Gold Diggers, Sanjena Sathian [hardest books to read .txt] 📗

Francisco is a small town, as is upper-middle-class Asian America. I’d been reencountering Hammond Creek transplanted into the Bay Area for years. There was Manu, and old Ravi Reddy, once expelled to Hyderabad, who’d resurfaced as a back-end engineer and was vocal about his “ethically nonmonogamous lifestyle” whenever I bumped into him. Wendi Zhao—whom I’d dated intermittently in college—headed west after graduating Harvard Law, logging time as a patent troll. I’d even swiped right on Melanie Cho on a dating app once, to no avail. Though we’d grown up in a no-place, the privilege and ambition incubated in that no-place had driven many of us to the place where so many with privilege and ambition flocked. But Anita, who I knew had attended Stanford and stuck around out here since, had remained steadfastly hidden, as though she did not wish to be found.

At least, not by me.

“I’ve seen her a few times,” Manu said. “She was working at Galadriel Ventures for a couple of years, doing PR or marketing or events. I ran into her at a demo day she was organizing. She seemed, I don’t know, different.”

“Different how?” I asked.

“Calmer, maybe?”

Manu’s mouth was still open, considering, when Hae-mi snapped her fingers and pointed at Maya. “She was a few years below us at Stanford, dated Jimmy Bansal! Ooh, I bet he helped her get that Galadriel job—”

“Didn’t they break up?” Maya said doubtfully.

“Mm, yes, they totally did, at least once, but weren’t they on and off?” Hae-mi said. “I remember one of the breakups because it was our commencement and she just kept calling Jimmy over and over, freaking. I think she dropped out after that, actually.”

“Anita dropped out of college?” I inhaled sharply, now turning from Manu, who still hadn’t answered my first question. “Like, the way start-up people drop out?”

Hae-mi looked at me pityingly. “No, not like the way start-up people drop out. I put her down as a case of classic duck syndrome.”

“Duck what?” Prachi said.

“Duck syndrome,” Maya said. “You know, someone who looks all calm and crushing it above water, but really they’re paddling like crazy underneath to stay afloat?”

Prachi shrugged, as though the concept were foreign; school had come easily to her, and professional life welcomed her gracefully. If she’d suffered trauma (I still remembered the sporadic bulimia on which I’d eavesdropped through high school) she generally refused to reflect on it. I’d always thought time eventually forced even the most practical people to introspect. But my sister had cheerfully attenuated her inner life with each year.

Everyone else hmmed in recognition, though.

“You didn’t talk to her at all?” I asked Prachi.

“Took me a second to place her. And I was covered in all these fabrics. Anyway, if she’s wedding shopping now, she must be doing okay,” she said. Which was, of course, so like my sister’s particular understanding of happiness. “Don’t give me that look, Neil, I just mean, that’s an expensive store, so she must be doing well for herself.”

“Or Jimmy’s paying,” Hae-mi said, taking her phone out. “But I definitely would have seen something on social media if Jimmy got engaged.”

“Or her dad’s paying,” Prachi doubled back.

“Ugh,” Hae-mi reported. “Jimmy’s on zero apps. I can’t tell.”

“Meanwhile”—Maya leaned her elbows on the counter, clearly ready to be done with the talk about Jimmy Bansal’s cracked-up ex—“my parents announced the other day that they’ve spent half of what I thought was my wedding fund on my sister’s post-bacc. If she’d just been premed from the start—”

“I can’t believe you guys are that out of touch,” Manu said, edging nearer so he was only addressing me. In his gentle regard I felt recognized as the teenage boy I still was, or contained. “You two were always a unit. To me, anyway.”

“She ran hot and cold on me,” I said. “Did you talk? When you ran into her?”

“A little. She was pretty thoughtful, in a way people in tech aren’t always. Honestly, I never found her very thoughtful, when we were younger. She was so into winning stuff that I couldn’t have told you what she loved.”

“What did you love then?” I asked, probably too sharply.

Manu blanched. “I loved math, Neer,” he said. “I wanted to go to grad school for it. I just wasn’t smart enough. I’m a very good engineer, but I’m not cut out for pure math.”

“I don’t think I ever knew that,” I said.

“I don’t think it ever came up,” he said, not unkindly. “I can’t remember talking about anything very real at OHS.”

“But you and Anita—you talked about something real?”

“Not quite. She seemed kind of dissatisfied. Maybe I’m projecting. Galadriel’s super prestigious, but they run people to the ground, and their portfolio companies start at suspect and go all the way to evil. Data theft and worse. She said she was going to quit soon, she wanted to do something good, only she didn’t know what.” He nodded somberly, sympathetically, for surely it was this shared sentiment that had him considering enduring Grindr in Iowa.

“Well,” I said, “that’s a start.”

Lost on earnest Manu was my dryness.

“I’ve gotta bounce, Neer,” he said, hugging me. “It’s always great to see you. Just makes me reflect on how far we’ve all come, don’t you think?”

•   •   •

I spent that summer flailing through my research, in advance of the proposal defense that impended that fall—I needed an outline for the whole dissertation, plus two sample chapters, or I risked losing my funding. I’d already missed several deadlines in spring, and my exigent adviser, Irwin Wang, had let me know that I was on probation.

Each day, I grew headachy from staring at my laptop until my vision fuzzed. I was exhausted from sleeping and eating too little, subsisting on Adderall or coke, the latter of which was slowly becoming more than a party habit. My hair and limbs hung off me like peeling bark and Spanish moss. I was a ghost to myself, one of those Japanese mythic creatures—the unsatisfied self peels away from the body to