Wherever you go, here you are
Tonight I watched the new Matrix (黑客帝国—hei4 ke4 di4 guo2—black guest [or “hacker”] empire] movie in a theater near campus. In order to premiere it at the same time here as elsewhere, it was released in English with Chinese subtitles, which I didn’t mind at all. Next week they’ll show a version dubbed in Chinese, presumably hoping some people will go twice. It was quite expensive, at 80 kuai a ticket (about $10).
Because of arrangements we made for our long trip last Spring and things I learned, it’s amazing to me how easy it is to keep one foot in the world at home. When I’m on campus at BNU, I can, if I like,
- listen to the local UIUC NPR affiliate
- connect to my office computer and through it to any UIUC resources
- get and pay any bills that come in, thanks to paytrust
- find an optometrist covered under the UIUC health plan for my daughter in Massachusetts
- and, of course, get more email than I’d like
The connection is slow and sometimes unreliable, but not qualitatively different from life at home.
So it’s very easy to have one foot in that world, and then be disoriented when I go out and deal with the very different one in which I physically reside at the moment. I was thinking about this biking home from seeing the Matrix, with the traffic unusually intricate due to the snow and ice and fallen tree limbs, plus the usual chaos of Beijing traffic. Taking a cellphone call from my colleague Fang Ge added to the mix, although at least no one sent me an SMS text message (it still amazes me to see people biking along and typing SMS messages into their cell phones).
It’s amazing in part because I still remember desparately trying to connect via a modem in a colleague’s brother’s house (who had a phone you could make international calls on) in order to get a 300 byte file we needed to run an experiment. It took several expensive tries to connect, because the modem was timing out before it dropped the connection speed low enough to make a connection.
Like the Matrix movie, this communication technology raises questions about what it means to be somewhere.