A Ritual of Grief in New Waves

In New Waves, Nguyen tells a story of an Asian American — half Chinese, half Vietnamese — twentysomething working in the tech startup space just after the 2008 stock market crash. What is included is often just as important as what is not. The theory of omission. The bottom of the iceberg. Lucas Nguyen, male protagonist, was not line-driving into a blossoming future as an engineering mastermind but he was flittering about in his parents’ bed-and-breakfast before stumbling out of Oregon into tech as a customer service rep. And maybe it would have been more resonant to operate with this sort of Silicon Valley archetypal Asian male who codes at breakneck speed because he was born a mathematical genius, bred with discipline, and by such hard work, has climbed the ranks to become another version of the model minority in a technocratic American Dream. Instead, he strips away the stereotype-clad character lest we mistake economic rise with visibility of the Asian American. 

This ambitious debut speaks about the world of tech intelligently, always being critical but never anti, always hoping to evolve it and expand it to become big enough to include us all and never to cancel it. It doesn’t trivialize tech but asks the tough questions. How does our value in data and expediency in algorithms coexist with human labor? Can it? If not, is there not something fundamentally compromising, fundamentally inverted, fundamentally absurd in our incommensurate value system? Should it not cause us to both laugh at such a farce and cry at such a tragedy of replacing humans with machines? For those who default to “business as usual” methods, these questions might not have clear answers. Otherwise, they may seem merely rhetorical. On the contrary, if coexistence is possible — and it must be — how can we maintain such a world? Nguyen does not seem to go as far as to answer this.

It is no surprise that Nguyen’s ability to critique tech is razor-sharp since he is an editor on The Verge, a media platform that largely covers tech and science, but that’s not all within his repertoire. New Waves does not stay in the abstract world of ideas or the belligerent space of confrontation. It is grounded by so many lines of dialogue washed in wit and comedy that I was left shaking my head in deep satisfaction again and again. 

Much of the use of dialogue comes through Lucas’ memory of Margot. Margot was Lucas’ best friend, a no-nonsense engineer of great talent, unafraid of contention, and perpetually hampered by society’s reminders that her body was racialized. “Being black means you are merely a body—a fragile body.” In the very beginning, they commit a data heist in a drunken moment of retributive angst after Margot is unreasonably fired. “What is any company’s most valuable asset? . . . its information”. It was a sly way to expose a rhetorical point — a point that ruthless capital-hungry companies seem still to miss — that we have mistaken the dispensability of human workers with the dispensability of data. The theft of data leaves no void. The loss of people leaves one that cannot be filled. Margot is snatched from us almost immediately once the story begins. She dies suddenly by a car accident Lucas was not present to witness. The heist merely hands Lucas his best friend’s login credentials as a flashlight that guides him through the aura of mystery surrounding her death. Nguyen lays out an entire stage for grief to speak.

Leonard Cohen famously sung, “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in”, as an interplay of the holy and the broken, the truth in the mess. The pessimist in me wonders whether or not this interpolation of hope in life’s tragedies is just our own willful conjurings. Our need to formulate redemption when there is none. But Nguyen’s elegiac prose is not meant to inspire fatalism or to discuss objective reality. He acknowledges the tendency of the living to write narratives for the dead whether or not those narratives are given consensus. We are human and that’s just what grief does to us. It isn’t an act that is only selfish but also an investigative ritual where grief hands us a spade and challenges us to probe deeper and longer than we once did. The plot structure ebbs and flows from Lucas’ reality to memories of his dead best friend in such a way that invites the past to whisper secrets into the present like grief swimming with resurrection.

This commingling is the flagrant act of a rule breaker demonstrating that the boundaries that limit our world only serves to restrict us from innovation. As Lucas breaks into the first of Margo’s accounts, he is faced with the dilemma of how to give meaning to her death by the constricting choices laid out before him. “Memorialized or deleted. The only two states for a dead person’s Facebook account. . . . A memorialized Facebook account was preserved in stasis, frozen in time like a caveman in ice. Deletion was, on the other hand, a complete erasure.” Stasis or obliteration. Our world, at least the technocratic dimension, suffocates the substance of death and allows a binary to be oozed out. Nguyen is clearly not satisfied with this and insists instead to innovate it.

As Lucas goes on a reluctant rampage, hacking into Margot’s accounts, he discovers her online presence on a forum for sci-fi aficionados, harking back to his shared history with Margot on another online forum. He becomes privy to her threads of conversational content with Jill, Margot’s virtual friend and published sci-fi author, who quickly becomes co-conspirator. A stark difference exists between Margot’s virtual identity, when cloaked with anonymity, and her embodied identity. She seems liberated to empathize, to opine, and to create. At every moment of pause Lucas has with this conquest, his grief betrays his integrity. He eventually finds a library of WAV files with recordings of Margot drunkenly creating fictional worlds. “Grief isn’t just the act of coping with a loss. It’s reckoning with the realization that you’ll never discover something new about a person ever again. Here it was, though. Something new.” Nguyen snidely stages an existential coup on the limits of death, ripping the ceiling wide open. Grief is not the twist of the knife or the apotheosis in dying. Grief gives us permission to revolt against stasis; to continue creating even past disembodiment. 

The novel is layered with a metanarrative conducted by Margot’s resurrected voice, breaking through the forcefield of mortality to communicate that she too lived with her own grief. The illusion of dialogue.

“She had a way of seeing the world for its composite parts. Everything could be broken down into systems, each with their own rules and consequences. I think engineering data architecture was effortless for her. It was so self-contained. But when she’d look at the world more broadly you could see her trying to piece it together, but it was just too much at times. Systems of sexism, systems of racism, systems of social class, all interlocking and tugging at each other in different directions.”

As Lucas irresistibly shuffles through her deeply stowed audio files, his portrait of Margot becomes clearer. She imagined blasting into intergalactic realms to resettle on planets with no trace of life like drawing on a blank canvas. She spoke presciently of the dissolution of a world ruled by a cacophonous tribunal that would sail into its eventual extinction by natural causes. Grief compelled her to write new realities that were unencumbered by the infrastructural chaos rendered her world uninhabitable.

Like Margot, the entire cast of characters find themselves living in an equally restrictive world — a white CEO who wants to build something noble but is forced to alter the shape of his company according to market demands, a customer service staff that is marked by dispensability where hard work will never reward them in an industry that refuses to assign them value, an author who’s best work comes not from herself but from an anonymous online legend that proofreads her copy. What if we could rip open the ceiling to create a new world?

In many ways, New Waves celebrates the human achievement that has ushered us into the digital age. Without the dawn of the internet, the luxury of anonymity which re-humanizes us for community would never have been possible. End-to-end encryption has secured confidential messages which is crucial to virtual organization for social activism. Algorithms are mystifying to most, but they have also built realities and systems for us that once existed only as a figment of our imagination. 

This doesn’t mean that Nguyen coddles the tech industry. All innovation with noble origins can become corrupted and co-opted for the most egregious means. At one scene, a CEO of a startup searching for funding from a venture capital has an idea for a facial recognition application because a photographer once took a picture of him and his ex-girlfriend happily in love on the subway. Sentimentality frozen in time. He combed through the entire internet and could not find the lost photo floating nebulously in virtual erehwon. The next time he appears, he has sold it to a government sector using his application for comprehensive surveillance. To make sure that the metaphor does not drive us down the edge of the cliff because this fiction is bordering on reality, he decides to call the company Panopticon, satirizing tech with a double entendre hiding behind the shadows. 

Nguyen recognizes that there is no formula to striking that balance or to how humans and machines are to coexist. Algorithms and data may never get humans right and our worlds may continue to feel restrictive to us, but in the face of it, we must write habitable worlds if only that we could live. Grief does not become any less liminal, but rather than a prison we are trying to escape it can be a shelter that allows us to create. Instead of being paralyzed by stasis or releasing by oblivion, it can be tossed with the waves of resurrection to bring about something new.