Atom Yang

“Hey, it’s nice of you to show up!” That was a decent start. “What has it been—a year since you flattened my heart by leaving without a word and ignoring all of my texts, messages, and voicemails?”

“We never expressed this to each other in Chinese, because it wasn’t something said in Chinese culture; the emotions were too strong, the words too coarse, and besides, it was assumed that parents and children loved each other.”

“Hey, Doc, we better back up. We don’t have enough road to get up to eighty-eight,” I quoted as I slid into the passenger seat.“‘Roads?’” he replied in an excellent impression of Christopher Lloyd’s eccentric scientist. “‘Where we’re going, we don’t need roads!’” The call-and-response rituals of geeks were a thing of beauty, and allowed said geeks to identify each other across time and space.”

“Over the years, we had been as cautious as blindfolded men feeling their way around a mysterious beast, trying to extrapolate what was between us without communicating the knowledge that would have illuminated everything. Until that morning, when we took the blindfolds off, and discovered we were face to face with each other.”