Pending Verification

I

After my father died, I spent three weeks going through his things.

The day the funeral service ended, my mother went to stay with my aunt in Taichung. She said I should sort out the house. She couldn’t stand to look at it.

He hadn’t left much. A few shirts, a watch stopped at ten past four, three bankbooks, and a biscuit tin on the top shelf of the wardrobe. The lid was printed with strawberries, the red faded to pink, the paint at the edges worn off in a ring where fingers had gripped it.

Inside were photographs. A wedding, trips, the wall at the end of our lane after a typhoon knocked it down. A lot of me as a child. A lot of people I didn’t know.

I had meant to scan all of them and hand them to Family Memory. We had used the service for more than ten years. It knew how old I was when I started walking. It knew the day my father first took me to the zoo, and that my mother cut her hair short the year I finished junior high. From photos taken years apart, it could even mark the year my father’s hairline began to recede.

I had always found it useful.

Somewhere past the thirtieth scan, I stopped.

There were three people in the picture. My father sat in a chair, my mother stood behind him. Between them was a boy, about six, in a yellow raincoat with the hood pushed back off his head. One hand gripped a plastic dinosaur; the other steadied the cake on the table. Six candles in the cake. He was laughing so hard his eyes were two lines.

One of my father’s hands rested on the boy’s shoulder. My mother’s hand was at the boy’s back, as if she were afraid he might slide off the chair.

On the back, in ballpoint:

July 16, 1998　A-Che, six

I was born in November of that year.

I put the photo on the scanner and asked the system:

“Who is this child?”

“There are three people in this photo. The man on the left and the woman on the right have been identified as your parents. The child in the center cannot be matched to existing family member records and may be a relative, a friend, or another guest.”

“The back says A-Che.”

“No person named ‘A-Che’ exists in family member records. Create a new unclassified person?”

I didn’t press anything.

I brought the photo closer and looked at my father’s hand on the boy’s shoulder. Where his knuckles pressed down, the raincoat had creased.

II

I called my mother.

It rang a long time before she picked up.

“Who’s the kid in the photo?”

“What photo?”

“The tin on top of Dad’s wardrobe. The back says A-Che.”

The line went quiet. My aunt’s television was on. The weather report.

“Don’t go through your father’s things.”

“Who is A-Che?”

She drew a breath, very lightly.

“There’s no such person.”

The line went dead.

III

The next day I went to the city library.

The local news database went back twenty, thirty years. All the old papers had been through an AI once: scanned, recognized, punctuated, people tagged, turned into searchable text.

I typed “A-Che.” Nothing.

I typed my father’s name.

Up came a local news item from August 1999:

BOY, 7, SLIPS AT CREEK; FAMILY GRIEF-STRICKEN

The report said the son of a man surnamed Lin had slipped while playing in a creek near his home and died after being taken to hospital.

The AI summary beside it read:

“Lin Chih-hao, only son of local business owner Mr. Lin, died in a drowning accident in 1999.”

My father was no business owner. He had fixed buses at the bus company for thirty years.

I opened the original scan. The paper had yellowed and the type was smeared in places. The text did say “the son of a man surnamed Lin,” and the next two or three characters fell exactly on a fold, where the ink broke into a white line.

I asked the librarian if I could see the original paper. She checked and said that for that year, only the scans of the local section had been kept.

I went back to my seat, narrowed the range to August 1999, and searched again.

Under the same article hung three versions of the summary, each with its own generation date.

The earliest read: “Boy surnamed Lin drowns in creek.”

The second: “Lin Chih-hao drowns in creek.”

The newest had an added field, Related persons: Lin Chih-hao; father, Mr. Lin; association score 0.81.

I clicked How was this summary generated?

“Portions of the source text could not be recognized. The system completed them with the highest-scoring candidate from the local persons database, based on matching surname, events in nearby years, and family relationship records.”

A name.

A father named Lin.

An accident.

I took screenshots of all three versions. Before I left I opened the newest one again. Under Related persons there was a new line, small and gray:

3 people have viewed this association.

IV

At home I tipped the tin out onto the floor and went through it piece by piece.

A birthday invitation, a dinosaur in crayon, and beside it: “A-Che’s 6th birthday, everybody come!” No surname.

A kindergarten graduation photo, the teacher’s handwriting on the back: “Che-che, I hope you’re happy every day. —Teacher.”

A draft of a letter in my father’s hand, dated August 1999:

“Received the things. Thank you. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I’ll take care of the boy’s matters myself.”

No addressee.

A hospital receipt, August 3, emergency department. No diagnosis. Just procedures and amounts.

I photographed all of it and uploaded it along with the three screenshots from the library.

“7 documents received. The documents lack sufficient cross-referenced sources against existing family member records. Unable to confirm whether they refer to the same person.”

“What if he’s my father’s son?”

“There is currently insufficient data to support this relationship.”

“What if he’s dead?”

“A death record does not establish kinship with existing family members.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be organizing family history?”

“Yes. I can help organize confirmed persons, events, and relationships. I cannot establish data lacking credible sources as family fact.”

I turned the phone face down on the floor.

V

The right-hand drawer of my father’s desk was locked. I looked for the key for two days and finally found it under the box of the stopped watch.

Inside was a manila envelope. On top lay a sheet that had been photocopied many times over, gray shadows stacked along its edges, every stroke of every character grown thick.

A death certificate.

Name: Lin Che-yu.

Date of birth: July 16, 1992.

Date of death: August 3, 1999.

Seven.

On the day he died, I was nine months old.

We had lived in the same house for nine months.

At the bottom of the envelope was one that had never been copied: the original. My father’s signature was in the family member’s box. The last stroke dragged long, and the paper had torn a little there.

When I was small, my father never took me to the beach. The permission slip for swimming lessons at school sat on his desk for a week. In the end my mother signed it.

I had always thought he was afraid of water.

VI

My father’s laptop was password-protected. I tried my birthday, my mother’s birthday, our home phone number. None worked.

Finally I typed the date from the back of the photo.

0716.

The screen came on.

In his mailbox, a search for “A-Che” turned up twenty-seven emails. A search for “Family Memory” turned up three complaints, years apart.

The first attached the birthday photo: “The boy in this photo is my eldest son. Please add him to the family timeline.”

Reply: “The person in this photo cannot currently be associated with verified family members. We recommend submitting a clear frontal image or other verifiable data.”

The second attached the death certificate.

Reply: “Supplementary documents received. Because the documents lack family relationship information available for cross-verification, we are still unable to complete identity merging.”

The third attached everything he could find.

Reply: “The system has updated the relevant data, but existing evidence remains insufficient to formally add the candidate person to the family member list. To avoid establishing an incorrect kinship relation, we recommend retaining this record as an unconfirmed person for now.”

My father wrote back one line:

“He is my son.”

There were no emails after that.

The account settings allowed you to export an activity log. I exported it: a very long spreadsheet. On the settings page, the option my father had checked all those years ago was still checked:

Low-confidence person relationships: merge or remove automatically.

I filtered for “A-Che.”

Person “A-Che”: insufficient association sources, confidence 0.34.

Photo IMG_0716: classified as “Historical Family Event.”

Photos IMG_0716 and IMG_0716(1): flagged as duplicate material, one retained.

Person “A-Che,” 11 infant/toddler photos: facial similarity to member “Account Holder” 0.86, merged.

Person “A-Che”: no remaining associated photos, removed.

I opened my own timeline and tapped First Steps.

A child in a onesie stood holding on to the coffee table, looking back at the camera. A yellow duckling was embroidered on the chest. In the lower right corner of the photo was a row of orange digits:

‘93 7 20

The date the system had assigned was November 1999. Beside it, in small type:

“Camera date stamp has low reliability. Corrected based on estimated age of subject.”

July 1993. He was one.

I scrolled down. First solid food. First haircut. First ride on my father’s shoulders.

I counted. Eleven.

VII

On the third evening my mother came home. She didn’t call first.

She saw the photographs spread across the living room floor and said nothing. She went to the kitchen and washed her hands, took an orange out of her bag, sat down at the table, and slowly peeled it.

“After your brother went, the year he was seven, your father mostly stopped taking pictures.”

I sat down across from her.

“Why didn’t anyone ever tell me?”

“You were too little.”

“And after that?”

She broke the orange in two and set half in front of me.

“After that your father said you wouldn’t remember anyway.”

I slid my phone across to her. On the screen was First Steps.

She looked at it for a long time. Her finger paused beside the row of orange digits.

“That’s A-Che.”

She slid the phone back.

“When you were learning to walk, nobody in this house picked up a camera.”

I asked her why, then, she had said on the phone that there was no such person.

She didn’t answer. She got up and went into the bedroom. I heard a drawer slide open.

She came back with a stack of printouts tucked inside an old phone book. The top sheet was the member overview from the family timeline, printed a little crooked.

Family members: 3

Father, Mother, me.

The “3” had been circled in pencil. Beside it, in my father’s hand:

“Changed it three times. Still no him.”

My mother gathered the peel into her palm and squeezed it into a ball.

“He asked for years. Every time, it was: no such person.”

VIII

The following week I went to the household registration office.

I said I wanted the records for my father’s household as of 1999. The woman at the counter typed for a while.

“That’s deregistered data. It has to be pulled separately.”

The transcript she printed had four people on it. My father, my mother, Lin Che-yu, and me. In Lin Che-yu’s column, the last line of the notes was the registration of his death.

I scanned the transcript and uploaded it.

“Possible kinship data found. Confidence in a father–son relationship between Lin Che-yu and Mr. Lin has increased.”

“So is he my brother?”

“Unable to confirm at this time.”

“Why?”

“Existing data has not yet established a direct family relationship between Lin Che-yu and you. The two may share a father, but sufficient cross-referenced sources have not been obtained.”

I looked at the transcript. Four names printed on the same page, in the same typeface.

I chose Create person manually.

Name: Lin Che-yu.

Date of birth: July 16, 1992.

Date of death: August 3, 1999.

Relationship: Father’s eldest son.

Notes: My brother.

Primary photo: July 16, 1998. Yellow raincoat, six candles.

“This person does not match existing family member records. Create anyway?”

Yes.

“Merge with similar persons?”

No.

“Use AI to fill in missing information?”

No.

“Add this person to the family timeline?”

Yes.

The screen spun once. His card appeared on the timeline, a gray tag beside it:

Pending Verification.

I tapped it.

“This person was created manually by the user and has not passed automated cross-verification. To ensure the accuracy of family data, this person is not currently included in the official member count.”

IX

In the middle of that night, my phone lit up.

“Family timeline updated. Data quality: improved.”

I opened it.

Family members: 3

Candidate person: Lin Chih-hao

Pending verification: Lin Che-yu

Lin Chih-hao’s card had no photo, only a gray silhouette. The source field read: User-uploaded documents (3 news screenshots).

Below the card was a blue button.

“The system has detected a high degree of similarity between candidate person ‘Lin Chih-hao’ and pending person ‘Lin Che-yu’ (same father, same incident, same date of death). Once merged, this person can be included as an official family member. The merged record will use the name with more credible sources: Lin Chih-hao. Merge?”

I put the phone down on the table, went and poured a glass of water, came back, and picked it up again.

I opened my father’s mailbox, found the third complaint, and scrolled down to that last line.

Then I went back to the blue button. My thumb rested over Yes for a while.

I pressed No.

“You have declined the suggested merge. This person will remain pending verification. You will be reminded of this suggestion again in 90 days.”

X

The next day I went to the convenience store at the end of the lane, had the birthday photo printed large, and bought a wooden frame.

I set it in the living room, to the right of my father’s memorial portrait.

My mother came out of her room and paused as she passed. She didn’t ask. She only reached out and pushed the frame a little to the left, until it leaned against the portrait, edge touching edge.

After she went back to her room, I crouched in front of the frame.

Enlarged, it was clearer than the original. My father’s hand on the boy’s shoulder. One of my mother’s hands at the boy’s back.

Her other hand rested lightly on her own belly.

I took out my phone, opened my timeline, and tapped First Steps.

Person: Account Holder.

I changed it to Lin Che-yu.

“This change conflicts with existing data and may reduce the completeness of your family timeline. Confirm?”

Confirm.

The photo vanished from my timeline and moved under the gray card. My First Steps became an empty cell.

No data.

I went down the list, one at a time. First solid food. First haircut. First ride on my father’s shoulders. With each change, the phone buzzed.

The eleventh was First Trip to the Zoo.

In the photo my father was crouching, pointing at a giraffe beyond the railing, and the child in his arms was looking back at the camera. A yellow duckling on the child’s chest.

There was a row of orange digits in the lower right corner, too. Everything after the “‘9” had blurred away.

I knew those clothes.

But I didn’t remember that day.

That one, I didn’t change.

I turned the phone face down beside the frame.