The earliest documented period of Amy's life, before the move to Peoria. She lived in Guilderland, a suburb near Albany, New York. The family was intact: Jason, Sue, George, Amy, and a pet named Kurtle.
What We Know from the Archive
The oldest email in Amy's Gmail is from August 31, 2011. She was ten years old, going on eleven in December. Already on an iPad, already generating digital noise, already sending app recommendations to her dad at jizst8@yahoo.com and links to Chinese TV show ringtones to her mom at gengsy@hotmail.com.
The mom's email address at this time was gengsy@hotmail.com, not the Gmail account that shows up on later correspondence. She appears to have made the switch sometime between 2011 and the Interlochen applications in 2015-2016. The hotmail account is a small but precise detail about what the family was like in 2011, a normal immigrant Chinese-American family in upstate New York with a hotmail address.
September 12, 2011
On a Monday afternoon in September 2011, ten-year-old Amy sent herself an email with the subject line: 我的名字叫周点点。我今年十一岁。
Which translates to: "My name is Zhou Diandian. This year I am eleven years old."
It is, unmistakably, Chinese homework. The full text she was practicing:
我的名字叫周点点。我今年十一岁。我喜欢吃巧克力，鱼和包子。我家有四口人：爸爸，妈妈，弟弟和我。我们还有一个宠物，他的名字叫-Kurtle。
Translation: "My name is Zhou Diandian. I am eleven years old. I like eating chocolate, fish, and baozi. My family has four people: dad, mom, younger brother, and me. We also have a pet, his name is Kurtle."
She sent multiple drafts of this same passage, each slightly more complete than the last. The first draft just says her name and age. The final draft includes the pet.
Things to notice:
One. She calls herself Zhou Diandian (周点点) in Chinese. Diandian is the nickname she still uses. Two. She lists her family as four people: dad, mom, younger brother, and her. Mom was still alive. This was roughly four years before Sue died. Three. She mentions a pet named Kurtle. This predates Teddy, who arrived in April 2014 after the move to Peoria. Kurtle was the Guilderland pet.
Kurtle
The name "Kurtle" is almost certainly a pun on "turtle," which strongly suggests Kurtle was a turtle. Amy was ten years old, living in suburban Albany, doing Chinese homework about a turtle named Kurtle who lived in a four-person household. This is the oldest concrete detail about what Amy's family life looked like before everything changed.
Teddy came after the move. Kurtle was before. What happened to Kurtle between Guilderland and Peoria is unknown.
The Digital Child of 2011
At ten, Amy was already:
Playing the "My Horse" app and sending George seven consecutive photos of her virtual horse named Copper on a Sunday morning in November 2011. George presumably received all seven.
Subscribing to the Talking Friends Newsletter (Talking Tom Cat) and also trying to share the app with "ladygaga@gmail.com," which is not Lady Gaga's email address. This is what ten-year-olds did with the share button in 2011.
Receiving newsletters from Fantage Arcade and Petpet Park, which was a Nickelodeon virtual world. She had accounts on multiple virtual platforms simultaneously.
Possibly donating to the World Food Programme. Emails to "Amzyst" from WFP's community team reference "your continued support" in December 2011. If accurate, she was donating to international food aid at age eleven.
The Guilderland Friends
From early Facebook notifications in December 2012, right before the family left or just after they'd arrived in Peoria, the Guilderland-era friend network is visible:
Sierra Leslie Warning. Tara Nortman. Lily Teeling. Lisa Lopez. Liliana Delrio.
On December 20, 2012, the night of the supposed Mayan apocalypse, Liliana Delrio posted on Amy's Facebook timeline: "If the world ends tomorrow i want u to know..."
The rest is not captured in the email snippet. But twelve-year-old Amy got that message on what her classmates had turned into an end-of-the-world occasion, and she kept the Facebook account that received it.
A friend named Jessa Smith (jesssmithd@gmail.com) stayed in Guilderland and kept in touch after the move. In 2014, Jessa mentioned missing Amy. At some point, Jason briefly considered taking a job back in Albany, which would have meant Amy returning to Guilderland. He did not. They stayed in Peoria.
The Birthday Photo
On December 28, 2012, Amy's twelfth birthday, George forwarded a photo booth picture to Amy, their dad (jizst8@yahoo.com), and their mom (gengsy@hotmail.com). It was from an ElevateDigital photo booth somewhere in Chicagoland. The family was out, together, celebrating her birthday. It is a rare piece of documentation of the family as a whole, before the deaths, before the moves, before all of it.
The email was starred and marked important. It sat in the inbox for over a decade.
What Came Next
The family moved from Guilderland to Peoria around 2013-2014 when Jason took the UIC position. Amy was thirteen. Jessa stayed behind. Kurtle's fate is unknown. Teddy arrived in April 2014. Sue died sometime around 2015-2016. Then both paternal grandparents and the maternal grandmother died in one terrible summer in 2019.
The Guilderland years are the before. The years when the family was whole.