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A truly magnificent thing about the way the brain was coded, Sam thought, was that it could say “Excuse me” while meaning “Screw you.”
This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently. And that mode of transport only worked with those one had known a significant time.
Sadie liked the phrase “an abundance of caution.” It reminded her of a murder of crows, a flock of seagulls, a pack of wolves. She imagined
In Sadie’s art class at school, she had been taught to draw by breaking things down into basic shapes. To depict this boy, she would have needed mainly circles.
To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back—I know you won’t hurt me, even though you can. It is the dog putting its mouth around your hand and never biting down. To play requires trust and love.
To design a game is to imagine the person who will eventually play it.
Sadie didn’t want Sam viewed through her sister’s acute and often unforgiving lens.
Life is very long, she thought, unless it is not.
“Her parents can buy her anything she wants. Why would she want some dumb thing I drew on the back of an envelope?” Sam said. “I suppose,” Dong Hyun said, “because her parents can buy her anything she wants.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Marx said. “It isn’t about you. Just show up every day to check in with her.” “What if she won’t talk to me?” “Let her know you’re there. And if you can manage it, bring her a cookie, a book, a movie to watch. Friendship,” Marx said, “is kind of like having a Tamagotchi.” Tamagotchis, the digital pet keychains, were everywhere that year. Marx had recently killed one that he had received as a holiday gift from a girlfriend. The girlfriend had taken it to be a sign of deeper flaws in Marx’s character. “Get her to take a shower, talk a little, go for a walk. Open the
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Several hours later, he had finished the reading, which had been about Chinese immigration to America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how Chinese immigrants had only been allowed to do certain kinds of work, like food or cleaning, and that’s why there were so many Chinese restaurants and Chinese laundries, i.e., systemic racism.
Except for the day he worked his shift at Lamont Library, he went to see her every afternoon for the next week. He would leave her a small offering, per Marx’s suggestion, and then he would stay a while before heading back to his apartment.
There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.
Until Harvard, he had not realized that in America—and not just in its college theaters—there were only so many roles an Asian could play.
The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures.
The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don’t you? I’m terrified of that world, and I don’t want to live in that world, and as a mixed-race person, I literally don’t exist in it.
And as any mixed-race person will tell you—to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.
What was amazing to Sam—and what became a theme of the games he would go on to make with Sadie—was how quickly the world could shift. How your sense of self could change depending on your location.
“And this is the truth of any game—it can only exist at the moment that it is being played. It’s the same with being an actor. In the end, all we can ever know is the game that was played, in the only world that we know.”
Sadie thought about it. She didn’t love that Marx, whom she already resented, had just named their game. “Ichigo,” she said slowly. Dammit, she thought, it’s fun to say. “I can live with that.”
to return to one’s hometown felt like surrender.
We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living.
To return to the city of one’s birth always felt like retreat.
She was intelligent, but her intelligence didn’t get in the way of her enthusiasm.
it was the nostalgia he felt when he watched the healthy and the able-bodied leave a world that they had only been visiting, but of which he was a permanent resident.
Sam’s doctor said to him, “The good news is that the pain is in your head.” But I am in my head, Sam thought.
Every person you knew, every person you loved even, did not have to consume you for the time to have been worthwhile.
But public failures are different, it’s true.” “So, what do I do?” she asked. “You go back to work. You take advantage of the quiet time that a failure allows you. You remind yourself that no one is paying any attention to you and it’s a perfect time for you to sit down in front of your computer and make another game. You try again. You fail better.”
It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives.”
She had thought after Ichigo that she would never fail again. She had thought she arrived. But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through.
What was a gate anyway? A doorway, she thought. A portal. The possibility of a different world. The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.
The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.
Sam didn’t believe it was possible to spoil a game. The point was not what happened, but the process of getting to what happened.
She had once read in a book about consciousness that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person. Upon the person’s death, your brain still believes the virtual person exists, because, in a sense, the person still does. After a while, though, the memory fades, and each year, you are left with an increasingly diminished version of the AI you had made when the person was alive. She could feel herself forgetting all the
So many of the mothers she knew said that their children were exactly themselves from the moment they appeared in the world. But Sadie disagreed. What person was a person without language? Tastes? Preferences? Experiences? And on the other side of childhood, what grown-up wanted to believe that they had emerged from their parents fully formed?
“It’s not just you. It’s me. And it’s Marx. And too much has happened, I think. I’m not even sure I’m a designer anymore.” “Sadie, that’s about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
How quickly you go from being the youngest to the oldest person in a room, she thought.
keep thinking how easy it was to make that first Ichigo. We were like machines then—this, this, this, this. It’s so easy to make a hit when you’re young and you don’t know anything.” “I think that, too,” Sadie said. “The knowledge and experience we have—it isn’t necessarily that helpful, in a way.” “So depressing,” Sam said, laughing. “What’s all of this struggle been for?”
