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The old man said, “This is a very fine example of kao yuan.” “Which is what?” “In Chinese painting, it means perspective from a height.”
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“It’s all weird,” the old man said. “Don’t you think? A world of mysteries.”
Long ago Fred had gathered that feng shui was a practice so ancient and mystical that no one could understand it. But his work made him acutely aware that there actually were mysterious forces influencing everything, so it seemed possible that feng shui was some kind of ancient folkloric intuition of quantum phenomena.
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China never did much in the way of territorial expansion, especially compared to some other countries.
Thus it was that John liked to suggest to Valerie that they “go watch the grass grow.” Luna’s only entertainment, he liked to add.
He had mentioned once that he had Cherokee ancestry, making him, he said, a red man as well as a black man; and since Valerie’s parents were Chinese and Anglo-American, he went on, between them they had the old Sunday school hymn covered.
Humans remained the best construction robots around, being the cheapest and most versatile.
Quantum computers were magnitudes faster than classic computers in several classes of operation, but they were still limited by their tendency to decohere, also by the inadequacies of their programming; which was to say the inadequacies of their programmers. So it was like being confronted with one’s own stupidity.
All this was hard; and even if he managed to do some of it, at best he would still be left with nothing more than an advanced search engine. Artificial general intelligence was just a phrase, not a reality.
It’s clear, then, that always our real interest has been not in any particular place, but rather in our ability to get to that place. It’s the process of exploration itself that fascinates us, not the places we explore.
Between the standardized building design, the robotic labor, and the new technique of sleeping in centrifuges, the moon was becoming much safer for humans than it had been in the earliest days, which even though only twenty years past, felt like a time of distant pioneers, no doubt because almost no one here now had been here then.
Ta Shu stared at the blue world, entranced. He traced its outline on the window. Such a complicated place. Even China by itself, no one could understand. Then add the rest of the world.…
For home he had used the word laojia, ancestral home, the place you came from. Your heart’s home.
The sublime, in a certain strain of Western aesthetics, is said to be a fusion of beauty and terror. In China the Seven Feelings don’t mention this combination, but now I think I know what it is. It’s a true feeling, the sublime—it’s spirit confronted by sheer matter, as Hegel put it.
This is not what I thought it was, this place is not what it looks like. It’s not just Xinjiang or Tibet. This is an alien shore, this is not a human place. I must trust my spacesuit not to fail. And I must remember, if I can, that really we are always in a spacesuit of one sort or another. We just don’t usually see it so clearly.
“We’ll face forward on takeoff,” Ta Shu said casually in English, filling the silence with something innocuous. “The taikonauts call it eyeballs in. It’s much better for the body than eyeballs out.”
Earth, blue world, living world, human world. He was going home.
Part of the unexpected beauty of old Beijing at night. In his previous visits he had only ever been to the city outside the Sixth Ring Road, where high rises and industrial parks dominated. Now, with lit paper globes strung through the trees and reflecting off the still water, and a paper dragon draped along the stone dragon that topped the canal wall, it seemed as if he had been transported to a China out of legend.
He was so often amazed or stunned, so often moved by simple things, obscure things.
One g! It was a little frightening to feel how big their planet was, how fervently it clutched them to its breast.
All that change stretching below him had happened since he was young. Of course this proved he was quite old, but also it was proof that landscape restoration had become a science of great power: feng shui for real.
“You know me, Master. I am always for weiwen. Maintenance of stability. All the old virtues. Lean to the side. Harmonious society. Scientific outlook on development. All the best old ways.” “It’s really Daoism,” Ta Shu said. “Confucius too. Or really it’s Neo-Confucian. Like Deng Xiaoping. I like it. It suits me, because I’m a practical person. But now we have the New Leftists, wanting to steer us back toward socialism.”
“Maybe it is. Rule of law was always Hong Kong’s great advantage over the mainland. They got it from the British, and they kept it during the fifty years of transition as best they could. That’s why they did so well. We built up Shanghai to try to make it a rival financial center and cut Hong Kong down a little, but Shanghai was always a Party town, so it’s never been trusted by the outside world like Hong Kong is. In that sense you could say that rule of law is an economic value. It makes us stronger.”
“But think how China has always been Zhongguo, the Middle Kingdom. That middle was always said to be halfway between Earth and heaven. Now, with us on the moon, it seems to be coming true. China really is between Earth and heaven.”
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!
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.
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.
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.
“The moon,” Qi remarked at one point, “is like a miniature Hong Kong in a giant Tibet.”
With so many poor people in this world, can the middle class afford to share? If they do, won’t they become just as poor as the poor?
Everyone’s precarious now, you should know that word. You’re the precariat.
“We’re all mad. A lot of them are madder than I am! Because they’re the ones in the sweatshops. Sweet little Chinese girls all into their cloud games and pop stars, I tell you, they will jump out of their phones and kill you dead if they get a chance.”
Lord of the Flies is like some Christian support group compared to the mean girls’ club.
“The chink and the geek! Riding the pilot wave! Finding the dao together! Solving crimes and saving the world! Binge view the whole series!”
“I like Mao. Listen to this: ‘Not to have a correct political view is like having no soul.’ You hear that?”
Fred regarded her. Now, even when her back was turned to him, he could see she was pregnant. He thought about how fermions had to rotate 720 degrees before they returned to their original position. This was one of the first facts that had snagged his mind when learning about the subatomic realm. Fermions existed in a Hilbert four-space, in dimensions beyond what humans could see at the macro-scale. What would it be like to see something like a fermion’s spin? Would it pulsate in place, would it shimmer and gleam, would it overwhelm the senses to look at it? Maybe it would look like Qi did now.
“My dad used to say, we Chinese eat everything with legs except the table.”
“I mean America is more of a one-party state than China. It’s entirely ruled by the market. Actually the market is the only party in the world now, or it wants to be. So every nation has to deal with that in its own way.”
Polyarchies are better because power gets distributed to various groups. They’re inefficient and messy, with lots of turf battles, but that’s the cost of distributing power.
“This is no time to get a case of yellow fever,” she said. “What do you mean?” “You know—white male tech nerd falls for mysterious Chinese female? Yellow fever, they call it. A total cliché.”
“Someone told me that all of Australia has six hundred buildings that are taller than thirty stories, and Hong Kong has eight thousand.”
The old north-south orientation of the city, with the elite in the north and the poor to the south, has mostly gone away. The Maoists built great Chang’an Avenue to cut that north-south orientation in half, marking the new China with an east-west stroke of immense calligraphic power. Broad tree-lined boulevard, big public buildings monumentally flanking it, orientation directing the eye to the sinking sun like some Paleolithic astro-archeology.
A billion and a half people, one of every six people on Earth, living on a big chunk of Asia, in a country with the longest continuous history of any country. Big! Then turn it around and say: China is small. And this too is true. I see it right here on this corner. Introverted, authoritarian, monocultural, patriarchal; a small-minded place, with one history, one language, one party, one morality. So small!
the Five Loves, as taught in all our elementary schools: love of China, love of the Chinese people, love of work for China, love of scientific knowledge, love of socialism.
“I know. One of the Four Space Cadets.” This referred to four billionaires of a certain age who had had an interest in space, forming companies and pushing human activities above the atmosphere.
