But young professionals, with money to burn without too deep investments in any platform, may increasingly turn to Apple

I was deeply fond of Family Two, because they seemed unaffected by the cultural inferiority complex that Family One and my family keenly exhibited. With them there was no talk of class or social status, there was no envy nor condescension. Though they often came home covered in dust or smelling of sewage, they were warm instead of self-pitying, curious instead of preachy. They seemed to have the gift of accepting life. They had a pair of teenaged twins who were natural troublemakers and therefore, my natural heroes. The boy was called Kevin, and the girl was too enthralled with the prospect of having an English name to pick one. She called herself April, June, Olivia, this week she was Samantha, which she pronounced Sa-man-far.

Family Two consisted of four illegal immigrants who occupied two bedrooms in the back of the house. Family One and my family looked down on Family Two, because the parents worked less-than-minimum-wage jobs at ungodly hours that were friendly to undocumented workers but detrimental to human health. The father at a construction site a three-hour drive away, and the mother as an assistant caretaker for the elderly. They were both illiterate farmers back in China.

I was fascinated with her rendering of the American social hierarchy. The China I grew up in was made up of 1) the politically connected, hence wealthy and educated 2) the working class like my parents, much less wealthy and educated, and 3) lastly, comprising of ~65% of the population, the farming class: the uneducated and poor agricultural workers whom we literally called peasants.

So you can only imagine my mother’s shock when, a month after emigrating to the U.S., she felt a small, furry creature nuzzling at her ankle while taking out the trash. She let out a scream and scurried back inside. My father gave her a cursory look, “just don’t feed it, it’ll go away.”

That year, my mother and I had arrived on American soil to meet my father, the three of us crammed ourselves into a single-story home with two other migrant families in a low-income neighborhood. We rented the cheapest bedroom in the middle of the house, which meant sharing a front door with Family One, a back door with Family Two, and a bathroom with whichever family wasn’t using theirs. Family One, a trio we revered for their Green Cards and basic English language comprehension, occupied the fanciest and most picturesque part of the house — the front, which grew a single rose bush and some wild mint weeds. The mother of the family, a warehouse receptionist named Annie who did yoga, frequently granted us glimpses of real American ways through her pithy musings, which we gobbled up like popcorn. “Americans love pickup trucks, burgers, pizza,” she’d note casually, “when they do eat vegetables, they usually eat it raw, this is called salad.”

From that moment on we openly defied our parents and fed the dog with impunity. Mickey Mouse was the only iconically American character we knew, so we named her Mickey, gender normativity be damned.

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orrect involves four main steps, namely, identifying a misspelled word, then finding the strings while computing the minimum edit distance from each of them, filtering the possible candidates for the right word selection. And finally, calculating the word probabilities to forecast the best possible prediction for the particular word.

There has been this idea that during an espresso shot, the finer particles (<200 um), also called fines, migrate to the bottom of the filter and either block the filter (causing channeling) or coming out in the cup (ruining the taste). This concept drives people to be more careful in their puck preparation for fear that too much agitation will cause the fines to accumulate at the bottom and make this problem worse.

At least, that’s how the well-rehearsed story goes. Rabies has the highest mortality rate — 99.9% — of any known disease. In the decade before my birth, almost 60,000 people died from rabies in China, nearly all from encounters with rabid dogs. When my parents were growing up, less than 1% of dogs in China were vaccinated. Street dogs, then, were at best farmhands, at worst pests, and to some, food. Only in 2020 did China’s Ministry of Agriculture officially designate dogs as “companion animals” instead of “livestock.”

File that under “obvious foreshadowing.” From the other side of the screen door, I saw a dark, long, wooly puppy with upright ears no more than 15 inches tall. It had made itself a home in the hollow among the garbage cans. It sat upright, straight-backed, head tilted, in curious defiance. I happened to be 11 years old and also treading the newly delicate balance between unquestioning obedience and calculated rebellion. So when my parents were getting ready for bed, I bolted to the fridge, grabbed a piece of leftover meat, and — being careful not to contract rabies — flung it out the back door.

I am aware that there exists an uncanny psychological phenomenon in which, when asked to describe their pets, pet owners unconsciously choose to impose a limiting, narcissistic narrative onto them by describing themselves. “He’s the strongest dog in the pack,” says the bodybuilder. “She’s picky and independent,” says the activist. “She’s a princess — and if you can’t handle her at her worst, you sure as hell don’t deserve her best,” says the Karen, quoting Marilyn Monroe.

“I have a secret,” Samantha told me one day. “I have been feeding the black puppy by the back door.” Elated that I had the prescience to follow my hero, I told her about my mother’s fear of rabies. Sam dismissed me with conviction, “No rabies in this country.”

I shall attempt to circumvent this by describing everything Mickey was that I categorically was not. She was a natural athlete, with keen sense, quick movement, and a muscular build like a wolf. She was resilient, and endured cold and hunger like a bear. We couldn’t afford any dog food, so we just gave her leftovers; our house was too small so, even when it rained, she slept outside. She never made any complaint, as if, like a philosopher, she had learned that without hard work and suffering there would be no pleasure worth having. She was steadfast and measured, she wasn’t the type of dog who leaped onto furniture or rolled on her stomach for a belly rub. All of her movements were slow, deliberate, sphinx-like. She loved easily; it only took a couple of sausages thrown hastily from the back door for her to regard me as a friend. She was strong and confident and she had the foresight to stay — despite our reluctance — in our crowded and inhospitable home because she knew, somehow, she was here to change a life.

Were we the new peasant class, then? I distinctly remember going to the supermarket with my mother and picking up a plastic container of precociously ripe strawberries. My mother looked at the price tag — $3.99 per pound — and apologized. She then gestured to a pile of Fuji apples, priced $0.69 per pound, and told me to grab some of those.

“No,” Annie corrected, her hands gesturing to signify the stratum of American society. Her voice was so serious, her scale so precise, that I pretended to pay deference to it by taking notes. “At the very top you have white people,” she began, then Native Americans, because “whites took their land and so they have special privileges like owning casinos,” then light Latinos, light Asians like Koreans, dark Latinos, dark Asians like Filipinos, Black people, recent immigrants, and illegal immigrants. “Weirdly, sometimes Americans treat animals better than humans,” she finished.