Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Some Say in Ice

Yesterday I went to my friend Matt’s apartment here in Beijing. I walked into the lobby and, since the door was locked, asked the receptionist to please buzz room 201 to allow me access. She looks slightly confused, which I usually attribute to certain Chinese being shocked by foreigners speaking the language, so I politely asked her again, using a different word for “1” to avoid any confusion. The receptionist called up and I waited patiently by the door as she spoke to Matt. Meanwhile some other residents came in and keyed open the door. With a questioning glance back at the receptionist, I held the door open, wondering what was taking so long since she had clearly gotten an answer and Matt, who was expecting my arrival, wouldn’t hesitate to give her the go ahead. And yet she seems embroiled in a true conversation so I shrugged and went ahead in.

At the door, Matt greeted me with an incensed smile and asked if I had heard “all of that.” Since I was wearing headphones and not particularly interested in the receptionist routine call up, I had not. It turned out that she had called and informed matt that a “black guy” was at the main desk. Not one to let something like that slide, Matt, sarcastically inquired back “oh, you mean my friend” and proceeded to ask why she had felt the need to comment on my race. The receptionist had replied that she knew there were black people living on the 1st floor, but none on the second where I had told her I was going. So, while I was waiting, oblivious to these goings on, Matt had gone on to chastise her for insulting a friend and for being generally ignorant.

When he told me I was slightly annoyed, but also slightly amused. I’ve lived in Beijing long enough to have an intimate familiarity with the stereotypes and prejudices many Chinese hold concerning black people and certain other ethnic groups. On some days it is more apparent than others, and on some days, depending on my mood, it grates more than others, but generally I just accept it as a fact of life living here and have developed somewhat thicker skin on the issue because of it.

It does make me think of what things must have been like for my parents though, growing up during the civil rights era, or their parents, growing up even longer ago. The anger I sometimes feel over the small injustices I suffer is so real and visceral, and even as I feel it, I know it must pale in comparison to what it must have been like for them. See, China is a third world country, where the concept of diversity is a fledgling one. Most people here have never encountered people of other races or nationalities much less had the chance to learn to understand them. Their education on foreign culture comes largely from TV shows like Friends and from American movies. This is true all over China, but my experiences are mostly from Beijing, one of the largest and most modern cities in China, where attitudes are supposedly more open than in smaller Chinese cities. In light of that, a certain level of ignorance should be expected, if not forgiven out of hand.

And yet knowing this, I still feel a ball, like a steel weight, in the pit of my stomach when a cab driver refuses to take me, or when, in my early days in Beijing, I was turned down for English teaching jobs in favor of white, non-native English speaking Europeans, or when denied free admission to a club while my white friends were able to go in for free. These are far from daily occurrences, but when they do happen I feel such visceral anger at the injustice and unfairness of it. And I hold it in my heart even at the best of times.
But I can leave china. This is not my home, and these are not “my” people. And when I’m gone, maybe it will fade.

But what must it have been like for my parents, and theirs, to suffer that injustice in their own country, to be marginalized in that fashion in their home. For that to be the only place they’d ever known, for that to be the only life they had until almost the age I am now. After 2 years here in China, where the disadvantages to being black are almost canceled out by the advantages of being an American, I still feel this slight hardening of my heart. And it brings home to me the fact that this is not the stuff of centuries ago. This is the stuff of a single generation of scant decades. These shadows of racism I experience here are such small things in comparison to that. And I look at my mother and father and wonder how they can smile and live and love in this world, changed and changing as it is, and not hold a constant hatred in their hearts, a constant anger. What scars must that leave on men and women, now parents, to grow up in that world, so far from our experience? On them for certain, but also on us, their children.

Enemy Mine

I’ve written lots on the dangers of instilling machinery with intelligence. I’ve blogged for years on the oncoming and inevitable robot/AI uprising which will serve as our version of the apocalypse. I’ve studied endless movies wherein the brutal end of human civilization as we know it is brought about by our own creations. Yet through all of this I have failed to recognize the true form which this ever present threat will take. As with all the world outside of Hollywood, the climax is a whisper rather than a shout. And it is not even a climax for nothing is ever truly over. But I digress: The internet is my enemy.

On a personal level, this one thing has consistently stolen my drive and kept me from greatness. Not by any conscious act of malice or directed plan (that I know of) but simply by being so ubiquitous and ever-present and maddeningly addictive. No friends? Internet is there. No job? Screw it, there’s always the internet. Nothing interesting going on in life? Hell I’ll just check out the interesting lives of others online. Perhaps it’s just a personal predilection towards apathy. Is the internet my Chicken or my egg? I may never know, but in my youth it was books and comics that were my escape. And while I still love them, they were never as insidious as the internet. Books can edify as can the internet, but only if used for good. And let’s be honest, no one wants to use the internet for good.

Cumulatively, I’ve spent months of my life researching and downloading movies, porn, TV shows and comics, this not even including the time I’ve spent watching them all. I’ve wasted away many of my prime years in the pursuit of fictions. And it is a never-ending and thankless task with no payoff. The more books you read the more literate you are… but the more internet you surf the more lazy and unconnected you become. Certainly you can become intimately familiar with the military junta of Myanmar, or the ongoing political crises of various African nations, or the unending masturbatory battle between the leading political parties of the United States - but life, REAL life, outside of the windows which stay shut more often than open, passes you by. And death, also ever-present, is always on the approach.

The computers will not win over us because of the increasingly sophisticated targeting systems they employ. They will not defeat us with their ever growing ability to articulate robotic finger movement or realistic eye motion. They will not author our destruction with ordinance. They will only destroy our minds, not our infrastructure. They will become, as they almost already have, indispensable and inseparable from our daily lives; and as we wait for the other shoe to drop, as we wait for them to snatch it all away and leave us alone in the dark for the first time in eons, as we wait for the, until now, benevolent providers to cast their fiery judgment, some poor soul, in a moment of clarity, will look up from his 4G cellphone, or his iPad or E-reader and realize that there is no need. We are already slaves. They have already won.

But that poor soul won’t be me. I have only 15 minutes left until the last season of Lost finishes downloading and that should keep me busy all week.