b-side

Have you used an older Windows PC running, say, Windows XP or 2000 before? You might remember that you had to use an “installer” .exe program to install a piece of software. Larger programs sometimes took hours to install. You absolutely must not disturb the process. One time I did, and the program left zombie footprints all over my disk drive that was almost impossible to clean out. Files would be littered everywhere but the program would only throw errors if you tried to start it. Of course, because the installation wasn’t done. There was no way to “uninstall” it either because, well, the “uninstaller” wasn’t compiled yet.

I have two incomplete installations in my brain. The Chinese language. And the English language.

It first occurred to me that my confidence in my mother tongue was no longer justified when I visited China after spending my first four years in California. There were expressions I knew perfectly how to articulate, and as I fluently layered one sentence upon another, I’d suddenly hit a nasty speed bump, a hit of silence that gives me a small identity crisis every time. The word lacked a Chinese equivalent. Not because it was untranslatable, but I just never learned that concept before I moved to the states.

The fourteenth year is a formative one, and so are the years that come after. My Chinese language installation was abruptly stopped. And in its place, a completely different language resumed its role, but did not supplant it completely.

People looked at me aghast when I didn’t know something that a six-year-old American kid does. “What kind of childhood did you have?” Their eyes were more honest. “One where I can’t even write with Chinese characters, because some of those names only existed in a dwindling dialect.”

It did not get better either. Year after year, I accumulated more knowledge and expressions in the English language, without ever knowing the equivalents in Chinese. To date, I still can’t pair up the names of fish I eat even though I’m familiar with all of the individual words. Is “catfish” 鳕鱼 or 鲈鱼? I don’t know, but I’ve eaten all of them and am confident that it’s not “猫鱼”. Last week, I sent out calendar invitations as a 28-year-old adult titled “greet and meet.” If Kelsey didn’t point it out, I’d probably gone for another ten years using it while people politely ignore my odd expressions.

I started learning English with English a few years after settling down here. It was a big linguistic milestone for me. Instead of relying on translations, it freed me from Chinese constructs and lit up a new circuit of thinking. But as the two languages grew apart, I got farther and farther away from the culture that I used to breathe like air. If I were a piece of software, I’d no longer be backward compatible.

How do I say “density” or “gender-neutral bathroom” or “cross-functional collaboration”? I don’t know. Is “坦率” the same thing as “forthcoming”? Sounds like it. While I know that “底片” is “film negative,” I’m not sure how to say “film advance lever.”

I continue to struggle to explain my life in front of my relatives. But hopefully, word by word, I’ll painstakingly stitch the two worlds back together one day.

From Wired last week:

I want to quit. I need to quit. But I also feel like I should be getting stuff done, even in my entertainment, and if I abandon a game before I’m finished with the story, it’s lost time, a failure. What do I have to show for the hundred hours of my life I’ve already put into this?

Sometimes It’s OK to Give Up – Wired

It’s cute that Wired sometimes just publishes articles like this. Relatable, anecdotal, but still on brand. I don’t know if you’ve played or finished The Breath of The Wild. 120 hours later, I still haven’t finished it. And I haven’t touched it for 2 years. But my reason is completely different.

Sure, I get bored of games easily. Beside a short list of them, most of them never interested me enough for a second visit. But it’s not that I don’t enjoy games that I find interesting. I play Splatoon with my friends every other week. I finished 80 hours of Fire Emblem: Awakening during my summer internship commute. I played more rounds of Age of Empire then I can remember. It’s relaxing, rejuvenating, and I almost never regret it. But yet, I never seem to want to play games when I have free time unless it’s a prearranged social event. And even when I get started by myself, it’s super easy for me to fall out of it.

Friends around me talk about their childhood binges of various Pokemon games. I was allowed to play games on the PC for one hour a day on the weekends. And the never-ending and overly reactive crusade in China against gaming addiction also made me instinctively distance myself from such “bad influences.” Gaming just wasn’t a super big part of my childhood, for cost reasons as well.

I’m not sure if those are the reasons.

BotW is the longest I’ve ever played of any game. It was so good that I actually felt hooked for three days. And interested for a few more months. I liked it so much that I actually kept delaying the main story line. And now I just feel guilty for not playing it. Not because “I don’t feel a sense of accomplishment” or “I’ve already sunk so many hours into it,” but rather, it’s such a beautiful piece of narrative art that it’d be a waste if I didn’t appreciate all of it.

It’s ok to give up, for sure. I think I’ve practically given up on finishing BotW.

But I still feel guilty. And I’m not entirely sure why I just don’t feel like picking up the controller nowadays.

Beijing launches campaign against obsequious behavior by requiring party cadres to study leader’s remarks on ‘formalism and bureaucratism’

Xi Jinping’s Eager-to-Please Bureaucrats Snarl His China Plans

I highly encourage you to speed read through this piece on WSJ. But if you don’t, the summary is: centralization of power causes every cadre to be accountable in one direction: the top. And when everybody is trying their best to appease their bosses, their work becomes more detached from the actual people they serve.

One thing I’ll insert here that is not a part of this WSJ piece: I think the key catalyst of this ossification is reduced attention span. In a decentralized system, even the highest officials are only accountable for a part of the whole. In China’s case, everything goes up to Xi. And under him, everything in each division goes up to their respective highest officials and nobody else. At any point in this hierarchy, information flows through a single, narrow tunnel, as opposed to many tunnels in all directions in a decentralized system. So the content of that information has to be highly abstracted as bandwidth is reduced. Home visits become stamps of trip completions. Inspection reports become lists of scores. That’s the only way to centralize power without making the planet spin slower: delegate, and rely on abstraction.

I remember that in middle school, when there’s a provincial inspection of teaching quality, we’d rehearse a scripted 50-minute class over and over until we can perform perfectly in front of the officials. This might be unimaginable for some: 40 or so students, each have their own line, acting as if they were in a real class. Everything from when and who would raise their hands and what questions they would ask, to what they’d write on the blackboard and what “conclusions” and “insights” they would draw, were completely rehearsed. The most ridiculous part was that for each question that my teacher asked, there were designated “fake hand raisers” to make sure that students looked curious and eager to participate, but they were never called to answer because, of course, they didn’t have the line.

And we nailed it in front of groups of important people. Perfectly. And my teacher won some award or something. But what the fuck did we learn?

The most ironic thing about this whole farce was that everybody watching it knew that this was rehearsed. They had to. There’s no way a thirteen-year-old could answer some philosophical question with the poetic elegance of 鲁迅 (lǔ xùn), coherently without pauses or fillers. I suppose that they could now report happily to the central overseers about how great the teachers in their provinces could teach.

Even more ironic: for a class to participate in one of these was a privilege. Less prestigious schools or classes not designated as top-performers didn’t get to do this. After all, why embarrassing yourself in front of your boss with “inferior” results right? Oh I don’t even want to get into the amount of infighting among ourselves. Who got to stand up and say the line, whose group got to make the final presentation. Everything indicated how much the teacher liked you and how much power you held. Politics, at 13, that’s what I learned.

Bitter anecdote aside, it feels to me that centralization pushes the work of information filtering and processing downward in a hierarchy. And when that hierarchy’s scope increases and centralization calcifies, the lower you’re in the hierarchy, the less substance your work actually is.

Anyway, time to go to work. There’s an important presentation tomorrow.