Aye I Longwhite: An American-Chinese teenager’s adventure in the Middle Kingdom and beyond (3 page)

She
just looked at me for a moment, during which I swear time slowed down.  She finally snapped the time warp with a simple “Ok” and skipped off.  I realized I was still holding my breath; I blew it out, but it was too late for me to say anything else.

I had my first friend.

--------------

Chan
g Lin and I ended up doing our language exchange every other day, when I wasn’t playing basketball.  I was the star on the basketball team.  Basketball, even in my academic magnet school in the US, was played at much a higher level than my Shanghai school, which had the best basketball team in the district, evidenced by the many championship trophies displayed in the dusty case hidden at the back corner of the gym.  I was definitely mediocre on my US team, a bench warmer, but here, I was the star.  In the US, being the star athlete would’ve put me in the popular crowd, and I would’ve been batting away cheerleaders throwing themselves at me.  Here in China, they couldn’t care less.  It was the equivalent of being the top chess player in a US school’s chess club, which ironically would’ve gotten me a lot further with girls in China.  I frankly was ok with my anonymity, but I was amused by what was important to my new Chinese classmates.  Sports meant nothing; academics everything.

Chang Lin was different than not just the girls but
almost all the other kids in school.  She didn’t aspire to ace the tests and go to the top university and get a base level job in the government bureaucracy.  “I want to go to the America!”

“Just America.
  We don’t say ‘the America.’  In fact, just say US.”

“I want to go to US!” she enthused.

“Umm, you need to put in the ‘the’ in front of US.  The US.”

Undaunted, she beamed, “I want to go to
the
US.” 

“Why?”  Why would a student in the best school in the best city in the best country want to leave the one place everyone else in the world wanted to get into, and to go to the US of all places! 
“Why not Nigeria or Mexico or Brazil?” These countries had a young, vibrant population driving their economies, not like the old, sick Western countries that were clinging to vestiges of past glories.  More importantly, these countries early on read the global super-power tea leaves and sided with China over the US.   Even though they were tiny compared to China, China gave them preferential treatment as a reward for their early support, before everyone else piled in.

“This place is too close.” 

I gently whispered “closed,” even though I knew what she meant was “too restrictive, confining, dull.”

“Too closed,” she cont
inued, accepting my correction and interruption without losing track of her thread.  “I want to be free!  I want to be me.” 

I was impressed how she summarized the American culture so succinctly.

Playing the devil’s advocate, I countered, “But the quality of living is nowhere compared to things here in MK.”  “MK” stood for “Middle Kingdom,” the literal translation of what the Chinese called their own country, “Zhong Guo.”  The English net abbreviated it to “MK.”  “Quality of living,” that was a phrase I had learned from my mom’s expat package discussions. Since Shanghai was so much more expensive than where we had lived in the US, we were given a monthly bonus to equalize the increased “cost of living.”

“Who cares?
I don’t need very much.  I will only want what I have.”

Again, I admired her wisdom in quoting Buddha.
  Want what you have and the corollary, not want what you don’t have.  I didn’t tell her that was a very un-American way of thinking.

“But what will you do there?”

She now quoted my other favorite master, Yoda.  “Do?  We are not human doings.  Be.  We are human beings.”

I felt that my objections were going nowhere, like fighting water.  I decided to join her instead of
continuing to spar.  I remembered a quote from our Classics class from the quixotic master Lao Tzu.  I intoned in Chinese, accentuating the rise and falls in the tones:

When I let go of what
I am,

I become what I might be.
 

I’m not sure if this was contextually correct, but it sounded good, and I was rewarded with a raised eyebrow from Chang Lin.  It would be an understatement to say that the Chinese prefer subtlety.  I felt like a puppy given a dog treat.  If I had a tail, it would’ve been wagging.

--------------

Mr. Smith, my MakerSpace teacher, was my favorite.  It helped that he was also a “foreign devil,” the affectionate term Chinese people call white people.  But I really liked him because he was funny. 

He was humorous in the way I was used to.  Though most of his jokes and puns went over the heads of the other students, I smiled appreciatively, which in turn, made Mr. Smith like me back.

I learned early on that humor (or “humour” as my English teacher would correct) was not transferable across cultures.  Only the barest, most superficial jokes made it through the otherwise impermeable humor wall between cultures.  All my “quiet wit” was useless here, except for in Mr. Smith’s class.  We basically had our own little secret language of inside jokes. 

I also learned to my detriment that sarcasm, a poor-man’s form of humor, also didn’t work.  My sarcastic “Oh really?” when someone said something patently obvious was often
replied with a straight, “Yes, really.”  Even worse, the person would look at me as if
I
were the idiot.  I didn’t bother trying, “No shit Sherlock.”  I tried to purge sarcasm out of my language, which is like asking a sailor to stop swearing.  I had to change my whole way of thinking.  I basically had to play it straight all the time.  It was so boring.

Mr. Smith was
a Brit.  I’m not sure what made him so important to gain him entry into China, and he never explained it.  At first, I didn’t know he was a Brit, just that his English accent was different from my American one.  Frankly, the Aussie’s, Kiwi’s, and South African’s accents all were variations of British English, but woe be the fool who guesses the wrong one.  So I didn’t bother guessing, and sure enough, Mr. Smith eventually slipped he was a Brit.  One thing for sure though, the British accent makes a man sound smart to my American ears.  Whenever Mr. Smith spoke, it sounded learned to me, maybe because all the shows on the extinct animals were hosted by Brits.

Mr. Smith
had traveled the world before coming to MK and had done innumerable jobs on location to fund his travels.  He was constantly sharing stories from his various adventures, often seemingly to be talking to himself, as the students generally ignored him for being a foreigner.  Their respect for teachers I guess only went so far as Chinese teachers.

But I loved his stories and found the lessons easier to digest sugar-coated in a parable.  One time, he inexplicable started
on a story of when he was a whitewater rafting tour guide. We were learning about structural engineering, and we had a side project of building a bridge out of balsa wood.  The other kids hated it because it wasn’t directly related to the MakerSpace objective and it required them to use their hands, but I loved it.  I think the thought of the river rushing under the bridges brought up his story. 

“When you are in whitewater rapids, you have to row as a team.  You
can mess around in the calm waters and it won’t really matter, but when you’re coming up to the rapids, everyone’s got to listen to the guide.” Ironically, nobody was listening to him, except me.  “The guide will tell you the direction to row in so you enter the rapids at the right place, in the right angle, at the right speed.  We all have to row hard and in synch up to that point.  And then, do you know what we do when we enter the rapids?” he asked rhetorically.

I hazarded
a guess, “You row really, really hard?”

He looked up, surprised somebody answered him.  He smiled, “No, you pull in your oars.”

“Why?” I spluttered at this ridiculous idea.

Mr. Smith basked in my confusion.  He finally had an audience. 
“For 3 reasons.  First, you may lose your oar in the rapids because of the power of the water or from catching a rock.  Second, even worse, your oar may get stuck under a rock and fling you out of the raft.  Third, the worst case, your stuck oar could flip the entire raft, risking not just your own safety but everyone else’s wellbeing.”

I nodded, satisfied with the reasoning.

“This is kind of like life,” he pontificated, now that he had a keen student.  “When things are calm, you should work hard to get to where you want to go.  But when things get crazy, and trust me they will, fight your natural instinct to work even harder.  Pull in your oars, have faith that you’ve done your best to get there, and ride out the rapids.”  He then tied it back to our Classics class with a quote from Lao Tzu:

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them - that only creates sorrow.

Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.

That’s what I love about Mr. Smith.  He helps me understand the master Lao Tzu’s paradoxical quotes, which totally don’t make any sense in Classics class.

Since my last Lao Tzu quote worked so well
with Chang Lin, I tried again. 

Anticipate the
difficult

by
managing the easy.

Mr. Smith looked at me appraisingly.  “Wise beyond your years, young Jedi.”  I think this compliment would’ve gone over the heads of my classmates, even if they were listening, but it made me feel all warm and squishy inside.

So,
I loved Mr. Smith’s class because I could exercise my shriveling “funny muscle” and because he wrapped life’s lessons in easy to understand stories.  But the best part of his class was that I could use my hands and move around.  All the other classes required us to sit like stones, recite back what the teacher said, accepting the lecture as gospel.  I remembered in the US, if the teacher made a mistake, the class would burst out laughing and the teacher would gamely continue on.  I actually reddened in shame at the thought of this happening in my new school.

Mr. Smith’s class was different.  We were supposed to use our hands in MakerSpace. 
MakerSpaces started out a long time ago as a playground within schools, basically a modernized version of “shop.”  But instead of learning how to drill, lathe and weld, the original MakerSpaces allowed students to play with “3D printers,” which were very new and expensive at the time.  Nowadays, everyone has one at home, and we just call them “printers.”  They make, or “print,” most utilitarian things needed at home.  If you want something beautiful or extremely durable, it’s still better to buy something mass-manufactured or even hand-built, but the printed items were fine for most basic things used on a daily basis.

Mr. Smith made his
MakerSpace focus on AI (Artificial Intelligence) and robotics.  There were tons of very clever robots out there, but they all approximated human intelligence; they didn’t pass the “Turing test.”  Mr. Smith shared this definition of the Turing test from the
net
:

A test devised by the English mathematician 
Alan M. Turing
 
to determine whether or not a computer can be said to think like a human brain.

In an attempt to cut through the philosophical debate about how to define "thinking," Turing devised a subjective test to answer the question, "Can machines think?" and reasoned that if a computer acts, reacts and interacts like a sentient being, then call it sentient.

The test is simple: a human interrogator is isolated and given the task of distinguishing between a human and a computer based on their replies to questions that the interrogator poses. After a series of tests are performed, the interrogator attempts to determine which subject is human and which is an
artificial intelligence
.

The computer's success at thinking can be quantified by its probability of being misidentified as the human subject.

We set ourselves the lofty goal of creating the world’s first true AI.  Really quite silly considering that our
school’s computer, though quite powerful for a school to own, was like a single neuron in a brain compared to the computing power of the supercomputers that the think tanks and R&D centers were using to reach the same goal.  We had already passed the year of 2045, one of the more famous dates predicted for “singularity,” when AI was supposed to surpass human intelligence.  The AIs out there are wickedly smart and can do all sorts of astounding things, but none of them have proven self-awareness yet.

The goal was far enough out that it basically gave us scope to do anything we wanted.  The other kids in the class were way better programmers than I was, but I was the best at wiring things up, and putting together the Lego-like pieces to build a robot.  Everyone was a theorist because the Chinese prized the thinking part; the doing part was seen as beneath them.  “Getting your hands dirty” was not a good thing.  So I was the engineer
, the necessary evil to build an actually functioning robot instead of just a piece of software.