11

The Second Challenge

BUT ERIC AND Albert were. Right there in stinking seventh place. We were Team SunCloud, so they must be Team Esher since there weren’t any other competitors from our school.

This was impossible. I was valedictorian of my class. President of the Student Business Association. National Merit Scholar. I did not ever get second place, even.

This . . . this was a mistake. This was unacceptable.

I refreshed again. And again.

And even though I would rather have jammed a handful of Q-tips up my nostrils, I sucked it up and called Garrett.

“Did you see it? It’s wrong, right?”

There was the sound of kids shouting in the background, laughter.

“Hello? It’s Juliana.”

Maria poked her head out of the conference room and said, “We’re almost done. Do you have anything else to add?”

“One minute!” I said, and she ducked back in. I got back on the phone. “The results? Did you see them?”

“I saw them.” There were more kids shrieking in the background. Where was he? A three-ring circus?

This was bad. Maria and Tammy knew I had entered this competition. And so did the rest of the SBA, who I had asked for help earlier. Would they now think I sucked? Ask me to step down as president? How could I lead the group if I couldn’t even win a simple challenge?

Even though I knew I shouldn’t, I opened Line and took a peek. Sure enough, there in the Linevine was a message from Mrs. Lin: So grateful for the opportunities provided by the AABC! Eric and Team Esher are learning so much! Honestly. She should be in the humble bragging Olympics. “Accidentally” revealing Eric’s team name? Masterful. It was practically a banner advertisement to check the competition results every week.

A text came in from my mom: Juliana. She always used periods in texting, which made all of her messages seem super severe. Or maybe that was the intent. She didn’t have to say more; the Lunar New Year potluck was around the corner. I pictured my mom and me walking into the room with the stink of failure wrapped around us as all the uncles and aunties gossiped about Dad’s competition. About Dad.

“Hello?” Garrett asked. “Are you still there?”

If we couldn’t figure out how to fix this, we would continue to fail. This competition depended on traffic, and I wasn’t sure how to get more. Then we would be out, and I would lose everything. I knew as well as anyone that everything—class standing, leadership positions, accomplishments—was all skyscrapers balanced on landfill, and it would take only one quake to bring them down.

I could almost feel it, the cold slice of getting cut off. The free fall.

Maria leaned out of the meeting room again. “Juliana, I think we’re done. Do you want to end the meeting? Or I can do it for you if you’d like?”

“Sorry! I’ll be right there.” I quickly apologized to Garrett and hung up.

Maria stepped out and closed the door behind her. “Hey. Are you okay?”

No. I’m in huge trouble and I don’t know how to fix this. I had to do one thing—win my father’s competition—and I am failing. My mother—and the rest of the community—is watching, and I am choking.

“I’m fine,” I said.

Maria and I had first met when we were ten and were friends when Bella was disowned. I had come to school after crying all night, and Maria had asked what was wrong. And like today, I couldn’t quite tell her. There was a logical part of me that knew she would try to understand. But there was a more powerful part of me that was afraid that sharing what had happened would change what she thought of me. If she knew not only what Bella had done but what my mother had. Because her parents never would have done the same.

How could I explain that not winning would be unforgivable? That the only thing I wanted to do—honor my father and his legacy—was going up in flames? This wasn’t the world Maria lived in. It wasn’t something she could even comprehend.

So I said nothing.

Maria’s concern sharpened to disappointment. But she would never push it. She gently squeezed my arm, then disappeared back into the room. I refreshed my email; to my surprise, a new message was already waiting.

CHALLENGE #2:
PARTNERSHIPS AND COLLABORATIONS

You have hopefully selected your idea and established a minimum viable service. But you may have also discovered the difficulty of creating audience engagement without a proper launch.

One way successful businesses solve this problem is by partnering with different corporations and piggybacking on their already established audience bases.

Your next challenge is to approach a company and to convince them to advertise your service. Points will be granted for those who can increase the traffic to their websites the most. Best of luck.

Were they kidding? I knew I had just ended our call kind of abruptly, but I still grabbed my phone and texted Garrett. This was an emergency.

We have to meet, stat! They released the next challenge.

I’m in the middle of something. Let’s meet in half an hour.

Where are you? I’ll be there in fifteen.

I hurriedly ended the meeting, and exactly fifteen minutes later, ran toward the cultural center. When I dashed in, Garrett and a bunch of little kids were painting a huge banner with gold paint. He had gold and black streaks on his jeans and what appeared to be a tiny handprint on the edge of his shirt. The kids were chasing each other with brightly colored hands, giggling.

“Good job,” Garrett said to one of the little boys, in Taiwanese, and handed him a Sharpie. “You can go sign yours.”

How could this possibly be more important than our competition? “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Donfield, Inc., wants to construct an arena on the edge of Old Taipei,” he said.

“Okay?” Esher was an up-and-coming city, and it seemed like there was a construction project on every corner. But how was this more important than the latest challenge?

Garrett said brusquely, “If it goes up, it’ll destroy the businesses and communities here. We have to stop the city council from approving its permit.”

My mom said this neighborhood had been in a steady decline since the building of the Dynasty Mall. All of her friends had switched as soon as it opened, now going there for their grocery shopping and dim sum. I hadn’t thought too deeply about what happened to the places left behind or pushed aside. I had just assumed it would be fine.

Garrett apparently knew exactly what I was thinking and was not impressed. I remembered what he had said before: Do you ever go against what everyone tells you? I felt a bloom of indignation. Did he think he was so much better than me?

“And what’s the banner thing supposed to do?” I said.

“It’s a sign for CultureFest next week. We’re trying to bring attention to what’s going on. That’s why I need help with publicity and volunteers.”

I didn’t see how it was going to help. CultureFest was an annual community event in Old Taipei, one that used to be really popular. When we were little, Bella, Hattie, and I loved getting the street food from the booths and watching the lion dances. But attendance had become more and more scarce these past years. I didn’t think a few booths could stop a major construction project.

Plus, if they really wanted to get attention, wouldn’t a professional banner be better, like the ones they had used to advertise the Dynasty Mall’s grand opening? I still remembered the event, which was more like a party. They had hired a band and set up a beverage service, and there had been people walking around serving small samples from all the new restaurants. That was how to get some real publicity.

Here, someone had painted a gold slogan in large Chinese characters, but they were kind of crooked. The cloth was wrinkled, and it was frayed on one end.

I was about to say something to Garrett when an older woman came over. I kind of recognized her; she sometimes came to the big Taiwanese events, like Lunar New Year and the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, though she wasn’t close friends with my mom. I think she ran some sort of tutoring thing? She had a son, Kevin, who was going to community college next year. The little kids all called her Ms. Vivian; it was a cute, informal nickname, which she seemed to prefer.

“Juliana,” she said. “So nice to see you again!” I waited for her to ask the usual questions about where I was going to apply for college or how we were doing in the competition, but she instead handed me a squeeze bottle of paint. She always seemed more relaxed than the other parents. Was this because she grew up in America? “Add your print! We’ve all done it.”

Her palm was light purple and Garrett’s left hand was vaguely stained blue.

The little kids gathered around me. “Can I paint your hand?” a boy asked.

“No, me!” another one said.

How could I say no to those adorable faces? I held out my palm and let them both do half. When they were done, I pretended to give them a high five and they squealed and ran away. Garrett’s expression softened, and he seemed almost entertained. What? I could be spontaneous. When it fit into my schedule.

“Where should I put my handprint?” I asked.

The kids shouted and pointed at different spots. I put mine on the corner and signed my name with a flourish. Juliana Zhao. What I didn’t add: Winner.

After I had washed and rewashed my hand, it still looked faintly red, like I had spent my afternoon playing a particularly vicious game of slapjack. I shoved it in Garrett’s face. “This is your fault.”

“How?”

“If we had just met at the library, I wouldn’t have been sucked into—”

“—having fun?”

“Staining my hand.”

“Oh. No. Not staining your hand.” But there was a small upturn of the corner of his mouth, something others might call a smile.

I pulled out my phone and laptop. I needed to get to work. I could feel it, what I had briefly forgotten while I had been painting: the stress. We needed to research companies. See if we had connections. Find out which types of ads might be the most effective. There was so much to do, and the minutes were leaking out and being wasted, endlessly.

Garrett was studying me. Unlike the other people I usually hung out with, he never seemed like he had a million things running through his head at the same time. He was just quietly watching. Listening. It had been one of the things I had always liked about him, before. What made me want to open up to him. But now it made me feel like he was seeing too much. Deciphering things that I didn’t want him to.

“Time to get back on track,” I said. “We only have a week to finish this challenge.”

“We do. But we have plenty of time.” He looked like I was a photograph whose composition was slightly off and he couldn’t figure out why. I knew I was tense. Maybe too tense. But how could I not be?

He said, finally, “So what’s the challenge? We have to partner with a company? Like a sponsorship?”

Another round. Another chance. Focus on that. We were offering dating advice, so which corporations might have the same target market, aka teenagers with love problems? Maybe the question and answer–type social media sites, like Reddit? But its audience was too broad, and almost everyone our age used other social media sites. I needed something like YouTube or TikTok but for love problems. A place where everyone our age hung out all the time.

Of course. The answer was, of course, on their phones.

The top app for people in high school was, obviously, coffeematch.com. It had been started by a sixteen-year-old high schooler who couldn’t find anyone in his school that he wanted to date. His idea was to get kids from around his geographical area to enter their information and interests into a magical algorithm that suggested matches. They could then all meet in person for coffee on preset CoffeeMatch Days. It was in public, so it was safe, and was also a fun way for people to mingle with people outside of their school. It was a little retro to do all of this in person, instead of online, but it had caught on quickly, much to everyone’s surprise. CoffeeMatch had recently partnered with national coffee companies, who started sponsoring monthly CoffeeMatch functions. It was brilliant. I wish I had thought of it.

I pulled up their website. “This is it.”

“Coffeematch.com? The dating app?”

“They’re national now,” I said. “Everyone’s heard of them and uses their app all the time. One ad from them could skyrocket our brand awareness and traffic.”

Garrett scrolled through the site. “Why would coffeematch.com want to advertise a high school love advice column? Wouldn’t it be a better idea to do something in person? Like pair with someone local and get to know them? How about the Esher Times? They might want to sponsor us. Support local teens in their effort to win a prestigious competition?”

“Sincerity does not sell,” I said. “Advertising on a nationally recognized app does.” It was one of the first lessons I had learned from my mom: the power of name brands. I had gone with her to meetings, had seen people who had been rude to her on the phone reconsider when they saw her pristine BMW, Louis Vuitton bag, Louboutin heels, and discreet Cartier watch. Mom never collected things just for the sake of collection. Rather, every item was strategically purchased and worn to telegraph success. It was necessary when she had to face racism and sexism every day; these items were her armor and they were powerful. Even for the rare Taiwanese functions that we attended, Mom always made sure she was impeccable, since she knew wealth, at least, could offset some of the gossip.

Advertising was the same: it was taking the feelings generated from one item or brand and transferring it to yours. The most effective thing would be a well-known national company. I scrolled to the bottom of the coffeematch.com website and then searched around a little more. But there was no information on how to buy an ad or how to contact the head office.

“It’s the top matchmaking company in our demographic,” I said. “You can’t find anything better.”

Garrett looked faintly bitter. “Of course. It has to be the best, right?”

Obviously. What did he know about business? Had he been studying it for years like I had? Gone through old textbooks and case studies? “We only have a week. We don’t have time to meet some random newspaper people and become all buddy-buddy with them. The Lee Corporation always has ads on prime-time TV. And they partner with huge software companies. They’re always trying to get their name out there. Like James Lee did with the AABC—and now all the colleges know about it.”

“Yes, those huge corporations love to splash their names around. But does it really make a difference in the end? Are people really going to pay attention to a little pop-up ad while they are trying to swipe right? Even if it’s from a large company? It’s too impersonal.”

“Of course they will,” I said. “Who are people going to listen to—some little Podunk paper they’ve never heard of or coffeematch.com?”

“A trustworthy local source?”

“No way,” I said. “Which car do you think is better? A BMW or some car made in someone’s garage?”

“That’s not even a thing.”

“Companies are famous for a reason. People like brands,” I said.

“People are brainwashed by brands. They just look at status symbols without bothering to find out if the thing is actually good or not.” Garrett’s mouth twisted. “Besides, coffeematch.com only offers ads for big companies. See? These are all huge corporations.” He tilted his phone screen toward me.

“I’ll get one.”

“Then I’ll be working on our backup plan,” he said. “With the Esher Times.”

“Is that a challenge?” I was beyond irritated with him, but the idea of a competition was slightly thrilling. The old us had done this so many times, jokingly—racing to the entrance of the camp dorms or seeing who could swim the most laps in the shortest amount of time. “Winner is whoever secures an ad first?”

“Done,” he said. He held out his blue-stained hand, and I smacked it with my red-stained one.

“Game on, Tsai.”