Karen S Zhang

Economists foresee that the future trajectory of the stock market will follow the trajectory of confirmed COVID-19 cases. They have an inverse relationship. The more cases of coronavirus, the poorer the stock market will perform. Environmentalists see the same inverse relationship between human activities and the health of the Planet. Roughly speaking, the more pollution caused by social and business interactions in the Anthropocene, our present geological age of man, the less healthy the Planet. COVID-19 is a test run for humanity to survive in a virtual-dependent world, e-clinic, e-grocer, e-library, e-market, e-school, e-office, e-recital, e-trade, e-cinema, as many e- affixes you can think of.

When China was at the brunt of the COVID-19 outbreak in January, all factories and businesses in the country were closed by law to curb the spread of coronavirus. Chinese people had celebrated one of the quietest and scariest, if not the quietest and scariest, Chinese New Year at home for two months. Mass transportation was suspended or service hours were reduced in many cities. Communities including residences and businesses shut their doors to returning migrant workers after the biggest traditional holiday for fear they would bring infectious disease. So production lines were delayed to resume until early March. Wall Street tumbled partly because the Chinese suppliers to big American firms couldn’t operate their machines and Chinese stores of multinationals were vacant under stringent nationwide disease control measures.

However, the temporary halt of supply chains and retail store traffic brought good news with decreases in nitrogen dioxide over China, according to the satellite data maps from NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). Nitrogen dioxide primarily gets in the air from the burning of fuels and contributes to the formation of acid rain and ground-level ozone. (See image above)

On the one hand, economists worried as the COVID-19 outbreak in China in early February drove global oil prices down from $55 a barrel to $50 (the prices fell even further in mid-March to below $30 for the first time since 2016). The drop was the result of an energy pricing tug-of-war among the US, Russia and OPEC, a multinational group of oil producers led by Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, environmentalists cheered. The change of color on the satellite data maps showed airborne nitrogen dioxide drop from high-density crimson red to mean-density azure blue. China’s sharp reduction in energy demand in response to the government’s lockdown measures cut the country’s carbon emissions by about 100 million metric tons over two weeks in mid-February, marking the first decline in emissions in three years.

A similar nitrogen dioxide emissions drop was detected over Italy after the country began lockdown on March 8. You can see the gradual change of color in the ESA animation video.

Social media unleashed the wow factor after the surprising discovery that the murky canals in lockdown Venice looked clearer; live fish were visible in the water below. The mass social distancing and reduction of tourists and traffic in Italy definitely have contributed to the temporary good health of the country’s emissions—if the pandemic is infectious globally, so is the rise of greenhouse gas emissions as a result of the free trade and freedom of movement that the West values most.

Biologists and environmental scientists are hotly debating rewilding to reintroduce once-lost keystone plants and animal species to restore our nature. The acceleration of human activities such as population growth and economic development after 1945 at the cost of natural capital are to blame for that lost nature. Humanity is paying a heavy price for the COVID-19 pandemic which originated from humans trading in wildlife, but which may lead to an unexpected rewilding in this quieter spring.

In ancient times, our forebears, without the knowledge of science, believed infectious diseases were an omen of the wrath of God. We know better now. But suppose the COVID-19 outbreak is an unexpected godsend for humanity to learn from the clear water with fish in Venice, the chirping birds in China, and the lonely but abundant cherry blossoms at the Tidal Basin in Washington DC. They are somehow surviving, even flourishing during COVID-19. But what if global warming threatens them as well as costs lives and economic losses on the scale of COVID-19 or greater? Will humanity learn the lessons of COVID-19 and prepare to prevent and cope with the climate crises of the future?    

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I was dumbfounded at receiving a text message from my wireless carrier in late March. It read: “We have added 15 GB of data to your plan at NO CHARGE for use from 3.25-4.30. No action is needed.”

Fifteen gigabytes of data is not a small number to me, considering my phone data plan has only one gigabyte monthly. So my first reaction was in disbelief. I thought it was some scam or a sweet doughnut fallen from the sky to entice me to buy a new product. I have no faith in my wireless carrier yet.

I read the text message a couple more times. Ok, the capitalized “NO CHARGE” finally sinks in. But I’m still skeptical—after all, why does my phone carrier all of a sudden become so nice to me? What’s the intention behind it? My cynical Chinese-consumer mind has sounded an alarm: there is no free lunch in this world. I’m well-trained in China to question before I sign up for anything to avoid buying counterfeit goods or paying a high price for them.

I learn that other US phone carriers have made efforts in removing data caps to keep customers connected during this uncertain and difficult time of COVID-19. Nice move. I wish I could roll over my unused data to the following months. But there is no such perk in my phone plan.

When I tell my Chinese friends about my one-gigabyte monthly data plan in the US, they’re dismissive and proud to compare mine with their data plans which are in double-or-three digit gigabytes. They tease me that if I visit them in China, they can give some of their data to me through a mobile hotspot with no string attached. What a philanthropic gesture!

However, I can’t offer the reciprocal favor to my friends if they visit me in America. Data, data, data—companies love them so they can optimize their products based on customers’ data. Digital device users can’t live without data, especially now when we’re practicing social distancing and our communications in the virtual world are so reliant on data. But I don’t see there’s any price competition in the near future for data plans provided by the US phone carriers. Alas, welcome to capitalism!

Since I don’t go out much, even I do, my main concern is not data but the percentage of battery left on my phone. These days the data-hungry apps on the phone will drain my phone battery as much as my data allowance. The app developers are cunning to get my consumer’s data without notifying me. This is how they do: When an app is updated, the new version is usually upgraded to the developer’s advantage. Notifications and other privacy setting features are set to “on” or “allowed” by default. For those phone users who know little of this setup, they’ve already opened a window of their personal information to data-hungry voyeurs.

To wisely spend my phone battery as well as my meager one gigabyte monthly data allowance, I have to manually turn off the default setting of my apps if I don’t want to be tracked. Upgrading my apps can fix bugs and loopholes of those apps, but the more often I update my apps, the quicker my battery will be used up. To some extent, I find my phone is like an oxygen-deficient patient who needs to carry a portable oxygen concentrator constantly. If only we had new batteries that could regenerate by themselves. If that day arrives, we won’t see so much hazardous e-waste dumped in the landfill.

Whether it’s battery or data, I have to marvel at my phone which is so much smarter than me. Without the phone, there won’t be a body to carry a battery and receive data. If I have any questions, I just type my questions on my phone, or even just ask my phone with simple questions, the phone will talk back to me. I’m thinking about what sort of facial expression our great Albert Einstein would put on his tongue-sticking face if a smartphone talks to him about his discovery of mass-energy equivalence, the famous formula E=MC2. Since I can’t roll over my data for future months, I have to think hard how to use up the additional 15 GB of data before expiry and also without draining too much of my phone battery. Data, battery, and my smarter-than-me phone, they have made the Internet penetrating into my life during COVID-19 much deeper.  

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We’re only at a quarter away from the beginning of 2020—the last year of a decade. I’m confident that the word “coronavirus (COVID-19)” is very likely to be selected for “The Word of the Year for 2020.” The global impact of this pandemic is far and deep on our life physically, mentally, socially, economically, environmentally and even politically.

Since the outbreak was first reported in China last December, I’ve written about COVID-19 and its related subjects twice. (See “Wuhan Pneumonia” and “On Different Kind of Guns”) Not because COVID-19 is a disease permeating our media airwaves now, but because even when we get through this difficult time, our worldview will be forever distorted as a result of the dramatic development of this piece of human history.

Linguistically, the “stay at home” order in the English world (in German: #bleibzuhause / in French: #resterchezsoi) implies self compliance to distance oneself from other human beings who are not cohabiters under the same roof. In other words, social distancing does not apply to cohabitation, including our pets. Humans are social animals. That explains why animal shelters across the US are reporting upticks in fostering pets during the fallout of COVID-19.

I see the “stay at home” order in the West as a relaxed version of house arrest. Like those in Spain, pet owners in France are allowed to walk their dogs in their immediate neighborhood. Dog-walking even becomes a spontaneous money-making business in lockdown Spain—dogs are for rent in local classifieds sites just to give bored humans an excuse to get out of their confinement. A social media post has sparked viral humor that a dog was borrowed by neighbors and was taken out 38 times in one day.  

China also implemented a “stay at home” order (in Chinese: 强制隔离, literally means “coercive isolation”) at the onset of COVID-19 in January. The top-down mandate was gradually relaxed in March as the country sees the infected COVID-19 cases declining. The degree of law enforcement in China then could be compared to, more or less, house arrest. House arrest is a legal terminology to describe the state of being kept as a prisoner in one’s own house. Chinese governments, from central to local levels, are serious about containing the infectious disease by all means. Regulations, fines, imprisonment, revocation and shame and blame, every measure you can think of has taken effect.

In my opinion, quarantine is a medical synonym for house arrest. For centuries, the rules of quarantine are unchanged, so is the public consensus about which contagious disease is a public health crisis. People have to stop the infections as quickly as possible through isolation, perhaps even solitary confinement. A recent article by AP about how Croatia’s Dubrovnik applied ancient quarantine measures in the 14th century has piqued my linguistic interest in the etymology of quarantine.

In the 14^th century in Dubrovnik, an UNESCO heritage site in Croatia, travelers and tradesmen coming from regions affected with leprosy, plague or other diseases had to stay at least 20 days in isolation. The time limit was extended to 40 days, or “quaranta” in Italian, hence, giving the practice its future name.

The Venetian policy (first enforced in 1377) required keeping ships from plague-stricken countries waiting off its port for 40 days to assure that no latent cases were aboard. Also, earlier in English, the word “quarantine” meant “period of 40 days in which a widow has the right to remain in her dead husband’s house” (1520s), and, as quarentyne (15c.), “desert in which Christ fasted for 40 days,” from Latin quadraginta “forty.”      

So back to modern days, if we are asked to “stay at home” for 15 days at least in response to curbing the spread of COVID-19, this order is much less draconian than our ancestors’ quarantine rules. The ordeal is not yet ended—both for now as we are looking around the four walls of our comfortable space of home (think about those homeless, though) and for the future as we ponder the lesson we learned from this world war of public health in the 21^st century.

Accompanied with the German song of “stay at home,” I sympathize with COVID-19 victims and their loved ones. I’m grateful for the fighters from all walks of life in the frontline against the pandemic. Perhaps, COVID-19 is forcing humanity to respond, reflect and review what we deem as “normal practices” and “safe systems” are no longer working effectively. At least on my part, COVID-19 will give me a lot to think about linguistically.       

“If you want to do a virtual tour of Croatia’s Dubrovnik, click here for Lonely Planet’s visual sensation and more.

(Continue Part I)   

In French’s nearly all of the 270-page manuscript of China’s Second Continent, I relate to every personal account. French’s interviewees in nonfiction are like characters in fiction. I prefer calling them characters anyway. So every character comes alive when they speak. One thing I notice is unlike the coolies and poor-stricken laborers in the 20^th century who traveled across the sea from China to Southeast Asia and North America, the Chinese migrants to Africa in the turn of the 21^st century worked either with a state-owned enterprise or as the first batch of college grads with a foreign language major. In other words, the Chinese in Africa were not illiterate. They received some education at home. They might not speak a foreign language but they were party loyalists for sure.

I was still young when China sent tens of millions of laborers abroad in the 1990s. Many of them went to the developing countries in Central Asia, Africa, South America, you name it; or to the developed countries in the EU and North America where there was a shortage of professionals in such fields as nursing and a shortage of others to do dirty, manual labor jobs. And most important, where there were Chinese state-funded projects abroad, there were Chinese workers.  

As French wrote, “Chinese had been coming here [Zambia] in substantial numbers since the 1990s, earlier than to almost any other country on the continent. By now [as of the writing of the book] they numbered 100,000 or so by some estimates, making them one of China’s biggest migrant communities in Africa.”

Economic migration is a norm in the 21^st century. During the same time, tens of thousands of African traders resided in China. Guangzhou was one of the biggest African hubs in the country. Before my literary exposure to Africa, my understanding of Africa was through these foreigners in my hometown.

In his book, French tries to strike a balance between the way the Chinese opportunists see Africa and how Africans see the Chinese in Africa. The negativity about the Chinese influence in Africa is prevalent throughout the book. I find it ironic that the Africans in the book blame the Chinese for local problems, likewise, the Chinese back at home in Guangzhou, in particular, also blame the African traders for the city’s social problems.

But nobody—neither the Africans nor the Chinese—says no to an inexpensive business deal offered by the Chinese to the Africans. Nobody, not even the US or the EU, intervenes or reminds the Africans of the irrevocable trade-off in these deals on their natural resources and people’s wellbeing.  

China is known for tofu-dreg projects—structures that are as flimsy and porous as tofu dregs—at home and now abroad in Africa. The author has mentioned a few poorly-constructed, made-by-Chinese projects in his book. When Wenchuan Earthquake happened in 2008, the Sichuan provincial authorities tried all they could to cover up the tofu-dreg projects that led to thousands of schoolchildren buried under the debris of the poorly-constructed classrooms.

Africa needs a second or a third contractor other than China to compete for projects. Africa needs continental financial benchmarks and regulations on foreign investments and the use of resources. Africa needs more intergovernmental treaties to protect the African consumer and labor rights and safety. Africa needs more local born-and-raised entrepreneurs and business dealers. I’m glad to learn that Rwanda has launched the first “Made in Africa” smartphones to compete against China’s phone monopoly in the market.  

China builds infrastructure in Africa while the US provides medical and education to the African people. I find that these two actors are like the US politics where the Republicans focus on hard power like defense and send more troops abroad, and the Democrats focus on soft power like diplomacy and increase spending on the African poor.

Never fall into the Chinese’s win-win rhetoric. On the one hand, hiring Chinese to work abroad looks like spending abroad, but the workers’ wages are actually part of China’s GDP (This tactic reminds me of the incumbent US President’s shifting official to his hotels and resorts). On the other hand, when the bridges, roads and other infrastructure projects begin making profits, African governments have to pay back China’s loan. It’s still advantageous to China’s balance sheet, not to the debtors.

The Chinese don’t, or in their words, slowly, teach African people skills. The Chinese’s bias about Africans’ intelligence echoes racial bias in the US. When can humanity put down our sunglasses to see one another’s true colors?

To do it right, we need to empower African people with knowledge and education. As a proverb goes, give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. We need more African leaders like Nelson Mandela, Kofi Annan, Abiy Ahmed, Wangari Maathai, Miriam Makeba, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and many more.

I can’t agree more with Ghanaian Albert Osei, one of French’s interviewees. He said, “China’s involvement should help us change the terms of engagement with the West, in order to gain greater equity, more parity. If the West is jealous of China, we should say to them, Train our people and give them a bigger role in your companies. Don’t complain about the Chinese. Help us move up the value chain. Do this, and we will love you.”

No matter if it is an emerging economy like China or the rich world, we are writing our history by our deeds. Historically, we are all in debt to the African people because for many generations we have achieved our prosperity at the cost of their well-being.

Speaking of Africa, I associate it with American travel writer Paul Theroux. His writing about Africa is one of my early exposures to this lesser-known continent. If reading Paul Theroux’s work arouses my curiosity, reading Howard French’s China’s Second Continent hits home.

The full title of the book is China’s Second Continent—How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa. This is not a new book. It was published in 2014 and was French’s 3^rd book. I picked up the book as part of my research for my own book project. This was how I got to know French’s remarkable journalistic repertoire about Africa and China.

As the author wrote, “With two billion Africans, including vastly more people who will have attained middle-class status or better, and over a billion Chinese, whose lives will be much more affluent, much more globalized and deeply involved in every corner of the world, it was possible to imagine the unfolding relationship between China and Africa as one of the most important in the world.”

Former President Barack Obama once said the US-China relationship is the most important bilateral relationship in the 21^st century. If that’s the case, the development of Africa, directly or indirectly, matters for US’s economic growth as well. China is the biggest exporter to the US. And yet, China is hungry for Earth’s finite resources for its supply chains. China is providing goods to its own domestic market with the world’s largest population and to the US and other countries. No way can China meet this gigantic demand without absorbing raw materials from elsewhere.

When the Europeans colonized African countries four hundred years ago, they were doing the same to extract local resources for their own economic growth. Four hundred years later, Chinese opportunists craved the natural resources on African soil—from metals and timber to arable land and fishery—as much as the European colonists in yesteryear. The European colonists gave no damn about the economic and environmental growth of their colonies, neither about the wellbeing of the African people. Instead, they exploited both natural and social capital. The study of the transatlantic slave trade led by Glasgow University will shed more light on the human exploitation during colonialism.

Several times the author writes that the Chinese disagree that their presence in Africa is synonymous with colonialism. In their eyes, the Chinese provide opportunities for them and the Africans by taking on infrastructure projects. It’s a win-win deal as the Chinese believe in French’s book.  

There is no slave trade in China’s economic exploration of Africa. But according to French’s accounts, fewer local workers are hired by the Chinese infrastructure projects; and they receive much lower pay than the Chinese workers. While the Chinese workers get better work safety protection on a metallurgy site, their African counterparts wear near nothing or shoddy materials for protection.

This condition reminds me of an award-winning documentary film, American Factory. In the film, the Chinese workers get the job done fast and in great quantity, and yet, the employer neglects the workers’ safety and well-being. The employer dismisses American workers who form a labor union and fight for labor rights. The operation in Africa is no different, and even worse. I sympathize with those angry African workers and activists.

(To be continued click here)

As seen in above video, Chinese law enforcement is really dead serious about the coronavirus (COVID-19) prevention and containment. If you read Chinese, you’ve probably figured out the exercise in the video is treated as a “counterterrorism drill” as the Chinese characters read in the blue sign.

I know how heightened the security is in every Chinese community, large and small, from residential complexes to public places such as schools, office buildings and banks. Security guards and staffers hold up thermometer guns to test body temperature of every individual at the entrances to these places. One of my friends in China said jokingly that everyone had to be “gunned” (test body temperature) so many times a day, they were about to “gun down” (tired out) from the daily repetition.     

I doubt the US law enforcement will follow suit, especially under the current administration which sends false messages on a daily basis. In hindsight, I’m glad that COVID-19 outbreak did not start in the US. Local US governments are scrambling to prepare as many test kits as possible. The test kit has three components, two of which test for the novel coronavirus and a third for a host of other viruses. In addition, the US needs more thermometer guns in place.

If the US federal government would regard COVID-19 outbreak the way American authorities regard a real-life mass shooting, perhaps the high-ranking officials will not be so careless in handling public information. Almost always, the US law enforcement will lock down a whole community after a hot fire mass shooting. Will authorities take the same precaution for COVID-19? Will they exercise a drill the way China does to prepare for the worst?

Although I wonder if China’s top-down mandate to control COVID-19 will lead to the abuse of law enforcement, I also worry about the Trump Administration’s overly-confident attitude toward uncontained coronavirus precaution.  

To some extent, mismanagement of public health is scarier than political malpractice. Either reason causes the loss of public trust. And yet, the mismanagement of public health can be fatal.

I want to end with a quote by a Chinese interviewee in Howard French’s book, China’s Second Continent. He said, “China is a bit freer now but still not altogether free. You can’t compare it with Western countries. But at the same time, most Western people probably have the wrong idea about life in China. They think that whatever you do, the Chinese Communist Party is following you around, ready to arrest you. It’s like our ideas about America. We think everybody has a gun in their pocket, and there’s danger everywhere. . . . the news just focuses on the negative. It’s the same with the way Americans think about China. It’s also the same Chinese people think about Americans. Our news always accentuates the negative.”

I’d add the news in China and in the US accentuates the negative about the other. Perhaps that’s why my Chinese friends often ask if America is safe because of the often-reported mass shootings.

Now, in the past weeks, I’ve been asked if America is safe because the spread of coronavirus in the US is uncontained and the thermometer guns are running short. How should I explain?  

Click here for CDC prevention guide for COVID-19 outbreaks.

Click here for my afterthought of China’s Second Continent.

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If you ask anyone from China whether she knows Rachel Carson, the chance for YES is slim. But if you ask her whether she knows the pesticide DDT, expect the positive answer. I hadn’t known about Rachel Carson until I moved to Pittsburgh eleven years ago. I was accepted by Rachel’s alma mater, Chatham University, to study literary writing. Since then, my knowledge about Rachel and her seminal work, Silent Spring, among others, has been enhanced greatly.

Rachel Carson is frequently mentioned in my graduate study about writing and global sustainability. Her unequivocal caveat about excessive use of pesticides like DDT that were poisoning food chains from insects upwards feels like today. But what really happens today is that we have another alarming scientific finding—the excessive emission of greenhouse gases from human activities.

The concurrent coronavirus outbreak in China tells us how problems elsewhere can impact us. We are living in a commercially globalized planet. When China suspended all production activities the past few weeks to contain the spread of coronavirus among people, our supply chains of goods and services around the globe were disrupted in a ripple effect. The future analysis of Wall Street is gloomy about the coronavirus concerns, thus stocks slid for four consecutive days as of Feb 25.

The concurrent global warming has prompted abnormal climate patterns and deterioration in the ecosystems. Natural disasters have become more unpredictable and volatile, causing higher risks to living habitats, transportation and the flow of consumption goods. No one wants to see their housing insurance cost rising or learn our food prices are going up because swarms of millions of locusts have ravaged crops in East Africa. 

This spring of 2020 is not silent, far from it. In America, I hear this phrase a lot—The sky’s the limit. If that’s the case, how can we limit our dreams? How can we restrain our potential to explore the impossible?

American astronomer Henrietta Leavitt sparkled the brightest in Lauren Gunderson’s play, Silent Sky. I had great pleasure in learning about this piece of American history through theater art. If you like the book and movie Hidden Figures, you’d find resonances from Silent Sky. A decade before American women gained the right to vote, Henrietta Leavitt and her fellow women “computers” had transformed the science of astronomy. In the Harvard Observatory, Leavitt found 2,400 new variable stars and made important discoveries about their fluctuating brightness, enabling her male colleagues to map the Milky Way and beyond.

From Rachel Carson to Henrietta Leavitt, from Silent Spring to Silent Sky, women, or I should say, women in America, are characterized as a gender of silence. Bear with my deductive reasoning. As I mentioned in my book, Golden Orchid, Chinese people like quoting Chairman Mao Zedong’s famous dictum “Women hold up half the sky.” If that’s the case, isn’t half of the sky in America silent, metaphorically?

Not quite. In fact, I see American women in general are adding volume to the public discourse. The US-originated, global #MeToo Movement speaks for itself. In both America and China, the number of women graduates from universities is slightly outnumbering men. Universally speaking, we give credit to women for their role in our first language since birth, thus we call it the Mother Language. Thanks to language, we’re able to speak out our minds in exchange for ideas and materials to meet our needs.

Being an American woman, I find my biggest liberation is to voice my opinion publicly. In East Asia, I see a trend for educated women, urbanites especially, to speak up. A good sign. But do not misinterpret that if a Chinese or Korean or Japanese woman—it seems I’m often mistaken for either nationalities—does not open her mouth, she is submissive and introverted. Asian women are well-regarded as good housewives and mothers because they are adaptable and resilient. They respect harmony and self-sacrifice.

Pressuring and even torturing relatives and family members are a common tactic for Chinese authorities to silent dissent. While Chinese young women are gradually voicing their opinions subtly without doing harm to their loved ones, a frightening phenomenon is more pronounced than ever among rural Chinese women. According to the World Health Organization, suicide in China accounts for about a quarter of all suicides worldwide. In contrast to the West, more Chinese women than men are killing themselves.

I know that self-destruction is a heavy subject, just as heavy as talking about mass suicide in the animal kingdom, or, as a matter of fact, about mass suicide of hopeless Chinese farmers who attempted to drink DDT outside a government building. Depression is a silent killer. Threats to survival can lead to suicide. Environmental changes increase the risks of suicidal behaviors. Scientists have warned that thousands more people may die by their own hand as Earth’s climate warms.

Environmental changes may trigger change of emotions. If you stand next to a blast furnace in an insulated uniform for long hours, you probably will become more hot-tempered, too. If you live in a run-down house that gives you daily worry about the roof falling and the basement flooding, there is a high chance that you see everything in your life as gray or even dark.

In the ancient days, people learned about the advent of earthquakes or a rainfall by observing the abnormal behavior of animals. Today, a rise in mass mortality events among species has sounded a similar alarm. When supply chains are broken, our flow of consumption goods stops. When food chains are disrupted, our survival as an entire humanity will face unprecedented challenges.

More than half a century ago, Rachel Carson called for science to work with nature. I’m not a scientist but I’m a science believer. And as an American and a global citizen, I’ve witnessed enough unprecedented misconducts and misbehavior of our politicians and policymakers in the past four years. The year of 2020 cannot be silent. Don’t let silence kill our hope and the future of our next generation to reach their boundless sky.     

“What really made me want to write a play about Henrietta is that her story was not only about one brilliant woman but an entire cohort of women who [were] Harvard ‘computers.’ This was a story about a sisterhood.”   

—— Lauren Gunderson, playwright of Silent Sky

I’m still not quite sure why the world recognizes mother language as the first language we acquire from birth. I believe my father also had contributed a lot to my mother language. In fact, he tape-recorded my early babbles. I remember that I could only laugh at my indistinguishable mother tongue at aged one. My father interpreted the meaning for me which I forget now. But he certainly had a better comprehension than my mother of that old tape in which the baby me sounded like an infant alien from outer space.     

As my interest in my mother language grows, I now know that there is difference between Cantonese spoken in Xiguan—a historical district in Guangzhou, China—and Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong. Strictly speaking, my mother language is the Cantonese that is spoken outside Xiguan. Guangzhou dialect of Cantonese once took Xiguan as its standard. Too bad, I’ve discovered this nuance long after my mother had passed on. I can’t verify with her the origin of our mother language sound by sound and tone by tone.

The United Nations celebrated the 20^th anniversary of International Mother Language Day on Feb 21 this year. According to the UN stats, at least 43% of the estimated 6,000 languages spoken in the world are endangered. Less than 100 are used in the digital world. I’ve made a remark about website language in an earlier piece. Click here for 2020: Saving the Endangered Species and Languages.

Although the UN celebration is symbolic, linguistic diversity and multilingualism can’t be more eloquently represented than in this year’s Oscar Awards whose theme is inclusiveness. I’m particularly moved by Best Actor Joaquin Phoenix’s acceptance speech.

The political arena in America and abroad seems to have been in drought for this kind of speech filled with understanding, compassion, altruisticness, self-awareness, empathy, inclusiveness and above all else, peace and love.

We don’t need to understand Korean to watch the winning Best Picture Parasite; we don’t need to disparage others who don’t speak English, Chinese, German, French, Spanish, Arabic and any other major language in the world; we don’t need to disguise our mother languages in public just to prove to others that we are educated and part of the mainstream.

Mother languages bring us a myriad of musical sounds. We are entitled to our cultural distinction as we are to our own opinions. Multilingualism is tens of thousands of times more colorful than monolingualism. A zebra would not be a zebra without the black and white stripes. Do you know zebra literally means “spotted horse” in Mandarin Chinese? I often think of this analogy when I compare Mandarin with Cantonese, or in any situation that I have to favor the dominant language willy-nilly. A zebra without “spots” is just a horse; a nation without linguistic diversity is dull and selfish.         

The Chinese media and local government often boast about Guangzhou as a city of inclusiveness. Because of inclusiveness, bāo róng in Mandarin Chinese, Guangzhou is one of the favorite destinations for non-Cantonese speakers to settle in as their new homes. Because of inclusiveness, non-Cantonese speaking new immigrants embrace their own dialects as well as Mandarin Chinese, which is mandatory in China. Appointed officials in Guangzhou do not bother to learn local Ningnan culture and Cantonese to assimilate. On the contrary, a coercive measure to use Standard Mandarin in public is enforced. Thus, the number of Cantonese speakers in Guangzhou has drastically dwindled in the past fifteen years.

Unlike the elistic Beijingers who blame migrant workers for urban overcrowding and poor sanitation, Cantonese people are inclusive to their compatriots across the country. However, the government has taken advantage of Cantonese natives’ good inclusiveness to enlarge the influence of Mandarin at the cost of the local language.

When we believe our language is better than others, our worldview is doomed to be limited and self-centered. I see there are many languages spoken in the United States. And yet, some native born Americans who don’t grow up in a bilingual setting are prone to have a limited worldview. Speaking English is our blessing to communicate and exchange ideas about our differences. And yet, speaking only English is not enough to understand others.

I enjoy listening to the Spanish-accented English from Sofía Vergara, the Austrian-accented English from former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the acceptance speech in Korean made by Best Director awardee Bong Joon-ho of Parasite. February marks Black History Month in America. I’m neither black nor white, but I enjoy hearing the African-American vernacular English—a mother language to many African Americans. If only we could speak in comfort with our mother languages and listen openly to many other different sounds of languages. We can make our linguistic world vibrantly colorful. I’d like to end with this video by Tapestry CEO Jide Zeitlin on inclusiveness and diversity.

For weeks, I’ve been carrying the burden of this question: Are we really living in an age of dematerialization or in the opposite?

Based on the idea championed by MIT scientist Andrew McAfee, a smartphone combines all the functions of a recorder, a radio, a CD player, a camera, a dumb phone, a compass, maps, a phone book, a television and many other products that we may only can see in the museums today. Zillions of applications for electronic devices will make our life easier and simpler. We can do more efficiently with fewer tools and steps. This is dematerialization coined by Mr. McAfee. If you read his book More From Less or watch his YouTube Ted Talk about dematerialization, you’ll be acquainted with McAfee’s positivity in the future of the Anthropocene.

I question whether McAfee overlooks the laborious process of manufacturing smartphones—or, as a matter of fact, the making of many other “smart” devices—and the multitude of abandoned electronics exported from the wealthy countries to the developing countries. Yes, I am talking about the e-waste industry.

When Verizon Wireless and other competitive carriers regularly remind the customers that it’s time to renew their smartphones by the end of contracts or during a promotional period, American mobile phone users are given incentives to renew their phones to the latest model. Apple Inc. and Samsung also dole out all sorts of promotions to encourage loyal customers to switch and replace their cannot-let-you-get-out-of-my-hand devices.

So it is in China. In addition to Apple and Samsung, Chinese customers face a dazzling market of Made-in-China smartphone brands. From Huawei, Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi to the lesser-known Tecno, Zte, Meizu, and Coolpad, they fit different household income earners. Lenovo is like Microsoft, jumping from the PC world to the smartphone world. Microsoft has acquired the Finnish firm Nokia to develop its mobile phone Lumia products. You can see Lumia phones in China, too.

Our obsession with buying the latest screen devices of all sizes is contributing to mounting piles of electronic waste. When my journalist colleagues covered the labor rights issues at sweatshops-like the Foxconn factories in China (Foxconn is Apple’s biggest original design manufacturer), I had the opportunity to learn what makes a phone smart.

From AMOLED displays to lithium-ion batteries and to the most complicated SoC—short for “System-on-a-chip”—which I called “the brain of a smartphone,” not to mention the cameras, the sensors etc., every component of a smartphone involves chemical and physical reactions of natural resources. Metals such as aluminum, copper, lead, zinc and others are vital resources for components used in smartphones and gadgets. Heavy metals could contaminate the work site and the entire community. Many Southeastern Asian countries as well as China are extracting, or even exploiting, local resources—both from nature and from workers in sweatshops—in order to assemble a “dematerialized,” multi-function device. While Apple Inc. reaches its goal of making big profits for selling more products at a low cost of labor and materials, the company is doing all it can on damage control of its poisoning supply chain abroad. You won’t find much on Google about this, sadly.          

Electronic waste is extremely toxic. The components of every piece of electronic devices contain toxic chemicals in order to enable the chemistry and physics in the device to kick efficiently as well as to draw your eyeballs to that attractive appearance and packaging.

For a long time, the rich world has dumped abroad what its people don’t want. Indeed, the attitude of NIMBYs—Not In My Back Yard—has been an unwritten consensus among the developed countries. China is one of the favorite destinations for global waste—yes, the Chinese call it “yáng lā jī,” the foreign trash. China wanted it. China needed it. As laborious it was to assemble a smartphone, so it was laborious to dismantle the scraps to make them useful again. For their livelihood, tens of millions of low-rung Chinese laborers, as well as those in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Ghana, Nigeria and many other countries, would sit together in their poverty-stricken villages to sort out bundles of plastics, wires, cables and other garbage. They would work at the scrap yards exposed to hazardous chemicals on a regular basis just to make both ends meet.

A record shows forty percent of the US e-waste has been dumped illegally in Hong Kong. In the name of “green laundering,” which is synonymous with money laundering, electronic waste traveled illegally from US recycling companies to Taiwan, Hong Kong and other developing regions and states.

How can we dematerialize if we create excessive waste from a small-sized product? Does a merchandiser really have little obligation to control the impact of an externality—pollution? (Read on. I will explain what an externality is.) Can a government really keep eyes shut to the e-waste pollution domestically and globally?

An externality is an economic term, meaning the cost or benefit that affects a third party who did not choose to incur that cost or benefit. By introducing this term, I hope I can bridge my argument with an economist’s mindset to help us understand why the merchandiser and the consumer—the polluters on the production side and on the consumption side of electronic devices—can, and should, take action to turn negative externality into a positive one. If we still believe the power of “We the People,” consumers, conscientious merchandisers and responsive governments can turn a “double negative” externality into a positive one. Solving the issue of e-waste is a sustainable, positive externality.

It is estimated that after the introduction of the first iPhone in 2007, more than seven billion smartphones have been produced in the following decade. And many of them have already ended up in the dump. The world population is more than seven billion people. But not all these seven billion people are smartphone users. The number of smartphone users worldwide in 2019 surpassed three billion. China, India, and the United States are the countries with the highest number of smartphone users, and also the biggest e-waste producers.               

We use less, but we poop a lot.

China has started to understand the waste problem. Beijing announced in 2017 that China would be reduced its import of global plastic and paper waste. Until then, China had been taking in up to 56 percent of the world’s plastic garbage to recycle, 60 percent of paper waste from the U.S. and more than 70 percent of paper waste from Europe, according to the German state media Deutsche Welle. As a result, the non-profit US-based group, Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, sees from the first quarter of 2017 to October 2019, US exports of plastic waste to China have plummeted by 89%.

I always say it’s a fate that my so-to-speak “formative years” of understanding modern China and modern United States took place in Guangzhou and Pittsburgh. China’s strategic plan of “Made in China 2025” is happening now. Just like Pittsburgh’s yesterday which produced one third of the US steel in early 1900s and became the center of the “Arsenal of Democracy” in WWII, China is moving at its own pace away from the “world’s factory” which produces shoddy goods at lower labor costs toward a more technology-intensive powerhouse. Today, Pittsburgh has transformed itself into a university town of computer technology, research and medicine. China tightens imports of foreign trash just like Pittsburgh treated its air, rivers and streams polluted by the steel and coal industry. Guangdong is pioneering in treating its water and air pollution caused by industrialization.

So you see why I am skeptical about dematerialization if we don’t follow Steve Jobs to do some damage control. We don’t hold back the scientific truth; we hold back our e-poop.

As I’ve relieved my burden of the question of dematerialization. I am leaving more questions. Watch the space.

Will China’s e-commerce boom turn China’s e-waste into treasure?

Will China’s manufacturing powerhouse of Guangdong become the next global factory for higher-value products and services, such as AI technology?

Can the Big Four tech companies—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft—find solutions way ahead of their competitors in the e-waste industry?

And I have a proposal for you as a consumer:

If you can keep your smart devices a little bit longer, you are doing tremendous good to the planet and to future generations.

For those who believe in God and often pray for Him to “lead us from temptation,” control your temptation by holding onto your devices a bit longer.

When you renew your phones, laptops, TVs and many others, ask NOT what they can do for you, ask what you CAN do to your wallets and the landfills.

Saving the planet starts from your wallet.

Does this sound like a feasible proposal for you?

By the way, I’m not an Apple hater. In fact, I’m an Apple fan. Thanks to my graduate study about sustainability at Virginia Tech, I have a second iPad. I did my personal inventory. Under my ownership, I have three iPhones and two iPads. That is five Apple products per capita. For this good sales record, Steve Jobs is toasting in heaven now. Let’s make the Planet great again.

You can read my iPad Rhapsody here.

Strictly speaking, Weathering With You (天気の子), “tenki no ko” in Japanese, is an animated feature film written and directed by Makoto Shinkai (新海誠). The story was set in Tokyo during a fantastical period of exceptionally rainy weather. The teenage “Sunshine Girl” named Hina was the “child of weather,” as the Japanese film title suggests. Hina had that magic to stop rainy days and bring temporary sunshine back to the Tokyo sky.

Hina was a poor orphan with a younger brother named Nagi. To support the family, Hina worked at a McDonald’s store in Tokyo, where she met her destiny love, Hodaka, a high school boy who left from a rural village for better opportunities in Tokyo. Their connection started from a complimentary Quarter Pounder at McDonald’s. Employee Hina secretly gave homeless Hodaka, who sheltered in the store from the rain, something to eat. What a praise to the American franchise for making this Japanese romance possible!

Right there, the scene reminded me of the homeless people in Hong Kong. Few people are aware of the charitable role these 24-hour diners and restaurants play after midnight. Especially in affluent cities like Tokyo and Hong Kong, as long as the homeless people are well-behaved, they relocate from one fast-food restaurant to another to find temporary hideout for the night. Looking at Hodaka on the screen, I associate with poverty. And that’s exactly what director Shinkai wants to express in his work—youth poverty in Japan.

Last year’s top-rated movie Parasite has also touched upon the theme of wealth inequality and poverty in South Korea. As Director Shinkai of Weathering With You said in an interview that social stratification is obvious in Japan. I second that for the situation in China, and in the United States, too.

In the movie, two poor kids, Hodaka and Hina, fell in love with one another and they lived on Hina’s magic power to make both ends meet. And yet, the day did not last long. The more Hina prayed for a good weather, the less of her was seen in a human body. She would evaporate like water and eventually disappear! Tokyo returned to the days of torrential rain. Th deluge put a third of the city underwater. Where is the “Sunshine Girl”? Where is the normalcy of weather?

Many Japanese anime fans like me understand that Shinkai has hinted the climate crisis—“気候危機” in Japanese—throughout his movie. I remember there is a scene in the movie: some years later, the old lady who used to be Hina’s weather client for a good weather to worship the spirit of her late husband told Hodaka that, many many many years ago, Tokyo used to be submerged in water resulting from typhoons and natural disasters. When people inhabited this place and adapted to the changes, they made it into a prosperous city. And now the continuous raining days were back, and the city was once again returning to what it used to be.

Let’s not question whether the old lady’s fictional storytelling is true in reality. Let’s just think about how Japanese people react to climate change. According to WIRED, the orderly society like Japan where people are respectful toward one another, ordinary people tend to be submissive rather than vocal about big social issues like climate change. Instead, similar to harmonious Confucianism in China, Japanese Zen spirit calls for bringing peace to your soul and making peace within as well as with your surroundings.

As Meera Subramanian, president of Society of Environmental Journalists, said beautifully, “Environmental stories are front-page stories. They’re every-page stories. They’re everywhere stories and they’re everybody stories.”

Climate change is everywhere and about everyone.

Viewers see a movie to look for entertaining pleasure. And Weathering With You does not disappoint me in that aspect. Moreover, the film somewhat surprises me that this is more than just an animated feature. It reflects Japan today. There is an underlying shock from social stratification and climate change in Japan. This is how Shinkai said it in his own language during an interview with the United Nations:

“（『天気の子』の）根底には気候危機から受けた衝撃もあることを観客に知ってもらえたら、とても嬉しいです」”

This is Google Translate version edited by me:

“I’m very happy if (the movie) lets the audience know that there is an underlying shock from the climate crisis.”

Perhaps we should be hopeful that there is a subtle calling among Japanese youths for change—Japan’s wealth inequality needs to change, so is the country’s climate crisis apathy. 

Environmental stories are front-page stories. They’re every-page stories. They’re everywhere stories and they’re everybody stories.
—– Meera Subramanian, SEJ president

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