"Parallel"
She always picked the word before the sky even began to lighten. Lo Tsai-hsiu kept her dictionary tucked on the second shelf, its spine wedged between a battered grammar manual and a soft-spined book of Tang poetry she’d nearly memorized. She was a schoolteacher, and she saw knowledge as a house: built in slow, careful layers, the foundation poured before any walls, the walls upright before she even considered a roof. Sometimes, she thought, you poured the foundation without knowing what you were building at all.
This was one of those times.
Each morning, she slid the dictionary from its place and let it fall open where it would. She never picked the same page twice. She didn’t plan ahead, didn’t map it out the night before. Her thumb would press down and let the spine crack at whatever spot the day suggested. She’d read, then pick her ten words. Occasionally, if two words clung together so tightly that separating them felt wrong, she’d let herself have eleven. Never fewer than ten.
These were English words. No one in the house spoke English, and hardly anyone in the city did either. In Taiwan, English drifted in on late-night radio signals or American movies, the voices fading in and out with the weather above the strait. It never seemed quite real, just another thing that came and went like rain.
She’d write each word in her notebook, shaping out the meaning in neat traditional characters. She’d whisper the pronunciation to herself, standing in the kitchen before dawn, and jot down her best guess at how it should sound. The English alphabet was still new to her, another puzzle to solve. She was honest enough with herself to admit she was still learning.
Her sons were still asleep while she worked. Hsing-kung, her older boy, stayed curled under his blanket, just as he had since he was a baby, like the blanket was an argument he’d won. Jen-Hsun, the younger, slept with one arm flung wide, his head turned like he might be listening to something the rest of them couldn’t hear. He’d always done this. She’d noticed, quietly and without fuss, the way she noticed everything about her children. Jen-Hsun watched and listened before he spoke. He’d pause at a doorway before stepping in, not from shyness, but because he liked to take in a room before joining it.
She hadn’t found the right English word for this quality. She tucked that absence away for later.
On his third birthday, February 1966, she opened the dictionary to a page she wouldn’t remember, and the word her thumb landed on was parallel. She wrote it down. She wrote the definition: lines that go the same direction, always the same distance apart, never touching. She tasted the word, counted its three syllables, felt the soft double-l at the end—rarely so gentle in English. She wrote out the pronunciation as best she could.
She had no idea what that word might come to mean for the boy sleeping in the next room. She couldn’t have imagined microchips or computer architectures or billions of calculations running through machines with names that didn’t exist yet, in a country she’d never seen. All she knew was that the word felt right to her in its neatness. Lines, side by side, never crossing, always matching pace.
Satisfied, she closed her notebook and started breakfast. Outside, Tainan was still wrapped in darkness.
Her husband, Huang Hsing-tai, was a chemical engineer, a man who believed in being exact. He thought about his family’s future the way he thought about refineries—gathering facts, weighing each one, waiting to act until he was sure. Once, the Carrier Corporation had sent him to New York for training. He spent three weeks in a place so much bigger than anything he knew. Not necessarily better, just larger. The buildings, the food, the way people talked about their dreams. He came home with a fixed idea, one that only grew stronger: the kind of future he wanted for his sons could be made there.
Jen-Hsun was too young to grasp any of this. At three, then four, and then five, he only knew that his father worked with dangerous things and that this job brought a certain seriousness to their home. He knew his mother woke up before everyone else and did something at the kitchen table that was private, like practicing for a performance she wasn’t ready to give. He sensed, in the quiet way children do, that something was being prepared for. He didn’t know what, and he understood that it wasn’t his job to know yet. He watched. He was good at watching.
The dictionary had a smell all its own: old paper gone faintly damp in the humidity, with a hint of something serious underneath. Jen-Hsun knew he wasn’t supposed to touch it. His mother hadn’t said so, but he understood by watching her, the way children learn the rules of a house before anyone tells them. But he watched her use it. He watched from the hallway or from his place at the table, after breakfast, when the book was closed and put away. He saw how she held it, how she paused over the open page, how her finger hovered over a word, pressing it into the paper or maybe pulling it out. He couldn’t decide which. Eventually, he decided it was both.
When Jen-Hsun was five, the family moved to Bangkok. His father’s work brought them to a city louder and hotter than Tainan, busier, humming with a constant energy that seemed normal to a boy who’d never moved before. He adjusted, the way children do. He learned the rhythms of a new neighborhood just as he had the old one—by watching, by listening, by figuring out how things worked before he tried to join in.
Bangkok, in those years, had tanks in its streets. He saw them. He didn’t understand the politics, the coups, the endless arguments about what kind of country Thailand wanted to be. He only noticed how the tanks changed things, how people altered their routes without ever talking about it, how the city absorbed the tanks into its daily routine. He filed that information away. He didn’t panic or ask too many questions. He watched the adults around him, saw how they handled the uncertainty, and copied them. He was, above all, a student of his surroundings.
His mother kept teaching English words. The dictionary came with them. It still smelled the same.
In the evenings, when dinner was over and the Bangkok heat had eased a little, his father sometimes talked about New York. Not much—he wasn’t a man for long stories. But sometimes, when the house felt especially quiet, he’d mention the size of the city, the way people there talked about the future as if it were a place you could reach if you just kept driving. Jen-Hsun listened with full attention, storing every word, not yet knowing what they would mean to him. His brother listened too, but in a distracted way, already thinking about what came next. Jen-Hsun listened with his whole self, eyes fixed on his father, memorizing.
His mother noticed. She’d been watching her younger boy listen for years, quietly, not telling anyone, not even her husband. Naming it out loud would mean admitting she saw something special in him, and she wasn’t sure what to call it. Maybe the English word was patient, but that wasn’t quite right. Patience sounded like waiting and doing nothing, but what Jen-Hsun did was active. His stillness was a kind of work, invisible but real.
She thought about the word parallel—lines moving in the same direction, always side by side, never meeting. She thought maybe her morning ritual with the dictionary was like that—a line she was drawing beside a future she couldn’t see, hoping that when the future arrived, it would be close enough to matter.
The next morning, she got up before dawn, took the dictionary from the shelf, and let it fall open to a new page.
She started with ten words, always ten.
Outside, something rumbled. It could have been thunder, or maybe a tank. In Bangkok, you learned not to guess too quickly. In the next room, Jen-Hsun was already awake, lying still, listening.
