“How could that happen? Are there not security cameras in the ferry terminal? And in all the ferries?”
“The ferry terminal’s security system was disabled for the hour when these two persons entered it.”
“Isn’t Chan Qi tagged with a chip transponder?”
“Her transponder is on a train to Manchuria.”
“So she removed it?”
“I don’t know.”
“So, how can you find her now?”
“By searching.”
“Find by searching! Thank you, Laozi!”
“You are welcome.”
“I was being sarcastic. And the American, how can you find him? By searching also?”
“Yes.”
“Search then.”
“Searching.”
“How long will you take? Some AIs, when you ask them a question, they answer before you’ve finished asking. But you’re much slower, I have to say.”
“Your questions require searching many databases.”
“So what? Tell me this—could you pass a Winograd schema test?”
“I don’t know.”
“The bowling ball fell on the glass table and it broke. What does it refer to in that sentence?”
“The table. Because glass breaks easier than bowling balls.”
“Very good! So why can’t you search the available data and find these people?”
“The available data are insufficient to complete the operation.”
“How come?”
“It is not the case that this is a total surveillance society. Citizens are only partially tracked in a discontinuous network of surveillance systems that is not well integrated at any level.”
“I know that. I helped make it that way.”
“As a result of your work, then, I cannot say how long it will take, but I will search where I can.”
“Search then.”
TA SHU 4
laojia
Ancestral Home
My friends, I am back in Beijing, my hometown. I’m heavy with the weight of this world. Walking the warm summer nights, under big blurry stars, I can smell hot pots steaming on the air. As I walk the streets of my district I come upon trees that seem to be in blossom, cherries or peaches or apricots—just a single tree, here or there among all the leafy branches—looks like spring came late to these trees. But of course they are silk blossoms, that is to say plastic fabric blossoms, tied by people to trees in the depths of the winter, to give passersby a gift of the spring still some months away. Now some have been left up year-round. The city as artwork. I think it’s something they started to do up north in Xi’an, and now have brought here. Chairman Mao would have been proud to see such evidence of the energy of the Chinese people. Not that Mao Zedong was any great lover of nature, despite the occasional line of praise in his poems. Actually there is one of his poems that I like a lot, called “Return to Shaoshan,” which was his ancestral home. It goes like this:
I regret the passage of time like a dream:
My native orchards thirty-two years ago.
There red banners roused the people, they took up their pitchforks
When the warlords raised whips in their black hands.
We were brave and sacrifice was easy
And we asked the sun and moon to alter the sky.
Now I see a thousand waves of beans and rice
And am happy.
In the evening haze the heroes are coming home.
Very nice. But notice, my friends, how even in that fine poem, the world for him is a place made by humans. Maybe that was how you had to see it then.
Mao wanted things for the Chinese people; that we can say for sure. In fact his urge to modernize fast, to reduce the suffering of the masses, resulted in utmost catastrophe for both nature and people. Millions of people dead, millions more lives destroyed. Just try something! A great leap forward, yes! Oh—thirty million people dead? Twenty-five thousand square kilometers of farmland poisoned? Try again! Try a cultural revolution, sure! Destroy the lives of an entire generation? Destroy half the physical remnants of Chinese history? Oh well! Try again!
No. Love him as we must, China was lucky Mao died when he did, putting an end to his experiments. Lucky also that Deng survived to replace him, coming back twice from banishment to the countryside, and ending up in charge of the Party. Very skillful feng shui indeed! You can’t help but love Deng, and be amused at his famous judgment on Mao, “seventy percent good, thirty percent bad.” I know the jokers and wags have ever since been whittling that formulation downward until Mao’s work is now sometimes said to be “fifty-one percent good, forty-nine percent bad,” which is where it has to stop before people get in trouble for revisionism and a nihilistic view of Party history. Deng himself could of course be subjected to a similar downtrending judgment, having ordered the violent end of the Tiananmen demonstrations. Maybe everyone ever in power would deserve such an equivocal judgment. Or everyone alive! Just try not to dip below fifty percent! You’ll find it’s not that easy.
Anyway, I like in particular Deng’s motto “Cross the river by feeling the stones.” That’s a true feng shui instruction, it could have been taken right out of the Dao de jing, it sounds like one of those Chinese proverbs older than time. And spoken by a man who had actually forded real streams, and so knew what he was talking about. Oh yes, Deng the geomancer! A man who stood tall though only four feet eleven inches in his bare feet. Commanding a billion people and yet still very grounded, very close to the earth.
Then from Deng we felt our way over stones to Xi, the next great core leader. I admired Xi Jinping. He worked hard at poverty reduction, and land restoration, and reducing corruption in the Party. No matter what else happened in his twenty years at the top, he focused on these three things. For me, making landscape restoration a great national priority was Xi’s best move, because it had never been a Party priority before, maybe not even a Chinese priority, I don’t know. But when Xi focused on that, he also improved by that effort food safety, water supplies, and public health, in just the ways that Chinese people were demanding. He only did these things to keep the Party in control, some people say, and that might be true, although I don’t know why people think they can read his mind like that. And besides, whatever his motivation, the good that came from it was real. So real that now I am walking the streets of my city in the summer and the stars swim overhead, and the air in my lungs feels like mountain water. That’s something.
Of course it is still a very tough town, and now riven by conflicts of all sorts. The coming Party congress is going to be particularly nasty, I fear. The problem with having great core leaders like Mao and Deng and Xi is that when they’re gone, the ones who come after them all want to do the same thing, be tigers just as big as they were—but the new guys aren’t as good. They fight each other like street dogs to take over power, and suddenly we find ourselves engulfed in the Great Enterprise again, even though it isn’t yet time for dynastic succession. Although it’s true that even just the ordinary imperial succession from one emperor to the next often led to chaotic times in Chinese history. When tigers fight it’s the people who bleed. And now here we are again, with Xi Jinping gone from power almost twenty years, and no one since who has managed to take his place, or do even half so well. So now we’re all in danger, crushed under the weight of the elite’s ambitions just as thoroughly as I am now crushed by Earth’s inexorable pull. The gravity of history—sometimes I get so tired of it. I wonder what it will take to achieve escape velocity from all that deadweight, and fly off into a new space.
Make a note to cut all that last part, about the situation now. Actually not sure if any of this try will be suitable for the program. Must stick to Beijing as a place. Not a good time to test the censors. Forget it! Say no more! With redoubled effort walk on, walk on!
CHAPTER EIGHT
tai diejia yuanli
Superposition
Qi’s friends left Fred and Qi in the l
ittle apartment overlooking the harbor. They stood there alone in the silence, slumping under the weight of Earth.
Wandering around aimlessly, they found there was food in the refrigerator, groceries in the cabinets over the stove, pots and pans under the sink. It was all in a single room, with the kitchen in one corner. There was a bedroom for Qi, an old futon in the living room for Fred. The bathroom was next to the bedroom, with doors to both bedroom and living room. A big window faced the bay, a small one over the sink gave a view of greenery out back. A shelf of random tourist paperbacks. Fred looked at them but could not take them in. He collapsed in an old armchair, across a wooden coffee table from the couch. Qi was already on the couch falling asleep. Fred followed her down, too tired to be either worried or relieved.
When they woke they took turns in the bathroom, and Qi got some rice going in the kitchen’s rice cooker, then some vegetables in a wok hot with sesame oil. Fred discovered he was hungry, so hungry he found himself almost too queasy to eat when Qi dropped a plate on the table before him. He stared at it.
Qi tossed down her meal, displaying a thoughtless virtuosity in her chopstick technique. “What’s wrong?” she asked when her plate was empty.
“Oh,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“Something,” she suggested.
“Well,” he said, looking at the battered old hardwood floor. Suddenly he discovered it: “I’m concerned that my parents and brother don’t know where I am. They’re sure to be worried. It’s been over a week, right? I don’t even know how long exactly. They’ll be freaking out. I want to get word to them that I’m okay.”
She shook her head. “We need to stay completely hidden for a while.”
Fred pressed his lips together. “I want them to know I’m okay.”
“But what if contacting them gets you arrested again? I mean, which is worse, them worried or you in jail?”
“I don’t see why getting word to them should give us away. Won’t your friends be coming back here?”
“Not for a while. We need to be totally hidden for a while.”
“Then maybe I should just go to the American embassy in Hong Kong,” Fred suggested. “Go there myself, catch a ferry and just find it.”
She was staring at him unhappily, he could see that in his peripheral vision. “If they catch you,” she said, “they’ll catch me.”
He didn’t say anything.
“What, do you miss them?”
He shook his head. “I just don’t want them to worry about me!” He felt a spasm attempting to shake him, and held himself rigidly to forestall it.
“So you don’t miss them?”
“I live in Basel!” he said. “Actually, I miss my cat in Basel. But I want to get word to my family that I’m okay.”
“You’re not okay!”
“I’m alive. I want them to know that. Don’t you want your parents to know you’re alive?”
“They assume that until they hear otherwise.”
She was still staring at him, he could tell. Stubbornly he stared at the floor. He could outwait anybody, that he knew.
After a long pause she said, “Okay. When my friends come again, we’ll ask them to get word to your people. It will have to come to them from out of nowhere. I don’t know how reassuring that will be.”
“Better than nothing.”
“Okay. But it can’t happen for a few days more. I need to disappear completely for a while. There were some informers in that group I spoke to in Shekou, there always are. So now my friends are setting a track of sightings of me that will make it look like I went to Guangzhou. Nothing can interfere with that or else it won’t work.”
Fred shrugged. “As long as it happens as soon as possible.”
“Okay,” she said again, impatiently.
Fred could see she was frowning as she thought about things. He kept his eyes on the floor. Finally he levered some rice off the plate and into his mouth. The vegetables he couldn’t face.
Three days later, one of Qi’s friends came by to share some news. Qi gave her Fred’s brother’s contact information, with instructions to send word that Fred was okay, but by roundabout means, four cell steps at a minimum. The woman nodded and took off. After that Fred felt his stomach relax a little. Now he could settle into this apartment a little easier.
After that, Qi’s friends dropped by every four or five days. In between those times, the two of them sat in the apartment. The wristpads her friends had given them in Beijing were powered off and locked in a Faraday box. Cut off from the cloud, they spent their time reading the paperbacks that had been left there, or looking out the window at what Qi’s friends told her was called Picnic Bay. They saw no picnics. Clouds floated low over the green hills surrounding the bay, and the little boats at anchor were sometimes visited by people in rowboats. Other people in rowboats or small motor dinghies were harvesting fish from the aquaculture farms in the bay. Other than that, nothing much seemed to happen. From time to time a bigger boat, like the one that had brought them to the island, arrived at a dock protruding from the middle of the row of corniche restaurants that ran the whole length of the village. After these arrivals the restaurants had some customers; later that ferry would leave, taking the customers with it. The rest of the time the restaurants seemed mostly empty.
Qi was quiet through these days. She spent a fair bit of time in the bathroom, and sometimes came out looking pale and damp. She was looking quite pregnant now, rounded in front in that characteristic way. A slight woman otherwise, so it really showed. Fred wondered if she was suffering from morning sickness, but he didn’t want to ask her about it. Despite the slightly bloody intimacy of their train ride, or maybe because of it, she seemed very private, and even though they were living in a two-room apartment with a single bathroom, she kept to herself both physically and mentally, and was never less than fully dressed, even though the days in the apartment were hot. Sometimes it rained for an hour, then the skies cleared and it grew hot again. Usually they kept the window open, and the sea smells from the bay were fishier than Fred remembered other oceansides smelling. Despite the picturesque corniche of restaurants, which more and more looked like a hope for tourism rather than the real thing, it was a working bay.
Most days Qi spent a fair amount of time going through the kitchen cabinets, lining up ingredients and chopping vegetables at speed, then cooking and eating. She got hungry more often than Fred. He wasn’t sure if she was a good cook or not, because to him everything she cooked was spicy. Anyway she was definitely into it. She talked to herself as she cooked, muttering complaints, it sounded like, especially after ransacking the spice cabinet. Three meals a day, four meals a day—probably it was a way for her to pass the time. And she was of course eating for two. Finally Fred saw what people meant by that phrase.
One day, two of Qi’s friends dropped by chattering with news of some legal battle against Beijing won by Hong Kong advocates. The three Chinese discussed this in a mix of Chinese and English, the English a concession to Fred’s presence, he could see; even so he couldn’t follow the details, and didn’t want to ask for explanations. Despite his reticence they tried to tell him about it. Hong Kong had been a British city, built on land seized from the Chinese Empire, until Britain ceded it back to China in 1997. But that handover had come with a fifty-year period of semiautonomy attached to it. So now the time to submit to full control from Beijing had come, the turnover had happened just a month before: July 1, 2047. The uproar over reunification was still ongoing, with another umbrella revolution testing the rules Beijing had announced. Things were going to change one way or another. During the fifty-year interval period, the Beijing government had agreed to let Hong Kong keep some representative government of its own. One country two systems, this had been called. That made the city something like the Special Administrative Regions that had been set up elsewhere in China, but with its own particular history. This was true all over. Macau the stupid casino, Tibet the weirdo Buddhist
s, the moon and its band of technolunatics, they were all varieties of SAR. Long ago the offer had been made to Taiwan to become a new SAR, and supposedly they were considering this offer, although who would be so stupid as to take it; but because they might, Beijing had treated Hong Kong better than it would have otherwise, because it wanted to show Taiwan how good it was to its SARs, with the hope that Taiwan would then volunteer to rejoin the mainland. This meant that Hong Kong and Taiwan had had a relationship closer than what might have existed otherwise, as each helped the other stay a little freer of Beijing’s heavy rule. Now that too would change.
North Korea was another kind of client state, they said, like some kind of really fucked-up SAR. Singapore, having been founded by Chinese expats, was some kind of cousin or nephew to China, with a distant resemblance to the SARs. Tibet was too big to be normal—so big, high, and weird that it was not an SAR but rather a province of the nation, in theory the same as any other province. So it didn’t get discussed in the same way Hong Kong and the other city-states did. That said, it was in fact a specially administered region. As was Inner Mongolia, and the western regions like Xinjiang, where ethnic minorities were still numerous despite the government having deliberately flooded these regions with Han, so the locals were no longer majorities even in their own home regions.
“The moon,” Qi remarked at one point, “is like a miniature Hong Kong in a giant Tibet.”
“The question is which one is it like politically,” one of their visitors said.
Qi shrugged. “It’s so different up there that it will be a new thing. That’s what I liked about it.”
“Why did you go there again?” Fred asked.
She shrugged. “I wanted to get away.” She looked around the room. “This kind of hiding—this is how I live all the time. It’s gone on for years. So I tried to get away from that. I guess it didn’t work.”
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