Page 10 of You Had Me at Hello World
“Then I joined the staff for real and I taught him calculus,too, his senior year. He was on the honor roll, great kid. Instead of college, he went to the army like a lot of his classmates did. The military recruiters would come to our school and make all these promises to teenage boys who were mad as hell—sorry,heck—about 9/11 and Al-Qaeda and didn’t have anywhere to put that rage.”
I nod, even though I already know the TL;DR of this story.
“Well, he suffered a lot during the war, and you know how he is now—” She purses her lips. “Char, you’re too smart to waste your life.”
“Um. Thanks?”
“Promise me you’ll try for this program.”
It doesn’t actually matter. It’s not like Alpha Fellows will admit me. I’ll just rush through the application in an hour or two, then forget about it.
I grab the pamphlet and stand up. “Fine. Yeah.”
“Forward me the confirmation email when you’re done.”
“Sure.” I’m dying to bounce.
Only a few minutes later, as I’m walking out of the building, does it hit me. I totally failed to quit my job.
Chapter Five
The Alpha Fellows application is decently straightforward, which is kind of disappointing. Like, hi, I expected at least one question to be written in binary or hidden in the page source code.
One of the short-answer questions goes like,Tell us about your first experience programming. I respond with this sappy paragraph about writing Hello World at age six and how it felt like magic. I don’t mention that my father was the one who taught me how to program. That it was the last time I ever saw him.
During Mom’s pregnancy, Baba got a job in Shenzhen, China. He moved there while my mother stayed behind in America—they wanted me to get citizenship here. After I was born, he visited every few months, and when he came for my sixth birthday, he brought me a laptop. It was made by the company he worked at, Huawei. It was sleek and silver. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever touched.
“Tang Yijun.” Mom said his full name like that only when she reprimanded him. “How much did this cost?”
“Relax, Qinxu,” he said. “The boss is going to give me a big bonus this year. I can smell it.” He even sniffed the air for dramatic effect.
“She’s too young,” Mom said. “What does a child need a computer for?”
“It’s the future. Don’t you want her to be part of the future? Isn’t that why we decided to raise her in America?”
He smiled with dimples. My mother once told me that those dimples were dangerous; he could use them to get anybody to do anything.
She sighed. “Don’t show her those video games you play.”
He nodded vigorously. “Of course not. Educational purposes only.”
After dinner, he showed me how to turn on the laptop, set up a username and password, and access the Web through Internet Explorer (which was still a thing back then). We created a Gmail account for me. I thought the computer was awesome, but I was happier to have an excuse to spend time with him.
“You have to be careful on the internet,” he said. “There are a lot of bad people. A lot of lies.”
I pointed at a banner ad with a voluptuous blonde, the wordsSexy singles are waiting to meet you!plastered beneath her photo. “So that’s a lie?”
My dad coughed. “Yes, don’t click on any of those. Actually, let’s install Adblock for you.”
He wanted me to learn how to code. He demonstrated howto make the computer printHello world!in Python. He signed me up for the Art of Problem Solving, a website that had programming exercises for kids. Together, we worked through the easiest problems.
While I was puzzling over the concept of aboolean(which sounded like a good name for a stuffed animal), Mom screamed from the kitchen. “Tang Yijun! What the hell is this?” I flinched.
Dad swallowed hard. “I’m going to help your mother,” he says. “Keep going. If you get stuck, you can click on the hints.” So I did.
When my parents argued, it was like a volcano (my mom) fighting a glacier (my dad). The volcano would spew more and more fire, and the glacier would simply evaporate into steam, which of course would anger the volcano further. This analogy only works if you forget everything you know about geoscience.
Whatever the fight was about, it seemed to have been fixed by the day Dad had to leave. We drove him to the airport, and before he disappeared into the security line, he squatted down such that our eyes met. “Make sure you do the exercises while I’m gone, okay? I’ll be checking the leaderboard for your username.”
