that a site requires a password, which then triggers a different, randomly generated passcode that is immediately sent to your phone. Since nearly all hacking happens remotely, the addition of second, physical verification prevents many accounts from being broken into. For two-factor authentication, one’s identity is defined by two things: something you know and something you have. Perhaps that’s how we define ourselves, in the end: by the stuff in our heads and the stuff we own.