My Dad and Kurt Cobain (The New Yorker)

When my father moved back to Taiwan, my family bought a pair of fax machines. In theory, this was so he could help me with my math homework. I was starting high school, in California, and everything, from what instrument I played to the well-roundedness of my transcript, suddenly seemed consequential. In seventh grade, I had tested just well enough to skip two years of math, and now I was paying for it. I had peaked too early. In fact, I was very bad at math. Like many immigrants who prized education, my parents had faith in the mastery of technical fields—math and science—where answers weren’t left to interpretation. You couldn’t discriminate against the right answer.

Faxing was cheaper than long-distance calling, and involved far less pressure. The time difference between Cupertino and Taiwan was such that I could fax my father a question in the evening and expect an answer by the time I woke up. My homework requests were always marked “Urgent.”

He replied with equations and proofs, explaining the principles of geometry in the margins and apologizing if anything was unclear. After wearying of America’s corporate ladder, he’d moved to Taiwan to work as an executive in the burgeoning semiconductor industry, and he was busy establishing himself at his new job. I skimmed the explanations and copied down the equations and proofs. Every now and then, I rewarded his quick, careful attention by interspersing the next set of math questions with a digest of American news: I told him about Magic Johnson’s announcement that he was H.I.V.-positive, I narrated the events that led up to the Los Angeles riots, I kept him up to date on the fate of the San Francisco Giants. I told him about cross-country practice, made honest commitments to work harder at school. I listed the new songs I liked, and he would seek them out in Taipei’s cassette stalls and tell me which ones he liked, too: