When my husband dies, I am left to be his datakeeper. I don’t fully understand what this means. The definition of datakeeper is lost on me, just as everything else seems to be for the grey flood of weeks incoming: the paperwork fiasco, cardboard boxes drawing corrugated outlines around his life, the black hearse, white lilies. I don’t notice the email, don’t remember ever seeing the subject line, because it is only one speck of the insidious digital swarm that chews up every one of my screens that July, all the texts oh my god i heard what happened, i’m so sorry frida, ms liu are you available for comment, i saw it on the news, the emails from his company, insurance, the banks, more and more vulturous reporters, in my inbox, my Instagram DMs, my Facebook account from 2008 which I eventually break myself into so I can transition his account into a Memorial.
At first I have more bark and bite and desperation and denial—No, no, you’ve got it wrong, Tian would never have killed himself, there has to be something more—knowing how I must’ve looked, like a poor wife who didn’t know her partner as well as she believed, or someone behind the times and not above stigmatising suicide. I maintain this even as it whittles away at my reputation, the words echoing against the simple pity of my friends, their tongues gently bitten and bid to silence as we empty nurse teacups in forgiving sunlit corners of my apartment. The sad nature of our surroundings isn’t persuasive. Half-sealed boxes stack up and darken the windows, while dust fraternises thickly across each plane, gathering in bleak vacuums of fog and warped, stretching time. Tian had always been on top of the vacuuming and wiping-down, whistling as his cotton slippers skidded against carpet, moving to the next offensive surface. The room withers more under the weight and saturation of flowers—corporate blooms and more pity jewel-set and overspread, the only thing more overbearing than the cardboard city mass.
But in a few weeks the media moves on to the next big tragedy, and Tian’s name fades from public forum. The autopsy becomes cemented as official state record, an inanimate piece of information which I cannot engage in conversation or debate. There’s no one for me to protest against, and I begin to feel embarrassed, and simultaneously a hot indignation at being made embarrassed when no one else knows what I’m going through, when I’m not only right but also the bereft, and then embarrassed again for allowing grief to victimise me in this way.
It’s in this period of time, when I am cornered into being quiet, that I begin to wade towards some sense of normal function. I make myself breakfast again and learn to halve the portion, start categorising the envelopes on the doormat by shape and size, building neat rectangular stacks. In reality, these are the only things I manage to do on these days, before I am hit by the weight of my own exhaustion again, alarmed by the constant siren of silence in our home. Every cell in my body feels the absence of Tian, every sense like it is stifled, censored of the full human condition.
But eventually I move on from envelopes to emails, and two months in I call my parents, telling them they can stop sending cured meats and congee via the aunty they know living a town away, and I’m twenty-eight, I can really cook for myself, I’m showering almost-daily, it’s going to be okay. When I speak to them over the phone I hope my uncertain accent masks my own lack of conviction, and feel my vocabulary shrink with the stress. I take walks, careful to avoid our usual routes, taking an extra loop so I don’t have to think about the frozen yoghurt shop we would frequent in the summer.
My friends convince me to return to work with a kind of firm smile and nervous haste. It’s unclear to me if they’ve deemed my time of healthy, isolated processing up and are trying to prevent me from spiraling down, or if their corporate conditioning wills them to protect me from redundancy, the threats of being a woman taking too much time off at a tech start-up. But the walk and bus on my way to the office assert some movement in my muscles and sunlight toward my brow, and even as I worry I am forgetting every detail I can hold onto about Tian by concerning myself with statistical reports and my colleagues’ sideways lunchtalk, I feel a little lighter. No one dares breach the topic of my husband at work out of a supposed barrier of fragility, and I in turn let my brain play imposter from nine to five, cushioned in this sterile cubicle where he might as well have never existed. My spare time to think, to turn our memories over and over again like an hourglass behind my eyes, shrivels between my longer working hours and the deep gravity of my head hitting the pillow.
It’s a rare evening of industrious inbox decluttering after an early Friday off, when I fully register the email again:
[TIME SENSITIVE] Data Record of Accounts for TIAN LIU – National Data Service
It is dated nearly three months ago, and when I open the email its text is largely serif and in some places bolded or red, apropos of the ugly demands of a government missive.
Dear Next of Kin or Personal Representative of Tian Liu:
You are receiving this email because you are listed as the next of kin or personal representative of Tian Liu. We are very sorry for your loss. At the time of the deceased’s passing, the National Data Service releases their digital data records to you as designated datakeeper of the deceased. These can be accessed at the link below with the following username and password. We encourage you to review the records in memoriam and amend any errors to the deceased’s legacy. This portal will be accessible to you until the stated deadline.
Underneath the body text is a link to a NDS web portal, as well as a date reading one year from Tian’s death. I stare at this pixelated number, and the dark shadow crosses my mind that I can’t even imagine myself alive at that point, on this earth for so long without him. I read and reread the words ‘designated datakeeper’ until the rhythm wraps around me like a nursery rhyme, as if trying to resemble something more familiar. But there is nothing—my peers and I are young and inexperienced with death, many of us still graced with living grandparents. I find it hard to believe, too, that much of the older generation now have many digital footprints to surrender at the ends of their natural lives. I recall my coworkers, sharing frivolous concerns about modern dating and unsavoury roommates at the lunch table, and can’t imagine that any of them had been tasked with “datakeeping” their loved ones. Although I suppose that even if they had, I wouldn’t know. Death was supposed to be a private matter.
When I open the link it drums up what looks like every other outdated federal portal, all the text a little too crushed and to the left. After entering the given credentials, the page stalls with no efforts to assure me anything is loading, then abruptly produces a new page with my late husband’s full name in big letters at the top. Underneath is his sex, lifespan to the nearest second reported on his death certificate, and birthday, asterisked out like a curse word. Further below that is a large table spanning the width of the screen, dense with rows of information: usernames, site domains, statistics squirming across with numbers of posts; dates and times of account creation, most recent comment, last login.
I click on the first row and feel my heart contract as it expands out, revealing more details: the metadata in his blog account, whether he self-categorised it as ‘business’, ‘technology’, or ‘personal’, the fact that it was his second registration with this website. He probably forgot his password to the first one. I realise too late that this entry is at the top because the data is sorted by Most Recent Activity, that I am walking backwards over Tian’s digital footprints, and my mouth dries. A panel to the side displays his final mark on the internet: an earnest engagement with a passive aggressive comment on his blog post. The distance between the adjacent timestamp and the clock in the corner of my desktop suddenly throbs.
Without thinking, I key onwards to the next row.
This one is his Instagram, bumped to the top by his activity the week before his death. I slowly slide through likes and comments on his friends’ posts, mostly well-interrobanged congratulations and enthusiasms about other people’s dogs. Tian wasn’t a zealous social media user; only two images populated his Instagram photo grid. The older of the two showed him as a child with his older brother, smiles copied and pasted at different heights outside Disneyland. Next to them is a worker costumed either as Chip or Dale, no doubt stuffy with sweat behind enchanted needle-and-felt eyes. In truth eight-year-old Tian had been terrified of the walking mascot, which was why he was squirreled so far away on the other side of his brother. After he shared this secret with me, I would squeeze his hand, pointing, teasing, whenever I spotted a chipmunk on our walks through the park in spring.
The more recent was a photo from our wedding, snapped as we stuffed handfuls of cake sponge into each others’ mouths. The band on his finger, still glinting through heavy cream.
The table seems to contain both profiles initiated by Tian and those created by others that describe him. His rank with the regional fencing society on their website, listing all the tournaments he competed in. The page displays one portrait of him, width cropped too close to his temples, the jacket’s dirty white collar nipping at his Adam’s apple. I would drive him to the competitions, guarding his little fabric pouch of packed lunch. We would go over videos of his performance on my iPhone in between his matches. I remember leaning in ever closer, even when he was sticky with sweat and effort, the heat of his neck. From my spot in the bleachers, when mask came down and his body was swathed in the uniform white nylon, he blended in anonymous with all the other fencers. When his round was on a further piste, I’d watch them dance, tiny helmets bobbing, a burnt match and its mirror.
Just as I’m about to minimise the record, I notice an appended section. More match listings and another person’s image appear, someone who looks nothing like him, and I can’t help the rush of offense when I realise the mistake: another member of the fencing society with a name two letters off from Tian’s. I hastily click to report the incorrect entry, offering too much of an explanation that perhaps no one will ever read in the optional textbox provided. The confirmation screen fades, and then the other person is gone. Possibly into some kind of moderation purgatory; the language this entry has been flagged as incorrect a blunt disguise for whatever process happens behind the scenes. Adjacent to the report button is a plus symbol, presumably for adding missing entries, but when I click in I’m intimidated by the number of valid text fields (pseudonym? referee to website? for commercial use?) in the given form, and quickly exit out. I run over every line of text again in his fencing profile and finally, feeling satisfied with my expert verification, move on.
A brisk scroll south of the page shows that it is in fact bottomless: there are hundreds of rows, each containing thousands of child entries. With each line, a strange solace, or even excitement begins to enshroud my chest. Is that perverse? I had struggled with what felt to me like the ethics of grief, as each day my heart was a pendulum between devotion and acceptance, stay and release. Last month Ma flew in from across the country to help me manage my affairs, and said nothing when she peered into Tian’s office, pens and papers fossilising on the desk how he left them. One night, she got up to use the toilet when she heard me in there, sobbing and hacking and caught, more nocturnal creature than daughter. I was kneeled on the carpet, leafing through a binder of his college maths problem sets. She tore through his room the next afternoon while I was at work, packing and collapsing until it was all out of sight, and I had howled the house down then. Afterwards, I found myself secretly grateful she rescued me from crystallising in his wake, then hit by shame again for my relief at being allowed to forget.
Forgetting Tian felt like betrayal, and anything less than clinging on inexcusable. When returning to work forced me to take my mind off it, I grew anxious that each second without him eroded away at a second of the life we had, until I wouldn’t be able to remember what we shared at all. Even reasonably knowing that I wouldn’t be able to grieve a memory I wasn’t aware I’d lost, this guilt gnawed at me. But now, in front of this massive, concrete volume of his life’s data, it dissipates.
Dusk has long landed, and I rub my eyes, pressing closer to my laptop screen. I’m unwilling to check the digits on the clock between soft clicks and the rickety scratch of the mousewheel, turning again.
The next day at work, my supervisor is spiny at my lack of focus.
“I know what you’ve gone through is…” She struggles to find a suitably sensitive word during our one-on-one. “But you know we need you here with us, Frida. The launch is only a month away.”
My eyes dart down to my laptop as if my answer is hidden in the keys. A tab open to the NDS portal is minimised in the bottom right, like the corner of a handkerchief, shining at me.
It’s not as if I’m particularly invested in this job anyway. The pay is fine, and other employees kind, if not a little too energetic and largely much younger than I am. I had a hard time with the job market after taking the entire length of my programme to realise I was too shy for teaching and should’ve spent some summers learning how to pass interviews. A startup developing digital painting software reached out to me and I jumped at the opportunity. It was only after they onboarded me as a data scientist that I learned what about my skill profile had magnetised them: they were pivoting to generative art and saw that I had published once with a close friend who specialised in AI.
Privately, I wasn’t interested and hoped to find a role at a different company, but when Tian shared with me his plans to resign from his job, we agreed that I should at least stay here until he found stable work again. Now, I don’t have a reason to stay anymore, but I’m good at the work, and my supervisor seems to think so too—at least enough to hold her patience still. She looks at me from across the table, expectant.
I smile without teeth and nod dutifully, wondering if my dark under eyes earned me any sympathy. I pledge not to return to the portal again until after hours, but when everyone breaks for lunch I find it open again on the screen, hear myself promising that I’ll join you guys in five.
I settle into this routine, of divvying up his existence and rifling through, remembering as I go. The public nature of Tian’s death meant that I didn’t have to break the news to anyone, exempt from a cruel but practical ritual in enforcing acceptance upon the bereaved. As I sit here tallying up his life, marking each record complete, I feel like I am practicing, exercising, getting my heart in the right shape to live with this pain. After his death, I had been recommended countless counselors, and received an invitation from HR for a free trial to a therapy app. Just the idea made me slimy and small; if death is natural and inevitable, then I should also naturally be equipped to get myself through. My emotions just haven’t evolved to encapsulate it entirely. But opening up my computer and pulling up the NDS website each day feels right, like I am productively marching forward. It feels like work, and this makes me feel good, as I become convinced that this is the griefwork they were talking about all along.
𓇢𓆸 ⟢
There are half-empty tissue boxes stationed in every corner of the apartment. The website isn’t mobile-friendly, so instead my laptop is perched on the edge of the sink, my attention spared between leftover yum cha rotating in the microwave and the record I have open on the window.
When I first met Tian he was still new to the city, and asked me if I had recommendations for local Chinese food. I was glad to have someone to bring to the malatang place around the corner, though I later discovered when we began dating that he actually couldn’t tolerate spicy food. He had been blowing his nose and quickly tossing the napkin pile each time I went to the bathroom. Still, we continued to frequent noodle shops around town and taste each others’ broths each time, his face reddening without fail whenever he took a spoonful of peppercorns and hot oil from my bowl.
Our lunches and dinners out are documented in his preserved Google Maps account, a trail of reviews snaking through tidy streets. Usually he would type them out on his phone when we folded into each other on the sofa after a late night; sometimes as we sat at the edge of the bed, his other hand carefully aiming the hairdryer at my scalp. He was diligent with them, making sure to carefully backfill entries if he forgot the day before, which would irk me when I was impatient to go to bed and tickled my heart every other time.
One review looks like it was written right before he drifted off.
bestliu_87
Little Yunnan ★★★★★
Plenty of delicious classic cold sides! My girlfriend really liked the Special Ground Prok liangban mixian, and the guoqiao mixian lucnh special was als o goooddd xccccccccccccccccccccc;xxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxzx
Tian was generous with his stars, and he seemed to have recorded my favourites off each menu. His only complaints were when they played music too loud over the speakers, and made it ‘too hard to have good conversation!’ Scrolling slowly past his excited, all-caps review for Jack’s, our nearby deli, and its reliable pastrami sandwich, I snatch a tissue to catch at my bottom eyelashes.
After switching the sort-by fields, I’ve been going down the table in chronological order of registration date, excavating each profile thoroughly. The first couple pagefuls were websites and accounts I’d never seen before from his teenage years. Some didn’t have his full name on file, but were presumably scrounged from a username-matching search across the net by referencing his later accounts. I saw his old Club Penguin and Tetris Battle stats. When I went over to his place on campus for the first time, back in the first year of my PhD and his junior spring, we ended up comparing our childhood gaming habits. The only real overlap was Club Penguin and a handful of Facebook’s Flash games. I ended up staying too late, too engrossed in beating him at every possible mini-game and re-running sled races to notice that the last bus had left my stop, too readily elbowing Tian in the side for a cheap win and throwing my head back in a breathless laugh, close to his heartbeat.
I’ve made good progress now and am in the territory of photos I recognise again, tweets of his I’d already liked. There is comfort in these confirmations of knowing him. I identify and report erroneous instances almost mechanically—wrong name, wrong gender, Tian Lius and Liu Tians surfacing as digital doppelgangers. The robust filtering and finding features on the portal prove helpful when I decide to deal with these common misflags all at once.
Occasionally I catch bits of information they missed on the record or think of websites that have been skipped—in these moments I am rewarded by my own intimate knowledge of Tian, by my memory which has been getting hazy with age and retirement from social interaction in my grief. This positive feeling recedes when the interface asks me to fill out more fields which I don’t know the answer to and select from a discrete set of categories, none of which really apply, to amend the data. I don’t know if his side account for showcasing his miniatures is officially considered a creator profile, or which field to enter his other-language names in if his name field is programmed to be immutable. I refer to the callously automated entries for guidance and after five business days of no reply from the NDS helpdesk email, I reluctantly contort and justify my responses to the best of my ability.
Hours at the office dilate long and blue through the evening shutters. Everyone’s working bleary overtime. I get in late on Monday to discover a tension among the data teams, and in our next sync a skittish intern reports their discovery: significant systematic noise entered our primary model and current efforts to reduce the impact have been negligible. The AI is imagining new movements by artists who were never born between Existentialism and Abstract Expressionism. It can no longer reliably produce a speculation after O’Keeffe. Someone sends a link to the company-wide mailing list, citing a dubious forum post which suggests a plan by online activists to alter the metadata of artwork and reintroduce it to internet archives en masse. I pass my supervisor’s desk on my way to make my third chamomile of the day, and see her send the email to trash.
The anonymous profiles are bookmarked away for last. These data records are mostly blank, largely whitespace instead of a name, age, gender, with vague handles that I can’t recall Tian ever using. Their account creation dates yield no clues. Coming across the first, I wavered on whether to report the record as misinformed. It was a customer account for the big grocery chain, with no features besides an ID and an apparently public wishlist feature, which was also empty. I racked my brain for how often Tian shopped there. Even if it was his, how crucial was this practically null value to his life’s data? Yet my mouse could only hover preciously over Report. My solution was to put off the inspection of these for later.
Returning to them now, most are similarly inconsequential and scarcely populated. An unused fantasy baseball account, a running app with statistics and routes behind a lock symbol, a language-learning profile that claims he tried German for two days and still has the default avatar set.
The only exception is a Reddit account with around twenty comments and zero posts, a random combination of letters and numbers as the handle. I stare at the jumbled string, trying to interpret his name or birthday in the characters. The last comment was made four years ago, the year we were married. A cursory scroll shows that the majority of them are offering short words of advice in a miniatures forum. Types of paints and lacquers and such. The person behind the account seems helpful and polite, but doesn’t have a distinct enough styling of texting to persuade me that it’s really Tian. I don’t recall ever seeing Tian open Reddit in front of me, either. The NDS had made an odd guess—from what data, I don’t know, considering they hadn’t even correctly collected his Instagram archive of tiny convenience stores—and extrapolated its way to some other nondescript online hobbyist.
Bouncing my knee, I load the remaining page of comments. I’ll flag these anonymous profiles as mistakes, after all then. There’s a long, off-white rectangle as the connection drags, before finally spitting up the last of the account’s content. The next comment is longer than those previous.
I also had a bit of trouble with hinges recently! Not only for the doors, but for the entire dollhouse. I’ve been working on a replica of the froyo shop where I met my girlfriend, kind of as a big ring box with figures of us inside, so I needed it to open to a cross-section of the building too. I think this tutorial really helped for paperclip/wire DIYs.
↳ This looks really promising, thanks dude! Good luck on the proposal, such a sweet idea :) You should definitely post it here when she says yes!
↳ Thanks! I’m hoping to give it to her at the froyo place too. I have no idea how I’m gonna get it all the way there without her noticing—been having a hard time hiding it from her already these past couple months, hah! But it has to be there, it was one of those love at first sight moments, y’know? Fingers crossed :-)
Something prickles at my stomach. I skim through the remaining comments, but they’re all the same as the first ones: brief and amicable, mostly painting techniques. I comb through them all twice more for clues, in the punctuation or vocabulary or types of emoticons, but only feel more nauseous when I can’t find any. The stranger is still undeniably my husband. The timestamp is a month before he proposed. As if that was the crucial evidence—how many guys presented their engagement rings in scale replica frozen yoghurt stores?
I chew my lip hard and taste metal. How can it be possible that the government recognised my husband from this? Was it the detail about the engagement gift, or some other dormant pattern in his online voice? My search history piles with the alias he used, community servers for crafts, anything else I can think of that could link this instance to a wider web of logic, of something a state algorithm could comprehend. When he proposed, I had told a handful of my friends, mostly other women at my research lab, and my childhood best friend over the phone about the dollhouse, how it caught the shine of the red leather barstools just right. But I’m not much of a social media user, and don’t recall sharing pictures anywhere, or even taking them. And Tian was an open book, but still valued his privacy. Although the other user had encouraged him, I could tell you without searching that he didn’t share photos. He was far too humble for that. Besides, it had been a gift just for me.
He had asked the place to do a private rental, which must not have been hard, since it was often empty anyway, save the straggling teens after school, hooting and laughing at their own decision paralysis up at the bar, and the remote office workers, video conferencing in the harsh sunlight of the corner booth, veins popping on their foreheads as they nursed melting Strawberry Cream between meetings. It was our hidden gem; the old and kitschy interior didn’t appeal to the sleek, metropolitan young adults who had overrun the nearby university campus area. It wasn’t suspicious to me at all then, when the bell above the doorframe jingled and we were the only customers in, steps falling loudly across the ceramic square tiles.
“Just one second,” Tian said, his giddy schoolboy grin about to debunk all surprise.
He turned to walk towards the employee break room and left my side.
The ticking of the clock on my desk is suddenly too frequent, and I look up from my computer to find the windows have darkened. I stride across the room to turn on the lightswitch. The walls are too far apart for my small body to traverse between without another body to revolve around, react to in this space. I exercise rolling my eyes around in their sockets like Ma would tell me to, but can’t outpace the unease. I try to turn in for an early night, knowing that I would only sit awake, too distracted by the Reddit comment to do anything else. But I can’t. The strange feelings follow into my dreams, fizzling tails of unanswered questions frying out my neurons, lost stars. For the first time since the week I moved out of my parent’s house, I sleep with the overhead lamp on all night.
There’s a new disaster at work but I am avoiding my supervisor’s eyes and offering stubborn, performative shrugs at the meetings. The puzzle of how the NDS identified Tian’s Reddit profile has kept me up the past week, and my brain is somewhere near the ceiling, a moth batting its broken wing. My physical body drifts and fidgets in a spinning chair, anchored to this company town hall about how the startup can worm its way out of this lawsuit. Some of our tool’s results have been proven to be trained on copyrighted images, or something of that nature—it’s unclear to me. I excuse myself under the pretense of going to the restroom and slouch in the hallway around the corner, punching in my best friend’s number.
“It just doesn’t make sense. How could they tell from the comments that it was him? Something about it… doesn’t seem right. Or fair.”
I hear my own voice almost come to a whine, and grimace. It had been hard to find a time between both of our busy work schedules, our days off and break hours alternating across time zones. When I finally explained it all to her—the datakeeping portal, the anonymous profiles, the incriminating comment which meant it must’ve been Tian after all—she made sounds of pure surprise and confusion. She had never heard of this procedure before, she admitted, and offered her condolences that I had to go through it alone.
“But… it’s not about making sense, right, Frida?” She ventures after a long, thoughtful silence, then chuckles lightly. “Or is that really the issue here for your data scientist mind?
“If I were you, I’d also feel weird about it. And I don’t think I’d feel better if I knew exactly how they found this information. It’s something special to you and to him, right? You didn’t tell just anyone, and it sounds like he wasn’t trying to either. It was an anonymous post.”
I swallow hard at nothing.
“The question that would bother me more than how do they know is… why do they need to know, anyway? I know I only met Tian a few times, but we both know what he stood for. Would Tian want them to know about something that was just for you?”
Over the weekend, I drive up two hours north to Tian’s parents’ house. I hadn’t seen them since the month of the funeral, although we fell into the pattern of calling every now and then. They were kind, and told me stories about his first bike ride—straight into the lake, and how he got that scar on his knee, that clumsy rascal!—over speakerphone while I sorted through photo albums. They needed someone to know Tian’s story, and I, eager to remember what I never bore witness to, to have more to remember him by, was a perfect listener.
Arriving at their well-kept front yard, the potted camellias at the front step are disturbed, door opening before I have a chance to get out of my car. In the doorway they press fifty dollar bills into my hands to my meek embarrassment, and when they ask me to stay for tea and cake I feel too bad to refuse.
“But, I must get going,” I say, hand guarding around my mouth as I chew, the other grasping the back of the dining chair as I lift from the seat. Tian’s mom gestures towards a pack of playing cards left out on the table, but I shake my head, knowing that if I make eye contact I’ll end up staying. “I really just wanted to pick this up before it gets dark.”
The little frozen yoghurt shop sits in the passenger seat next to me now, buckled in but barely touching the nylon seatbelt strap given its size. Windows wrap around three of four sides, and light enters through the acetate to pool on checkerboard floor. The countertops are balsa coated in speckled varnish. Chrome stool stems in steel wire, plush seats and booths in thick, ruby acrylic. The chalkboard menu is barely legible, and reads in Tian’s neat pastel scribble: Mango Rush, Caramel Milk, Lemon Lime, Lavender. If you look closely, at the bar there are two figures, small enough for a ring to loop over like a shared hula hoop, a crown. When I opened the miniature for his parents on the gingham tablecloth, I noticed its paperclip hinges for the first time.
I feel oddly proud now, knowing that I am one of the only people on earth who have ever seen it. I don’t know if that’s what Tian had intended for the gift, if he imagined it on a mantle in our house, to be the setting of gentle play-pretend for our kids, or remarked upon by impressed guests.
But in the weeks after Tian left his job and posted on his blog about the company’s health data malpractice, nothing really felt like our own. The media was contacted—I remember agreeing that he should take the interviews, that it was important that the situation received attention, and he had been uniquely positioned to prove it with the emails, screenshots, and other documentation he had collected—but then the vicious letters started flooding in, to his inbox, then our physical mailbox too, until we snuck out in the middle of the night and duct-taped the metal slot shut from the inside. He would apologise to me for upending our life, and we snuggled on the couch away from the windows. Millions of people had their data sold, I would say, patting his arm. This is just a bit of our privacy sacrificed, for the sake of theirs.
There was no evidence of foul play, the authorities said, and in the end I had no proof to warrant a further investigation. But I couldn’t bring myself to believe that it was really true: that there were signs I missed, that I didn’t know him well enough to realise he had been considering another way out. The requests for interviews resumed, cameras zooming in until I kept the curtains pulled shut every day. It took a while for the spam texts to slow, the reeling drive-bys to stop. The public interest was overwhelming; another whistleblower’s death for them to claim, to speculate over with no conclusions for the grieving.
When I stop at the red light, the silver pendant fixtures in the mini froyo shop swing back and forth in mournful arcs. The lightbulbs in the building glow bright still, when switched on with a level hidden on the external wall. I wish I spent more time looking at it when he was here.
The model is lighter in my arms than I expected, but fragile and irregularly-shaped, so I struggle for a confident hold on it the entire walk. I’m sweating through my cotton shirt, and am glad that the yoghurt store is so close. I imagine what Tian felt, carrying it to the store a day in advance, probably while I was in a seminar. It hits me that he would’ve placed it into a spare cardboard carton that fit just right.
It’s noon so the hollow-eyed office workers are off somewhere else seeking lunch, and the local high school hasn’t yet ended session. There’s no one else here but the elderly owner who smiles in recognition and waves me in, but is in no hurry to take my order. I am too shy to take what was our usual spot at the bar so I perch on a stool near the door, setting the miniature down on the wiped surface.
The park that faces the row of stores is returning to its usual green, and kids swarm the playground while parents sit on log benches all round, pushing rhythmically at their smaller ones’ prams. I watch a group of children discover daisy chains for themselves, making variations and long, looping bracelets, not having discovered purpose or finity yet. Once Tian turned to me while we sat at the counter facing the park and asked how old our kids should be when we allow them to climb on the monkeybars here. At the time, my eyes grew wide at his nonchalance. I ducked into my sprinkles to hide the pink in my face.
There are things that feel different to how I remember, too. There is no bell over the door, just a loud speaker playing digital high-low tones. There are flavours on the menu I swear I’ve never seen before, which can’t be true, given that the chalkboard was last dusted ten years ago and looks like it too. The life we had belonged to my own recollections, shaped by how I saw the world when I loved him; Tian was not a person I could rebuild from facts.
They promised that preserving his data would honour his memory. I think about the photo albums on my phone, organised into different moments and versions of him. I think about the nights I spent, manually scrolling through thousands of Tians, curating all the different ways I saw him. I begin to think that data, that systems cannot honour—and maybe the state can, but it has no interest. It’s people who can honour each other.
A girl pushes her sweetheart on the tire swing, his legs kicking up towards the sun. I sit by the window, and continue looking at invisible things.
𓇢𓆸 ⟢
It does not take long to write a script to randomly report records as incorrectly flagged. At first I worry about a denial of service if the site were to detect too frequent requests, but these datakeeping portals are apparently too unsuspecting and low priority for higher security. After a couple test runs with no alarm bells, I let the handlebars go and watch rows fade like an ebbing tide. As the animation ripples through the page there is a moment of panic—I am actively destroying the closest thing I have to a comprehensive proof of his life—but a thin thread at the back of my brain pulls taut and my vision realigns to something more real. If that were true, then Tian would look like records of black text on white, like round numbers, like Times New Roman—like the databases I examine every day at work. One more sharp twist of shame and self-hatred inside my chest for this thought, but the last for a long time.
I know that Tian looks nothing like that. His brown eyes always look extra kind because of his crows feet, unusually long and deep; you can see them in some of his baby photos too, little cashew dimples. His lips are softly formed such that the corners of his mouth are prone to collecting crumbs, and if we are sitting across from one another I’ll reach to dab at him after the meal, him holding up my right sleeve so it doesn’t dip into the dishes. He smells sour in skin and face when he loses a fencing match, and maybe even more when he wins. His laugh has a bouncing tune to it that kind of sounds like the noise our old toaster makes when it’s done. He washes and dries the plates one at a time instead of making a stack, because he doesn’t mind taking it slow. He turns the car radio down when I’m not asleep yet but my eyelids must be betraying something only he can see, and then all the way up when it’s playing one of three Carly Rae Jepsen songs he knows, but not up enough to compete with his own booming rendition. This information cannot be formatted as valid input, parsed into useful outputs, substituted into any side of a state calculation. It does not conform, nor serve to fuel machines for enforcing conformance, and so it’s worthless. And yet as the keeper of this worthless information, of all that I knew him to be, I feel full. When I close my eyes and picture his face this time, it’s in heavenly definition.
With the error-flagging script running, I write a companion script for automating new entries. As input I feed back all the other Tian Lius and Liu Tians again, netted from Facebook and LinkedIn and other online oceans. Then I curate some noise: fan accounts for his least favourite baseball team, anonymous blogs for reviewing Japanese motorcycles, profiles from a bulletin board on the other side of the world committed to avant-garde crochet. Satisfied that it’s hard at work as intended, I let my focus shift from the background activity to a game of Tetris, and then a slow draft of my letter of resignation.
I don’t check if the Reddit profile fielded mass removal when the scripts complete. In truth, I have no idea how effective my tampering has been. It is entirely possible that it’s too late—that they’ve already enshrined all the data I had accurately processed for them in some locked chest cast into deep sea storage, that they find me out and roll back the changes, that it never mattered anyway. They promised me this information was to honour Tian but hushed all his parts away into a black box, letting me fix his hair before they lowered him into state-owned earth. I click a large, imposing confirmation button that I’ve made all the changes I desired and do not need access to the portal anymore. I am swiftly logged out. There is no need to bid his sparse, computed effigy farewell.
The cemetery is within walking distance from the apartment, but still I had never been since picking out his spot for the grave. After the funeral I could only manage short phone calls to the cemetery director, who was adept at understanding my voice through the quivering and sobbing, and kindly informed me that the burial was completed. I remember my surprise when I made my initial visit: it looked like a large garden, with rolling lanes and paths in grassy concentric circles to walk alongside the graves, arched trellises raising morning glories and clematises against the curve of the sky. I had always imagined cemeteries to have some decrepit quality, haunted grey with stretching crosses and stony angel motifs, and felt somewhat sheepish and disrespectful when I realised the beauty of this one. I couldn’t have known any better. All of my grandparents are still living; Tian was my first to leave.
Despite how peaceful the lush surroundings were, I always believed that Tian’s grave held no value because it held no memory. He existed elsewhere, in stronger colours, and it would be foolish to treat it as a place of sentiment. But how could it ever hold memory if I never pay a visit, if no one goes there to remember him? I wonder if my occupation has over time made me prone to abiding by imaginary axioms, enlarged the gravity of the concrete and quantifiable.
I thank the cashier at Jack’s and put the sandwich in my bag, with the mandarins, sliced Fuji apples, and senbei rice crackers. Ma would always bring mandarins to the shrines of her ancestors, and as a young girl I was never sure why. Tian didn’t particularly like citrus fruits, but I decided to bring them anyway. Maybe your tastes mature in the afterlife. I’ll ask him when I get there. Besides his favourite snacks, I’ve also packed a romance novel we were in the middle of when he passed. I like your accent, he would say when I read aloud to him, usually while he was making dinner. When I told him it was a common accent and nothing special, he would say Yes, but I like when you read to me the most.
When I leave the deli the sun’s out, and the ripeness of morning air on my cheeks dilutes to a shimmer. I have a couple other errands to run, but first I duck into the florist with the chalkboard sign out on the pavement. It’ll take no time at all; for the past six years, every anniversary or Valentine’s day, the old lady here has known that I’m here for Tian’s sunflowers. A car goes by outside and the shadow sends the sun pattering across their tulips, carnations. The soft bump of my full bag weighs against my hip. Just another moment. I’m on my way to see you, soon, so soon.
𓇢𓆸 ⟢
Of course, all people, places, facts, and information in this published account have been randomly generated and falsified. In our current online culture, this might come as a surprise; by telling my story in such a format, there might be some impression of a promise of truth, and pure truth, and so my automated falsification violates some social contract between you, the reader, and I, the author. But the public is not entitled to digitised details of our lives, nor does it need to know for the meaning to land. ‘Tian’, as you know him, is not necessarily a Chinese, 35-year-old cisgender man, a data start-up whistleblower, or a dedicated model-making hobbyist. We are not necessarily living in a Western country, nor located near a yoghurt shop. This iteration pulls my pseudonym, ‘Frida’, from its simultaneous selection of ‘AI art company’ as my place-of-work, presumably after Kahlo. Our relationship, marital status, occupations, appearances, predilections, habits, speech patterns, et cetera have all potentially been fabricated and replaced—these pieces of information are for us to know and keep dear until we choose to disclose.
Perhaps that they can still exist without accurate documentation is what makes them real—perhaps the light hits with more wonder those refractions of memory that are fleeting and vulnerable to sunfade. The few moments shared here are doctored and illustrative; the rest of it all, and oh, how much there is, for cherishing.
In a world where administrative systems—as black boxes which demand our personal data—may not have our best interests at heart, this fictional story is inspired by calls to exploit error, become nothing, and become everything in the paper Name is a Required Field: Politics of Deadnaming in Administrative Systems by my partner Ace Chen, appearing in CHI 2025.
Illustrator
Isabel Li
Isabel Li is an artist, writer, and researcher daydreaming towards compassionate technology. They are Bay Area-based, Aotearoa-born, and trace their roots to Guangdong shores. They love collecting calendars, and laugh easily.