4

Yes, We Would Call This Being Hosed

IT WAS ABSOLUTELY, 100 percent not time to panic.

Okay, my dad’s favorite book, How to Be Your Best Entrepreneur, would say to break each problem down into manageable components. Then create a clear strategy and execute it with small, clearly defined steps.

Inhale organization. Exhale organization. Ahhh.

There was no time to find someone who wanted to do this competition with me. I had already reviewed all the other potential candidates before I had talked to Eric, and everyone I knew either had no time or wasn’t interested. Okay, maybe I should find someone who could partner with me in name only. Surely I could find someone and offer to help them with homework or something in exchange for registering with me. Yes. Yes! Okay, this was workable. I could take care of the rest of the competition on my own and still win. Or at least beat that weasel Eric Lin.

I quickly Googled “how long does it take to learn to design a professional website?” while Anna Lǎoshī was writing something on the whiteboard.

Google answers:

FIVE TO SIX MONTHS

TWENTY WEEKS

THREE HUNDRED HOURS??

I shoved my phone back into my purse. Wrapped my hand around the key chain Dad had given to me when I was a kid, a jade pig, since I was born during the Year of the Pig. I pictured my meditation balloon puffing and narrowing.

Maybe I could use one of those sites that had premade templates? You pay a fee, pick one and voilà! Website! I quickly pulled up the most famous company and scanned some examples. Perfect. It could work.

Anna Lǎoshī rapped on the whiteboard. “Juliana.”

I smiled. Everything would be fine.

Everything was not fine.

When I got home, I did a deep dive on one of those builder sites as a kind of practice run. Dad always said that early preparation is the best preparation. So I signed up for a free trial on WeBuilder.com, picked out a template, and used a free graphic design program to create a logo. So far, so good!

I found a photo I liked, pasted, and then . . . huh. Why was it so large? How could I make it smaller? I tried clicking on a few buttons, but it somehow moved to a side column and I couldn’t figure out how to move it back.

Argh!

This was a problem. My earlier idea to get someone in name only might not cut it. What I really needed to do was find someone who knew how to do web design. I went through my contacts again. Jonah from the Student Business Association dabbled in it, but his site was worse than mine. Mariah Jones might have the expertise, but she wasn’t Asian American, so she couldn’t compete. I was prohibited from hiring a professional designer, so that was out. I suppose I could partner with someone in name only and then sneakily hire someone on the sly, like some freelance high schooler, but I wanted to win this one square.

Unfortunately, I happened to know of one person who would exactly fit the bill. Someone who was writing his own webtoon, was a whiz with graphic design, and who had spare time since he couldn’t care less about the Ivy League. The last person on earth I wanted to ask.

The truth is, I had forced myself to push Garrett out of my mind this past year. I didn’t talk to him outside of class, not even when I heard he had gotten an early acceptance into RISD, which was his dream school. Not when Anna Lǎoshī held a whole class on Chinese opera, which the old us would have found hysterical. He had made it more than clear what he thought of me.

I scanned Dad’s office as if some alternate solution would magically appear. My mom had kept it just as it was before he died; the only change she had made was that she had closed the heating vent so we wouldn’t waste electricity. I snuck in here sometimes to study, and I knew Hattie did, too, because I occasionally found empty White Rabbit candy wrappers in his drawers. But we never talked about it.

I sat in Dad’s desk chair now, swiveling in slow circles. When he was alive, I had never been able to touch the ground. Now I could, easily. I wondered what he had thought about when he sat here. His business? Us?

I remembered when we had gone to Taiwan for my grandmother’s funeral, we had burned small packets of fake money, paper cars, letters. People believed the smoke from these talismans could cross the border between life and death. We could gift our relatives with these things they needed in the afterlife.

I knew what I would burn for my father—a single piece of paper with one message on it: I won, Dad. I did it.

I hadn’t been old enough to really know him before he died, so I had collected as many fragments of him as I could over the years. I had shadowed his footsteps, each foot precisely within each outline, because I believed—I knew—if I took the same journey, I could come that much closer to understanding him. When I got to Yale, when I got to walk on the same paths he had, when I got to take the same classes with his old professors, I could decipher what mattered to him. Who he was.

For him, I could do this. To uphold his name and legacy so the gossiping uncles and aunties wouldn’t drag it down, I would ask Garrett Tsai for a favor. I would swallow that pill.

I stared at the photo of Dad and his college buddies, then touched it for good luck. But I knew as well as anyone that luck wouldn’t win me this competition. Luck—like everything else—could never be trusted to stay when you needed it.