New Waves

by Kevin Nguyen

  * * *

  —

  I HAD TO LAUGH a little, imagining Emil, who rarely cursed or raised his voice, writing up a list of the most offensive words he knew. I had a strange impulse to look up “chink” to make sure it was on the list. In high school, I’d been called a chink. It didn’t happen often anymore—maybe once every few months—that someone might say it to me on the subway.

  One time, in the elevator of a department store, an older white man standing behind me muttered that he couldn’t believe that the gooks had made it to America. He said it quietly, but just loud enough for me to hear it. I turned around to face him.

  “What did you just say?”

  He repeated himself, this time at full volume: “I said I can’t believe the gooks have made it to America.”

  The man stared me straight in the eyes. He was easily in his seventies, shorter than me too, but I shrunk back. The hatred in his eyes was so clear and pure.

  “Oh my god, Grandpa.” He was with a younger white woman, about my age, now identified as his granddaughter. She must not have heard him at first, but she was embarrassed now that she had the second time.

  “I killed people like you in the war.”

  “Grandpa, stop!”

  “You fucking animals.”

  “Jesus, Grandpa, leave him alone!”

  With a polite ding, the doors opened and the woman tugged her grandpa out of the elevator. She turned to me and apologized profusely.

  “I’m so sorry. He’s not of right mind—”

  “Fucking gooks!”

  “Grandpa, we’re leaving.”

  I would have told her that it wasn’t her fault, that it was fine, really, but the elevator doors closed before I could. The woman had begun scolding her grandfather, and I felt bad for them both. She was mortified. The whole confrontation was tense, but it had happened so fast. Walking away, I even thought it was kind of impressive he had used the word “gook,” because it meant he had rightly identified that I was in some part Vietnamese.

  When I told Margo, she hadn’t understood.

  “I would have lost my shit,” she said.

  “If someone called you a ‘gook’?”

  “Do you know the roots of that word? You know, we’re both technically gooks.”

  “Unless you’re secretly Asian, I don’t think you count as a gook,” I said.

  She was dead serious. Its origins as a slur, she explained, went back long before the Vietnam and Korean Wars. “Gook” began to be used in the 1910s, during the U.S.’s occupation of Haiti. Marines called black Haitians gooks. Any idiot could look it up on the internet.

  “I’ve got Haitian roots, along with some Jamaican. I know that ‘gook’ mostly refers to Asian people now, but historically we are both gooks,” she assured me. “Look it up.”

  “I’m not going to look it up.”

  I wasn’t going to fight Margo, and I certainly wasn’t going to fight history.

  “Why do you even know the etymology of ‘gook’?”

  Margo didn’t answer. She was already waving down the bartender for two more beers.

  * * *

  —

  TO CELEBRATE THE RAISES I’d gotten out of Brandon for Nina and Thompson, I took them out for drinks after work.

  “Beers are on me,” I announced proudly. (I’d borrowed Brandon’s corporate card.) “What do you guys want to drink?”

  “Whatever the happy hour deal is,” Thompson said. “I only drink at a discount.”

  “The funny thing about ‘happy hour’ is that it assumes the rest of the night isn’t happy,” Nina said. “Like the night begins well, and only gets worse.”

  “Why is everything you say so bleak?”

  Things got bleaker. Nina had complaints about every single person we worked with. Everyone was either too lazy or too overeager. Thompson complained about the bathroom situation. Our floor, with two dozen people, had one dingy bathroom. There was an unspoken rule that you could only use it for quick business. He told us about the afternoon he’d spent wandering the neighborhood looking for “a fancy place to take a dump.”

  “You know I’m your boss, right?”

  “Please, I’ve seen the other people we work with.”

  “Wait, I want to know where Thompson ended up…” Nina trailed off.

  “Taking a shit?”

  “I mean, who doesn’t like a nice bathroom?”

  Two blocks from the office was a hotel. If you walked in with enough confidence, Thompson said, no one would doubt that you were staying there. I looked over at Nina. She was entering notes into her phone.

  As we finished our first drinks, Thompson excused himself. “I gotta get home. Kids and such.”

  “I didn’t know you had kids,” I said.

  “Four of them.”

  “How old?”

  “I can’t be expected to remember all four of their ages.”

  “Yes you can,” Nina said.

  “I can barely remember their names!”

  Thompson thanked me for the drinks, and on the way out shouted, “The kids are six, eight, thirteen, and sixteen!”

  I went to the bar and returned to the table with two more beers.

  “I’m actually fine. I don’t need another drink.”

  “Oh, you’re leaving?”

  “No, I can hang out. I just don’t want another.”

  “I should have asked.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. And then: “Actually, do you want to go for a walk?”

  “What about these beers?”

  Nina was already putting on her coat and slinging her purse over her shoulder. “Who cares? They were free.”

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS DUSK AND Nina was determined to squeeze every drop of sunlight out of the day. Bryant Park was nearby. We could hang out there. Nina walked quickly, weaving through people with the kind of graceful aggression that only lifelong New Yorkers possessed. (“Born and raised,” she said.) She dashed across the street when we didn’t have a WALK signal, totally unafraid of oncoming cabs. I thought I might die at least a couple times on our way to the park. But Nina had turned a twenty-minute walk into ten.

  Bryant Park was, as always, a swarm of tourists. Nina surveyed the park like a falcon, and when she spotted an open bench darted immediately to it, tugging my arm along with her.

  “Do you like working at Phantom?” she asked, once we’d sat.

  “I mean, it’s a job.”

  “But do you find it fulfilling?”

  “I’ve never had a job I would describe as ‘fulfilling.’ ”

  “My parents are both history professors. They went straight from college to grad school, where they met. They’ve never known anything outside of academia, and yet they’ve always seemed satisfied—emotionally, spiritually.” Nina exhaled. “I don’t know how they do it.”

  “Were you a good student?”

  “An excellent student,” Nina clarified. She slouched in her seat. “But being good at a thing doesn’t mean you like it.”

  It was a warm summer day, but as the light disappeared, a chilly breeze swept through the park. Nina shuddered suddenly, almost violently, and instinctually I put my hand on her arm and asked her if she was okay. Of course she was fine. Her skin was soft, smooth. I could feel the goose bumps prickling up on her arm.

  “You’re…still holding my arm?”

  “Oh, uh, sorry?”

  “I thought you were going to kiss me?”

  “Oh”—I took a step back, hesitated—“I mean, should I?”

  “Probably not, right? Like, you’re my boss and all?”

  “Yeah, that’s true?”

  Everything we said had the rising intonation of a question.

  “We�
��ll keep this relationship professional?” she said.

  “I guess so?”

  I thought I might still kiss her. But the moment, however brief, lingered too long, and I thought about Jill. So we had a New York goodbye, which was always logistical: Which train are you taking? We both needed to get on the N train. She was headed downtown, and I was going whichever was the other way.

  * * *

  —

  “WE’RE GETTING NEARLY A third of these correct now,” Emil announced proudly one week at our staff meeting. “I know it’s still a long way off, but at this rate I think we can get to over fifty percent in the next two months.”

  He was talking about progress on his algorithm. When Brandon and I had first started having weekly check-ins on the customer service team, Emil was often sheepish since there was little movement. But after a few more weeks, Emil was making small breakthroughs. Suddenly the algorithm had a success rate of 32 percent.

  “Two months is too long. Every day we support the twenty-plus people below us. We’re bleeding money,” Brandon said. “You have one month to figure this out.”

  Rationally, I knew that my team was competing against Emil’s moderation system, which would only get better over time. But the early results had convinced me that I had months—maybe even up to a year—before it would improve enough to catch up.

  Emil shuffled out of the room, laptop in hand, beaming.

  “Lucas, wait.” Brandon gave me a pat on the shoulder. “I’m sorry Emil isn’t making progress more quickly.”

  I wanted to tell him that it was fine. In fact, if Emil wanted to keep not making progress, I’d be more than happy with that.

  “I know it’s been tough,” he continued. “It can’t be that fun down there, managing so many people. But you’ve been doing a great job.”

  I thanked Brandon for the compliment and returned to the customer service floor below. The room was quiet except for the diligent sound of keyboards tapping; nearly everyone had their headphones on. I knew the customer service operation was not a priority, but I had never realized just how temporary the space was. No decorations, not even a plant. I barely knew most of the people I’d hired, but I thought about how they all had bills and rent to pay. They were my responsibility.

  * * *

  —

  THAT NIGHT, I WAS late meeting Jill at the bar because of a subway delay, and I found her by herself in a booth playing something on her phone. She motioned that she would show me. I scooted myself into her side of the booth.

  “It’s the worst,” Jill said. “But I can’t stop playing.”

  It was a puzzle game. There was a grid of brightly colored blocks—on closer inspection, different kinds of candy—that needed to be rearranged and matched in threes. Simple in concept, but challenging in execution. Jill let me play. She was on level 67. I asked how many levels there were and she shrugged, like the game could go infinitely and it wouldn’t matter to her. The game was both maddening and satisfying—a kind of perfect alchemy of pleasing colors and sound effects, masking an underlying system built to exploit the most addictive tendencies of the human brain. It was genius.

  “I’m already too embarrassed how much time I’ve sunk into it. And I’m even more embarrassed that I pay to keep playing.”

  As I continued to play I remembered something. “Did I ever tell you Margo was obsessed with Pac-Man? Like, we’d always go to this crappy bar solely because they had this old-school Pac-Man machine. And Margo would order a beer and ask for five dollars’ worth of quarters and just stand in front of the arcade cabinet until she was too drunk to play anymore.”

  Seeing how poorly I was performing, Jill took her phone back. I watched her eyes widen as she tapped and swiped.

  “Why Pac-Man?” she asked.

  “She had a total engineer brain about it. She could see the patterns of the ghosts chasing you around the maze. The game was designed to be easy enough to feel beatable, but tough enough that it wasn’t. That way people would play again and again.”

  Jill finally put her phone down.

  “That’s depressing, isn’t it? That you can trick people into doing a thing indefinitely.”

  “Humans will never commit to something forever. But they will do a dumb thing as long as you keep stringing them along,” Jill said. “Like my exes.”

  When I didn’t laugh, Jill added, “That was a joke.”

  I hadn’t really heard the joke because I was thinking. If a game could do it, so could I. By stringing Emil along, I could extend the lifespan of my team.

  “Brandon’s always saying this thing at work: Don’t ask for permission, ask for forgiveness.”

  “That sounds kind of rape-y.”

  “What?” I hadn’t quite caught what she said. “Sorry, but I have to go back to work.”

  * * *

  —

  EVERY RESOLVED CUSTOMER SERVICE ticket was saved in a database that fed directly into Emil’s algorithm. The more completed tickets, the more the system would improve. At a certain point, it would have enough tickets, enough data, to automate the process.

  But what if that data were altered slightly? If Emil’s system was ingesting false data, it would be learning from false signals. And instead of making progress, would it instead take steps backward?

  By the time I arrived back at the Phantom office, everyone had left for the day. There were still blinking lights and the glow of screensavers coming off monitors, connected to computers that had been left running even though no one was using them. I spent nearly all my time on the customer service floor, but on the main floor I still had a desk and a computer. I hadn’t used it in weeks.

  My plan was simple: change the status of a few hundred random tickets so that it would throw off Emil’s algorithm. The system was attempting to find consistency across the tens of thousands of customer support requests we’d handled. If I could introduce a little more randomness into it, it would make it impossible for the system to find any patterns. Emil’s progress would stall and people on the customer service floor would keep their jobs. But my process had to be as unpredictable and haphazard as possible—introduce a deeply human kind of chaos.

  It crossed my mind that Emil might notice something was amiss once his algorithm’s accuracy plummeted. But it was more likely he would blame himself rather than the data. Unlike people, data was neutral; data was infallible; the raw numbers were never self-interested.