For a few days this week I lived alone. I hadn't done that in a long time. The apartment felt oddly large, and I wasn't quite used to it, but the freedom was real. I bought a new desk, rearranged my room a little, and the change of scenery did its job.
I also made lemon bars for the first time. Golden, sweet-sour, and full of summer feeling even though spring had barely arrived. They also contained an alarming amount of sugar—an energy bomb in the most literal sense.
Ted Chiang and the questions that do not age
I first encountered Ted Chiang through Arrival, years ago. I liked the film, though the detail that stuck with me was that the heptapods' language was drawn with Mathematica—an odd thing to fixate on, I know. Later, podcasts kept bringing up his work. One episode of Busang, hosted by Hao Xiaoqi and Qiao, made the strongest impression: they described his fiction as 'philosophical science fiction,' where the point is not technology but the old philosophical questions. That was enough to get me.
The book is a short-story collection, so here are the pieces that stayed with me.
Story of Your Life
This is the original story behind Arrival. The prose is quiet—more resigned, more fatalistic than the film, and without the film's awkwardly forced political subplot. I liked it. But having seen the movie first, I lost the pleasure of discovering the truth in a single shock.
The free-will-versus-fate debate is ancient; Oedipus is the obvious example. In this story, Chiang uses an alien, nonlinear language to introduce nonlinear causality—a way of thinking that allows people to see the future. Whether such a language could exist scientifically matters less than the question he asks: if a person knew their entire fate, what would they choose? My biggest takeaway was that not seeing the future may be a blessing. It offers the illusion—true or false, I cannot say—that my choices matter, that I have some control, that there is something to look forward to. Of course, that is a human view. If we thought like the heptapods, we might not see it that way at all.
The story also smuggles in some linguistics. Human equations, musical notation, dance notation—Chiang suggests they resemble heptapod writing. I had never thought of it from that angle.
Tower of Babylon
This one I loved. Humans are building the Tower of Babylon—the biblical Tower of Babel—to break through the door of heaven. The protagonist is a miner sent with his brothers to the top of the tower to chisel through. Much of the story describes the journey in detail: the heat changes as they move closer to the sun and then farther away; construction methods differ at different heights; crops change. At the top, the workers worry that breaking through will flood them with heaven's reservoirs. Just as I was beginning to find the detail tedious, the protagonist is flooded, survives, and finds a passage into heaven. And heaven looks like the ground. He has come back to earth. I was stunned.
The story is about human hubris, I think—the urge to use our own power to break every boundary, whether or not that is wise. The afterword makes a related point: the characters are religious, but they rely not on prayer but on engineering. No gods appear; everything that happens can be explained in purely mechanical terms. In that sense, the world of the story is not so different from ours, even though it differs in many other ways. Science and technology may make us more arrogant and less reverent. That may not be a good thing.
The Evolution of Human Science
This was commissioned by Nature and is very short, but the scenario is memorable. Chiang imagines a future with posthumans who conduct their own advanced research at enormous speed. Ordinary humans cannot understand it; they need DNT—digital neural transfer—just to glimpse what is happening. He then asks what human research would look like. Some researchers would leave the field because they can no longer make original contributions; others would turn to hermeneutics, trying to explain posthuman science to humans.
I thought of today's science communicators. There are no posthumans yet, but knowledge is already so vast that no one person can study and understand all of it. A great deal of what we know about science comes through people whose job is to translate between the public and the frontier. They are our interpreters.
Hell Is the Absence of God
This one is less science fiction than a religious thought experiment. What does true faith actually look like? In the story, angels descend recklessly. Some people receive blessings—healing—and others are harmed: killed by accident, maimed, left without limbs. Neil's beloved wife, Sarah, dies during one such visitation and goes to heaven. Neil is devastated. His greatest wish is to join her, but he has never been devout, and without faith he cannot go to heaven. He tries various methods to make himself believe and cannot. Finally, he chases angelic visitations because there is a chance of seeing the heavenly light and ascending. At the very end he does see the light and understands, in an instant, the full meaning of faith—but his quasi-suicidal pursuit sends him to hell. Yet that glimpse gives him real faith: hell is the place where God is absent, and he still loves God.
I have no religion, but the final surrender in that story stayed with me. It might work if you replace God with life: to truly love life may mean loving it unconditionally, whatever happens, and continuing to live. Life never promised us fairness or luck. Only by accepting that can we truly love it.
Liking What You See: A Documentary
This one is excellent.
The subject is bias and discrimination, but not the usual sex or race angle. It is about lookism—the subtler, often unconscious way appearance shapes judgment. Appearance has an enormous influence on how we judge people, and much of that is automatic. Yet lookism is harder to discuss than sexism or racism because defining beauty is harder than defining sex or race, which are already contested.
The story imagines a device called calliagnosia—an aesthetic interference lens—that blocks people from judging appearance and might therefore eliminate lookism. A university considers a proposal to adopt it campus-wide. People disagree, and everyone has a point. Some say it is the best way to end lookism. Others say beauty is an important part of human life, and a blanket ban makes life less complete. Others say the device treats people like children, insults them, and assumes they cannot learn to see beauty and ugliness rightly. A girl who grew up with calliagnosia and recently had it removed shares her experience.
The form is also fun: it reads like forum posts, with different people arguing from their own perspectives and responding to one another—much like an online debate today, only far more rational.
The proposal fails, and the reason is delicious: Rebecca Boyer, a spokesperson for a group supporting ethical medicine, gives a speech against calliagnosia and uses digital manipulation to make herself seem magnetic. People are moved, persuaded—exactly the kind of trick we see in advertising and inflammatory writing.
Later, the story raises an idea I liked: Western culture has two roots. The Greek root cares deeply about beauty; the Christian root cares deeply about spirit. The debate over calliagnosia is, underneath, a conflict between body and soul. I do not know enough to say what the equivalent is in China. I was taught as a child that inner beauty matters more, but in recent years phrases like looks are justice have been popular online. There is plenty of contradiction there.
The story sheds light on a vision of solving bias through technology. Prejudice may have begun as a shortcut in the brain, a way to make judgments faster. But as culture developed, a feature produced by natural selection became a bug. Humans are the animal caught between nature and culture, constantly choosing and struggling.
Ted Chiang's reputation for philosophical science fiction is deserved. Technology advances and the world changes, but many human questions remain; we do not seem to have gained many new answers. Technology makes new answers seem possible, and perhaps it does not. Thinking about technology this way reveals human limits and can make us humbler.
P.D.Q. Bach and April Fools
Around April Fools I listened to P.D.Q. Bach. P.D.Q. Bach is a fictional persona created by American composer Peter Schickele—Bach's twenty-first son, out of twenty. I like comedy mixed with classical music. A friend introduced me to it, and I admire people who know music well and have a sense of humor. I will share P.D.Q. Bach's Unbegun Symphony; it is easy to find on video platforms.
The kids behind shamate
After watching Cotton, I became interested in stories about labor. So I finally watched the documentary Shamate, I Love You, which was well known last year. It was shocking. I knew almost nothing about shamate. I only remembered it as an online trend from childhood, maybe. The documentary showed that the founder was born in 1995; most were my age; most were rural-to-city migrant workers, the second generation. Many interviewees had left home to work at around fourteen. I had not known child labor still existed like that. Factory work was mechanical, like Chaplin's Modern Times, and strictly managed—even going to the bathroom required permission. There were scams, bosses withholding wages. In that environment, shamate became an outlet: a way to express individuality, release pressure, and comfort loneliness in the city. I teared up repeatedly.
I had thought shamate simply disappeared. The film shows there was a backlash: people deliberately smeared them, infiltrated their groups, and disbanded them. Their space was squeezed until it was basically gone, and society looked down on them.
What I liked was that the film lets shamate participants tell their own stories. Many clips were shot by the shamate themselves. It reminded me of Story FM: people telling their own lives, with firsthand feeling and real experience, without grand concepts like urban-rural relations, capitalism, or alienation—concepts that sometimes come from people with no direct experience. Lately I have grown tired of empty discussion. First-person accounts are more solid and more moving. I have too many blind spots; I plan to watch more work like this.
I came away respecting director Li Yifan's humility, patience, and gentleness. I also sought out an interview with him and a talk he gave at One Speech.
Podcasts
The Ritan Park episode Spring Flowers, Move to Camping! was not especially high-quality or educational. I listened because the guest was Xiao Fei from Feiyu Show. I had not heard his voice in so long. The episode was about glamping—how to camp comfortably. I know nothing about camping, but I listened with pleasure. That is Xiao Fei's charm. The episode also mentioned that this form of camping has connections to colonial history. Xiao Fei is someone who plays seriously and deeply. After Feiyu Show ended, he made Fei Mai Bu Ke, visiting vintage stores around the world. Hearing him reminded me of the days when Feiyu Show kept me company—a pleasant sadness.
Other podcasts: - Bafen: Where Are the Boundaries of Consumer Boycotts of Brands? The host, Daozhang, reviewed the history of consumer boycotts and NGOs. Very educational; I learned a lot. - Shuaizai Diary: My First Love, a Successful Failure. Ma Jiahui, the Wan Chai wolf, has a podcast. It has become a recent source of joy. Hearing his voice makes me laugh, and after the laughter there is some life wisdom.
Quote
“The future is already here—it's just not evenly distributed.” —William Gibson