Page 52 of You Had Me at Hello World
I puff my cheeks out. “Also, my eyes arenotthe color of Earl Grey. They’re the first strong steep of pu’er.”
“A storm in a teacup,” he mutters, but I pretend not to hear him.
A moment later, one man licking a Popsicle stops by.“Are you an immigrant?”he reads. “I’m here to get my PhD and then I’m going back to Pakistan. Do I still count?”
Honestly I’m unsure, but I nod anyway. It makes sense that we’re going to get grad students, since we’re on campus. “Sit down! We’d love to chat with you.” I pat the chair beside me.
He plops down. “You have until I finish this Popsicle.”
Turns out he really likes talking about himself. Once his Popsicle is gone, he sticks around until I’ve finished all the questions.
For the next few hours, more interviewees trickle in steadily. There are all sorts of people passing through MIT. A college student from New Zealand with the coolest accent. A Syrian refugee who’s waiting for a Tinder date. A Filipino man who fell in love with a New York lawyer. A few people who are second-generation immigrant kids, like me.
There’s only one tense moment. At around eleven a.m., while I’m interviewing a teenager whose parents were born in Istanbul, a woman comes up to our table, reads our sign, and wrinkles her nose.
“This app isn’t right,” she says. “You’re excluding people like me.”
The teenager cuts in. “So what? It’s not built for you. But the rest of this country is.”
“You know, technically, everyone is an immigrant,” she says.
“Were Native people immigrants? How about slaves? And are we really going to call colonial settlersimmigrants?” The questions spray out rapid-fire.
Khoi and I exchange startled glances. I feel like we should step in before this escalates into a full-blown shouting match, but I don’t know what to do.
To my relief, the woman only nods. “I suppose I haven’t thought of that before.” And then she trots off.
When we break for lunch, I’m overwhelmed. Some people said they didn’t feel out of place at all in America, while others said they could never quite fit in. People cited myriad reasons for coming here: more job opportunities, a better life for their children, civil unrest or war in their birth countries, or just a fresh start. They struggled with divorce, coming out, grief.
And I… I have no idea how to distill all these experiences down into a single app.
As we devour pizza—pineapple for him, sausage-and-pepperoni for me because I don’t hate my taste buds—I say, “Most of my town is white. I’ve never met so many immigrants with all these different stories.”
“Same. My family’s from a very white suburb.” He chews thoughtfully. “Honestly, I don’t know if I count as an immigrant.”
“But you’re Vietnamese?”
He lifts a shoulder. “A lot of the people we spoke to talkedabout feeling torn between the country of their birth and the country they now reside in. But I’ve never felt like I had to choose. My mom was adopted. I’ve been to Vietnam plenty of times, but it never felt like home.”
“I don’t remember anything about China,” I say. I’ve visited Beijing once, for a funeral when I was four years old. Maybe it’s bad, but I don’t even remember whose funeral it was.
When someone once told me to “go back to my own country,” the comment didn’t piss me off. It confused me. I was born and raised in America. What other country could I ever possibly call home?
Monday morning, Khoi shows me how to use Figma, a software for creating design mockups. We want the app to be intuitive, simple, responsive. I choose a sky-blue palette since that’s Mom’s favorite color.
We each assign ourselves to designing two pages that our app will have—login, user profile, discussion forum, private messaging—and work side by side.
Khoi begins playing something orchestral and cinematic from his laptop speakers. The cellos slide into crescendo. There’s a swell of woodwinds punctured by timpani.
“Really?” I give him a look.
He pauses the symphony. “What’s wrong with Beethoven?”
“Nothing’swrongwith Beethoven. I’m sure he’s a cool guy—”
“He’s not. If he were alive today, he’d totally get canceled for being an asshole.”
“I’ll take your word for it. Anyway, outside of movie scores and concert halls, his music is low-key pretentious. Don’t you have anything more… recent?”
