Sun and Moon - The Presidential Election of 2040

[Unapologetic Chinaperson]

Is Vietnam becoming the “Prussia of Southeast Asia,” then, as predicted?

I would not describe Vietnam like that. Misadventures such as what Prussia did in the 19th century or what Vietnam did with Cambodia and China in the 20th century would not be tolerated. China is Vietnam's main trading partner and biggest source of foreign direct investment, and the Chinese Community in Vietnam plays a significant role in Vietnam. But Vietnam is careful not to be overly reliant on China, unlike Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, and (to some extent) Thailand, which are often referred to as Chinese satellite states by Western observers (or tributary states, if you're a Chinese nationalist).

[Unapologetic Chinaperson]

What is China?

By Caroline Hong

China is not a nation state.

Or at least it is not just a nation state. Sure, it acts like a nation state. It has nation state borders, nation state statistics - world’s largest economy, second largest population, third or fourth largest area, depending on who you’re quoting - and it even has a modern system of governance. And it also has recognition from other sovereign states, something that’s self-evident, especially after the Reunification. These are facts that we all know.

But these facts belie something deeper about what is China. First of all, we must define what is a nation state. As we all know, there are two parts to that definition - “nation” and “state.” “State” is easy - it’s a jurisdiction whose government is sovereign over its own affairs and is not responsible to a higher governing power. “Nation” is a bit more fuzzy. Does it depend on ethnicity and race? Or does it depend on institutions and common values?

Regardless of how you define the nation-state, it is a new arrival to our history. Most academics have its start be the Treaty of Westphalia, which was signed four centuries ago. But China has existed in some form ever since Qin Shi Huang founded the first imperial dynasty more than two thousand years ago. Since then, there’s always been a common Chinese identity. When China was disunited, it always managed to reunite under that identity. The Chinese language, Chinese art, the Chinese system of imperial governance, Confucianism, and other crucial aspects of Chinese civilization persisted for millenia. In other words, Chinese civilization has had a history whose scope and continuity is unlike any other in the world.

For that reason, China is not a nation state, but a civilization state. Most Westerners think that the term “civilization state” is a buzzword invented by a British Marxist and promoted by the Chinese president to puff the country up. But it does capture the uniqueness of the Chinese state that results from this unique two thousand (or five thousand, as most Chinese students are taught) year-old history.

So what does this mean? So what if China is a civilization state, especially if the rest of the world can interface it as a traditional nation state? Because the fact that China is a civilization state informs the nature of the Chinese government and Chinese society.

First of all, Chinese people identify themselves with a greater Chinese civilization. This is distinct from the ethnic nationalism that most European citizens identify with, or the identification with class and race in the US, or with caste and religion in India. China is dominated by one ethnic group, the Han, but the Han themselves are extremely diverse. A northern Han Chinese would look different, speak a different Chinese dialect (which are mutually unintelligible between each other), and have a different outlook on life than a Chinese person from the south. What binds them together is a shared civilization, characterized by its own writing system, art, philosophies, and history.

Perhaps the most important practical consequence is the Chinese government’s upmost concern for China’s unity. As I mentioned before, China has experienced many periods of disunity and weakness, and these were never good times. For example, during the Century of Humiliation, Qing China had its territory chipped away by Europeans who got its people hooked on opium. When that and corruption led to the fall of the Qing Dynasty, the resulting Warlords Era and the Japanese occupation resulted in the deaths of millions. Thus despite the tragedies they themselves caused, the Chinese Communist Party is still seen positively as the unifier of China after a century of disunity.

This priority placed on unity was why the reintegration of Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan were central national goals. To the West, the Reunification between the mainland and Taiwan is seen as a tragedy for democracy and self-determination, but in China, it is seen as the completion of a reunification process that took nearly a century. Once again, all of China was under one ruler, one government, under heaven.

This unity doesn’t apply just to China proper, however. It also applies to all Chinese, all over the world. It explains why an entity like the Chinese Community even exists. Regardless if a ethnic Chinese person lived their whole lives in Manila or Munich, they would be part of that shared Chinese civilization, an identity that transcends national boundaries and political systems.

Furthermore, unlike in the West, where the state has been checked by competing institutions like the Church and the media, the Chinese state had no such competing institutions. In addition, Confucianism describes the relation between the individual and the state as an extension of the relationship between child and father. For this reason, the role of the Chinese state in society is much, much greater than that of Western states. Obviously this has its limits - one cannot rule a country the size of a continent with an iron fist, so Beijing must always compromise with the provincial governments. But it explains why China has not transitioned to Western-style democracy, even after becoming a developed country, and why the CCP still maintains such control over Chinese society.

The fact that China was and is the most powerful country in the world, save for the 18th and 19th centuries, creates a sense of superiority in the Chinese consciousness. Historically, other societies, such as the Mongols, the Japanese, and the Europeans, were seen as barbarians. This sense of superiority is fertile ground for tension between Han Chinese and other ethnic groups, which explains the tense relations between the Han and both China’s minorities and China’s immigrants.

On the other hand, Chinese culture is open to multiculturalism. In the past, Buddhism and Taoism had existed alongside the dominant Confucian tradition. Today, we are also seeing a nascent culture of Chinese anti-racism, feminism, and LGBTQ acceptance gaining steam. Which brings up an important point: within Chinese civilization, there is incredible diversity between ideologies and subcultures. Look at the vast differences between Mainland China and Taiwan, or between any two Chinese provinces, or between the different Chinese Communities around the world. There is, after all, no one “correct” way to be Chinese.

Likewise, neither Chinese culture or Chinese civilization is static. Chinese society to this day continues to be profoundly reshaped by technology, globalization, and migration. Chinese civilization influences the rest of the world, and the world shapes China in turn. This has been so for millenia, whether it takes the form of Qin Shi Huang’s empire to today’s modern superpower. What form China will take on next is anybody’s guess. But as an culture and polity with no parallel on this Earth, we need to understand it, as we journey slowly but surely into this new world.

Caroline Hong is a professor of Political Science at the Paul H. Nitze School of International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

[Unapologetic Chinaperson]

China and the World, in 10 Visuals
By Sungyoung Lee
This article was first published in Visual Capitalist

With President Crystal Sun kicking off the Fourth Sino-American Dialogue, it’s easy to remember that China is the most powerful nation in the world. But exactly how powerful is it?

As the saying goes, a picture says more than a thousand words. People have written thousands of articles and think pieces about the Middle Kingdom, but there’s nothing better to explain the country than humble images and maps.

As in many fields, the Chinese were cartography pioneers; the earliest known Chinese maps date back to the 4th century BCE, during the Warring States period. Today, we present ten maps and infographics that show the extent of China’s power and how it influences our world.

1. The $2 Trillion Club



Regular maps are decent for showing areas and shapes (never perfectly, though!), but they usually fail in showing  more interesting facts like population and GDP. That is solved with what is known as a cartogram, which change the size of territories depending on whatever data is being shown. This cartogram, created by journalist Hyeonson Bambini, represents every country with a GDP (PPP) of over $2 trillion as an appropriately sized dot. China is obviously the largest dot, with India and the US each having economies a little more than half that of China. While developed country dots form a good chunk of the remainder, there are plenty of developing country dots, representing the rise of the “Global South” as they converged with the “Global North.”

2. The People’s Republic of Earth



There are other ways to appreciate the sheer scale of the Chinese economy. This is a map by Stanislav Minatozaki that shows China’s provinces, but not their actual names; instead, it names them after their nearest-sized economies, showing the sheer scale of some provincial economies. And by coloring each province by GDP per capita, it shows the disparities between the coast and the inland provinces that persist despite the government’s best efforts to reduce income inequality (though there has been improvements over the last few decades).

3. China’s Megacities



Economy isn’t everything about China; it also has the world’s largest urban population, as shown by this map made by American-Chinese Hua Joregestein. China’s largest cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou are more populous than many entire nations, while hundreds of millions live in smaller cities most Westerners have never heard of, like Zhengzhou and Shijiazhuang. They also drive the Chinese economy, producing a disproportionate share of the country’s GDP and being the headquarters of some of the largest corporations in the world. Which leads us to…

4. Meet the Megacorps



China has the nearly half of the 50 biggest corporations as measured by market cap, as shown in this beautiful infographic by economist Susan Massey. The United States actually has most of the remainder, with the rest scattered around the world. To absolutely nobody’s surprise, tech companies like Tencent and Alibaba take the top spots. There are also some more subtle points to be made, such as the lack of major US banks on the list (a consequence of all the bank-breaking during the Realignment) and a dearth of Chinese pharmaceutical and biotech firms despite China being the world’s largest market in those sectors.

5. The Chinese Diaspora



The Overseas Chinese form one of the largest and most important diasporas in this world. Overseas Chinese people, whether they are humble merchants in Madagascar or the President of the United States, are in virtually every country in the world. The relationship between the diaspora and the homeland is also unique, thanks to the Commonwealth of Chinese Communities, which links each nation’s so-called Community with the Middle Kingdom. Fatima Kuo beautifully captures the diaspora in one of her characteristic China-centric maps.

6. China’s Railroads



Kuo has also made a map documenting every mile of China’s railroad diplomacy. Said diplomacy varies greatly by country, province, and city. Some rail lines were are built directly by the Chinese; others were merely financed by the Chinese. Some were built by Chinese state-owned entities; others were built by private corporations. A few, like the TAZARA railway in Tanzania, were built in the 1970s; others, like the China-funded Seattle-SF high-speed line currently under construction, utilize the latest in maglev and vacuum technology.

7. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership



As part of China’s rise, the country rejiggered the global institutions that form the basis of our international trade and legal systems. For example, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) was established by China, ASEAN, and five other Asia-Pacific states in 2019 after the demise of a similar American attempt, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a few years earlier. After going through a number of revisions, such as the RCEP II overhaul in 2029, the RCEP today forms the largest trade bloc in the world, covering almost half of the entire world economy in PPP terms.

8. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank



The AIIB, founded in 2015, is another such Chinese-led institution. After the United States became its latest member in 2037, after decades of holding out, the AIIB boasts the membership of every country in the world except for Eritrea and Turkmenistan (and Kosovo, thought the AIIB doesn’t count it as a country). Despite its name and historical focus on Asia, it is today a truly global institution, with AIIB-financed projects going on in every continent, including Antarctica.

9. The String of Pearls



China’s interests extend beyond economic relationships; they are intertwined with its global security strategy. Though it started out as a term coined by American consulting firm BoozAllenHamilton, the “String of Pearls” has become the crux of China’s Indian Ocean strategy. Each “pearl” is a special-use port used (and usually built) by China; they serve as trade hubs, information centers, and peacekeeping bases, though each port’s specific role varies (and is usually classified). Along with China’s Atlantic special-use ports and its military bases in Africa and the South China Sea, the String of Pearls is vital to securing Indian Ocean from terrorists and pirates, though that hasn’t stopped India, Australia, and the US from complaining about it also being tool of the Chinese Navy to contain them.

10. The Southern Africa Group



China itself is not the only entity to act on the world stage; its mega-corporations move and shake the world on their own terms too. And none do so as much as the Southern African Group, a partially-state owned conglomerate that operates in Southern Africa. (Surprise!) Its power is impressive, especially when you consider that it legally controls an entire country and de facto dominates many others. It is obviously a controversial company; many African critics say that it singlehandedly ruins the goodwill that China spent decades cultivating with Africa, though many others disagree, thanks to the economic growth it has spurred in the region.

[Unapologetic Chinaperson]

Author's Note: This was probably the longest update I've ever written, especially since I had to do all of the research/speculation and graphic design myself. Hope you guys enjoy this unique style of timeline update! (Maybe I'll do some US maps as well some point in the future.)

Obviously the default resolution of these infographics are too small for most computer screens, so I highly recommend that you zoom in on them (it's "Open image in new tab" for Chrome; dunno for other browsers).

Also, as further crediting, the RCEP map is a future variant of this map and the AIIB map uses the color scheme of this map. Future GDP projects are partially on PriceWaterhouseCooper's The World in 2050 figures, while future Chinese province population totals (for GDP per capita calculations) are loosely based on these projections.

All dollar figures are in 2040 USD. To convert to 2016 USD, simply divide them by 1.873.

EDIT: I also retconned some figures for VirtualEarth and Barron Trump so that they match the graphics. Now the younger Trump has a net worth of over $820 billion.

[Unapologetic Chinaperson]

The Factions
By Jodi Sima of the Brookings Institute

The Chinese Communist Party is not like Western political parties such as the Democrats or Republicans. Rather than representing particular ideologies or interest groups, the CCP is an institution representing the entire country and is deeply married to the state; the distinction between state and party is fuzzy if not non-existent.

Thus, while inter-party conflict does not exist in China (notwithstanding the Taiwan League, a few minor parties, and banned groups), much conflict occurs within the CCP. Since its inception, the Party has had many factions vying for power, with factional conflicts being a major driving force in modern Chinese history.

While in the past most factions were focused on personal relationships, special interests and the like, the post-Xi CCP saw an emergence of new ideology-based factions, coalescing in the 23rd National Congress of the CCP in 2037. There are many such factions, and the borders between them are often vague and controversial, but in general there are the “Three Bigs” - the Social Progressives, the Traditionalists, and the Capitalists, with “The Taiwanese” forming their own major and distinct faction.

The Social Progressives（适应派）

Also known as “Chinese Liberals” or “White Lotuses,” the Social Progressives, or SPs, are the current dominant faction of the Chinese Communist Party, led by Communist Party Secretary Xie Guang. They are the newest faction of the CCP; during the Xi era, the values that today define the SPs were often mocked and criticized in the Chinese mainstream for being “Western” and idealistic, among other reasons. During the post-Xi years they remained an ill-defined group, but they coalesced during the 23rd Congress as liberal ideas resurged in popularity.

The SP’s views come from diverse sources in Chinese history, from Buddhist prescriptions on morality to the radical equality of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom to Mao’s views of social equality, as well as from the West. They view equality between China’s many groups as a moral goal and the only way to achieve social harmony. As such, they support feminism, gay rights, multiculturalism, bioequality, and even AI rights, and they aren’t afraid of moral engineering. As a faction, they are more comfortable with immigration, governmental openness, and democratic governance, with some even envisioning a transition to full multiparty democracy.

Like the Traditionalists, they are economically left-wing, though this varies between members. Some radical “New Left” types envision a return to Maoism, where the means of production are re-collectivized and all class distinctions are erased. Others support leftist policies within capitalism, with an emphasis on an extensive welfare state buffering against the worst effects of it. In any case, unlike their Western counterparts, Social Progressives do not view any distinction between “social” and “economic” policies; social progressivism without economic justice is illogical, while economic progress without social equality is immoral.

In foreign policy, they support the detente between China and the West. An internationalist faction, they support global human rights, though the rights they promote differ from those in the West. While Westerners promote liberal democracy and press freedom, the Social Progressives emphasize economic development, cultural self-determination, international democracy, and corruption elimination.

The SP’s base of support comes from two places - the cosmopolitan cities of the East (especially among educated and well-travelled youths) and the minority-heavy provinces of the West. Their symbol is a white lotus; the term was originally used as a slur (along with the phrase “white leftist”), but was reclaimed during the SP’s rise; today the lotus flower officially reflects the Buddhist origins of much Social Progressive thought.

The Traditionalists（卫道士）

The opposition faction to the Social Progressives, the Traditionalists follow from the “populist” faction of the Xi years, with much of the core membership made up of the Youth League or “Tuanpai” faction of that era. Like the Social Progressives, they place paramount importance on helping the poorest and most marginalized in China. Their economic policies generally overlap with that of the SPs, though compared to the SPs there is a noticeable preference for collectivist “New Left” models over the “social democracy” ones.

What the SPs and the Traditionalists disagree on are social issues. The Traditionalists see the SPs as promoting moral decline and believe that their ideas run counter to the ultimate goal of preserving the Chinese state. While the Traditionalists are opposed to gay marriage and immigration, typically right-wing positions in the West, they also oppose consumerism and environmental destruction, which are typical left-wing positions. They are the faction most supportive of the current governmental structure; the Traditionalists are the dominant faction in the civil service and most are staunchly opposed to further moves towards democracy.

In terms of foreign policy, they oppose the China-West detente and are suspicious of Western ideologies; as such, they see the SPs as an extension of the West. Instead, they prefer to mend ties with Russia, after the deterioration of relations between the two during the 2030s. While the Traditionalists do not oppose internationalism in principle and are champions of ties between China and the developing world (sans India), they reject the SP’s promotion of “human rights” in their worldview.

Their base of support comes from the relatively impoverished interior provinces of China. They do not have an official symbol, but they are informally associated with the hammer and sickle of the CCP as a whole; associations with Confucian imagery are also common.

The Capitalists（资本家）

The faction of business tycoons, tech CEOs, middle-class entrepreneurs, and “princelings” of historical CCP bigwigs, they support “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” in its, erm, purest form. They distinguish themselves from the other two major factions by being economically right-wing, dropping all pretenses of Communism from the Party. As a faction, they support low taxes, stronger private property rights, relaxed labor and environmental regulations, greater freedom to invest overseas, and a slew of other pro-business policies.

Like the Social Progressives, the Capitalists support immigration, as they view a declining native population is bad for Chinese power and their bottom line; however, they prefer the Dubai model of inviting temporary guest workers without any regard for integration into Chinese culture. They are the most gung-ho about technological progress and have a minimalistic view of ethical regulations. As for foreign policy, their main tool is not the state itself, but rather Chinese mega-corps and NGOs, many of which are comparable to nation-states in terms of power. That said, they are the faction most willing to use the state to restore the tributary system of old.

Their base of support, like that of the Social Progressives, comes from the wealthy coastal cities, which leads to the Capitalists to form shaky alliances with the SPs from time to time. Like the Traditionalists, they don’t have an official symbol, but they are associated with the Yuan sign for obvious reasons.

The Taiwanese（台湾族）

Usually considered the “Fourth Faction,” what’s unusual about this faction is that it partially exists outside of the CCP itself; members are divided between the CCP itself and the Taiwan League, a merger of two minor parties (the Taiwan Democratic Self-Government League and the Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang) and one of the seven parties that is allowed to exist along with the CCP in the United Front. Their base of support, of course, is the Taiwan Special Province, which was reunited with the Mainland under the “One China, Two Systems” policy in 2035.

Even in 2040, there is still suspicion in Taiwan that the CCP will strip away their rights and individual culture. The Taiwanese Faction is the main group that promotes these interests in Beijing. Besides political interests like maintaining Taiwanese autonomy, they promote business relations between Taiwan and the Mainland, which are essential to restarting Taiwan’s economy after decades of stagnation.

The Taiwanese Faction is notorious for creating alliances with some factions in the CCP while backstabbing others in order to maximize their negotiating position. However, as representing the most socially liberal part of China, the Taiwanese Faction often finds itself allying with the Social Progressives, and dialogues between faction members are commonplace.

[Unapologetic Chinaperson]

Dong Ri

The Dong Ri colony, with Tianhe-class blimp Niu Lang in the foreground and most of the other aerostats in the background. The Zhengren-class aerostat Hai Wang is not pictured.

The Dong Ri Space Science Center (Simplified Chinese: 东日太空科学中心, Traditional Chinese: 東日太空科學中心, lit. Eastern Sun Space Science Center), shortened to Dong Ri and informally known as Cloud City (Simplified: 云城, Traditional: 雲城), is a permanent manned Venusian research center operated by the Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA). It is the first manned outpost on a planet other than Earth. Commanded by astronaut Lang Kaili, Dong Ri is a floating colony that does not occupy a fixed location on the surface; instead, it consists of a series of airships, including four large Zhengren-class aerostats and two smaller Tianhe-class blimps used for short-ranged travel.

The concept of Dong Ri was inspired by NASA’s HAVOC plan, which was a concept for a Venusian colony operated by the United States. While plans for a Venusian colony operated by the CNSA languished for years, it gained renewed interest in the 2020s, after several feasibility studies studied the advantages of a Venusian colony over a Martian one. The Zhengren-class aerostats were first launched unmanned in 2036. They arrived at Venus later that year and operated unmanned until 2038, when the first 26 crew members and the first Tianhe-class blimp, Niu Lang, arrived at the colony. A second wave of 14 researchers and technicians arrived in 2039 on the blimp Zhi Nü, and another wave is expected to be launched in December of 2040.

The aerostats that constitute Dong Ri float 50 kilometers above the surface of Venus, where atmospheric pressures and temperatures are similar to that of Earth at sea level. Both classes of aerostats use hydrogen as their principal lifting gas, though the Zhengren-class aerostats also use nitrogen and oxygen to provide lift. As a scientific outpost, Dong Ri researchers study many aspects of Venus, including its atmosphere, geology, and feasibility for long-term terraforming.

[Unapologetic Chinaperson]

Une Communauté Unie
By Victoria Lee of the New Yorker

It was a crisp blue day when Chloe Leung gave me a tour of her restaurant in this corner of the 13th Arrondissement of Paris. Le Dragon Chanceux - The Lucky Dragon - was a small place, easily missed if one was walking briskly on the sidewalk outside. Yet it still made a name for itself, serving an eclectic mix of Parisian pastries and Vietnamese-Chinese cuisine. Chloe and I had to wait a good fifteen seconds for the door to clear, as Parisians and tourists alike swarmed the entrance for a chance to eat there. “Business varies,” she said. “Today is a good day.”

As I walked in, I saw an inside that was just as small as the outside. There was only one main room that was barely big enough for ten tables, whose walls were covered with a red and yellow wallpaper whose floral pattern stretched around the entire perimeter. There was a flight of white stairs that led upstairs, blocked by a chain with an attached sign that said “Employees Only” in English, French, and Chinese. Next to the stairs was a counter that had a hastily-installed wooden door that led to the kitchen. Hung on the door was the Chinese character for luck - 福, or fú - hung upside down, as it should be per tradition.

I saw two women standing at the counter. “They are my sisters,” Chloe said as they coöperated as only sisters could. With remarkable precision, they took orders and gave them to the kitchen staff, and I, being the American I was, marveled at the grace and efficiency with which the sisters switched between languages. In one moment, they spoke perfect Parisian French. Another moment they spoke Chinese; it was the Teochew dialect of southern China, Chloe told me, which many Vietnamese Chinese spoke. When I walked up and placed my order, they switched to English without hesitation. “Two croissants,” I said, ordering the most basic French food item I could think of. “Sure,” they replied.

When I got my two croissants and my cup of green tea, I sat down with Chloe. I told her that I was here to write about the Commonwealth of Chinese Communities, as well as Chinese Community of France, one of ninety such Communities officially recognized by the Commonwealth. Today, the Chinese Commonwealth is the most powerful diaspora organization in the world. Though Communities differ greatly, most assist their overseas Chinese members in similar ways. Many Communities let members have the incredible privilege of holding dual citizenship with China. (For most people, China does not recognize dual nationals.) For those that do not, members have access to special visas that allow for free travel to China. For members who wish to stay put, they still have access to the protective force of the Chinese state, as the Community maintains close relations with it and often serves as the overseas arm of the Chinese government.

Community schools serve as vessels to teach the next generation of overseas Chinese their language, their history, and their culture. Community banks assist member-owned businesses, whether through grants and loans backed by Chinese banks or by helping them access Chinese state patronage directly. Community-sponsored festivals, held year-round, celebrate Chinese culture, while Community-run social media platforms unite members within their Communities and with the wider Commonwealth. Community police forces and neighborhood watches defend members from crime and violence from within the Community and from without. And the Commonwealth operates its own cryptocurrency, E-Yuan, which is permanently pegged 1-to-1 with the renminbi and allows for easy access in the Chinese marketplace.

Most importantly, the Communities provide an identity and a sense of belonging to something greater. In a world where being a minority can be dangerous, this may be the most important benefit of all.

* * *

“I don’t remember that much, but I still have some memories of the Le Pen days,” Chloe said when we began our interview, referring to the five-year presidency of ultranationalist politician Marion Le Pen. To the rest of the world, Le Pen’s fulfillment of her aunt's revenge against the unpopular sitting president Emmanuel Macron was a disgrace to the French nation. But to the French, and especially minorities like Chloe, it was nothing short of Armageddon.

“When I was born, and when my sisters were born, my parents had to keep it all secret from non-Chinese people. My parents said it was part of Chinese culture to keep births secret from outsiders, but I quickly realized that it wasn’t the case. The real reason was to protect us from lynch mobs. There were lots of people that viewed every Chinese birth and every non-white birth as a genocide against white people and were willing to take things in their own hands.”

Chloe continued, despite being visibly upset by recounting her story. “There were demonstrations and riots. People were shouting racial slurs, saying ‘Go back to China’ on the streets and writing anti-Chinese graffiti everywhere. They were throwing stones, smashing skulls, all that stuff. They were emboldened by Le Pen. It was dangerous and we needed protection.”

I took a tiny bite out of my croissant, even though her story and her anguish were making me less and less hungry. “There were lots of French people who wanted to defend us, both white people and other minorities,” she added. “But it wasn’t enough. Blacks and Muslims did all they could to fight back, but in the end they had nobody to turn to but themselves.”

I nodded, fully aware of the pitiful social standings of both groups in France. As soon as Le Pen was elected, no time was wasted in targeting French minorities. Within a month, her party introduced the Lois Spéciales, or the Special Laws, which would discriminate based on nationality or neighborhood, or if one “defied the principles of French culture.” Only a thin veneer covered their blatant racism. Like the Jim Crow laws of the American South, these Special Laws continue to define the French minority experience even after they were mostly repealed or struck down; today; minorities suffer from a malady of ills due to systemic racism in France, from lower incomes and life expectancies to higher unemployment and school dropout rates.

The French Chinese fought back just like every French minority group during these trying times. They established their own police forces and leveraged the support of China, despite the suspicion many had towards their Communist government. It was, to them, a matter of making peace with the far enemy to fight the near one. And it was through this struggle that the Chinese Community of France was born.

[Unapologetic Chinaperson]

* * *

The Community of France followed in the footsteps of the Community of Malaysia, which started in a five-story apartment in Kuala Lumpur, halfway from the City of Light. Like the Community of France, the first-ever Chinese community was also a product of violent ethnic strife, particularly in the Great March Riot, the worst anti-Chinese riot in Malaysia in more than half a century.

Since the early 19th century, when large waves of Chinese immigration came to Malaysian shores, many migrants settled in urban areas and started businesses, which led them to accrue disproportionate amounts of wealth compared to ethnic Malays. Tensions came to a head in the 13 May Incident of 1969, where two to six hundred people, mostly Malaysian Chinese, were killed in ugly race riots in Kuala Lumpur. That incident led to the implementation of the New Economic Policy or NEP, which seeked to rectify the wealth divide between Chinese and Malays through affirmative action. But the NEP, by its very nature, sowed the seeds of the next round of violence.

The policies of the NEP, such as requiring university and public companies to set aside a certain percentage of university seats and stocks, respectively, for Malays, understandably infuriated the Malaysian Chinese, leading many to leave the country for greener pastures. At the same time, while many Malays themselves turned on the NEP and its successor policies, others who benefited from the affirmative action and resentful of Chinese prosperity dug in. Anti-Chinese sentiment flared up in 2015, when around 200 Malays went on a spree of vandalism and assault against Malaysian Chinese.

At the same time, right-wing populism was surging in most of the world, from the United States with Trump to France with Le Pen, in India, in Japan, and, of course, in China. Malaysia was no exception; the ruling political party was more than happy to welcome Malay chauvinism to distract from corruption and government incompetence.

The rise of this ethnic chauvinism populism struck fear into the hearts of millions, and they wanted a solution. Some thought that globalist cosmopolitanism, with people identifying not with a nation or ethnicity, but with all of humanity, was the only solution. Others, such as Jeremy Corbyn and the Realigner, looked to an identity based on class consciousness, uniting their diverse working-class constituencies as a proletariat fighting against the bourgeoisie.

But as Chinese nationalism surged in popularity, a different solution came into being, as Chinese pan-nationalism became popular the national consciousness. China was not merely one nation state among many; it was a civilizational state that transcended national borders. China was a global entity that would encompass every Chinese person in the world, no matter their physical or temporal distance from Mighty Beijing. Any ethnic Chinese person, no matter how long ago their ancestors left the shores of the Mainland, was a descendant of the Yellow Emperor and therefore part of China.

This sort of “civilizational internationalism,” “ethnic globalism,” or however one calls it was nothing new in China. In a 2016 article, the Economist described China’s view of the Chinese diaspora as part of a greater Chinese nation; a little more than a year later, the Chinese government created the first of a series of extended, “no-strings-attached” visas for foreigners of Chinese ancestry.

Nor is it unique to China. Perhaps the best comparison can be made with how many Muslims, identify with a global ummah, or Islamic community, regardless of Sha'b, or nationality. States that claimed to be caliphates, from the historical caliphates of Arabia to modern failed ones like the Islamic State, claimed to be the leader of all Muslims. The idea of such a global, distributive nation has shown up in fiction as well, with the best known example being the Phyles of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age.

With rising Malay ethnonationalism and resurgent Chinese pan-nationalism, it was only a matter of time before these sentiments clashed. And they did with the murder of a shopkeeper.

* * *

On March 1, 2023, Aziz Abdullah, a Malay fruit seller, was severely beaten by Wang Lai, a Chinese chef over a dispute over the price of apples. Though Abdullah was rushed to a hospital, he lost consciousness and died from his wounds. Wang was arrested and sentenced for manslaughter, while Abdullah became a martyr for Malay extremists who were thirsty with vengeance.

Over the next four weeks, rioters across the nation went around vandalizing any Chinese business and assaulting any ethnic Chinese person they could find; they also intimidated any Malay who had a conscience and spoke up against the violence. In one infamous incident, a group of Malay teenagers kidnapped an elderly Chinese man, tied him to a tree, and burned him while watching Top Gear on their smartphones. Despite the heinous nature of these crimes, the Malaysian police allegedly turned a blind eye, with some policemen even coöperating with the agitators and participating in the violence themselves. According to the Malaysian government, the death toll was 73, but the Chinese Community of Malaysia places it at around three hundred, making it comparable if not worse to the 13 May Incident.

Despite the Malaysian government’s best efforts to hide the violence from outsiders, graphic imagery was displayed on TV channels and shared on social media everywhere. While condemnation of the violence was swift and universal, the anger reached new and soaring heights in China. Chinese citizens, aghast at the violence against their ethnic compatriots, vocally demanded that their government do something to stop the bleeding.

If China were a regular nation state, or if the Great March Riot happened a decade ago when China was weaker and a universalistic Chinese identity merely an idea of an idea, nothing much would have happened. The Chinese government would say a few words condemning the violence as “unfortunate” and whatnot and stop there. But instead, the Chinese government took a much stronger stance, recalling its ambassador and demanding that Malaysia stop the riots, lest it would face economic sanctions, cancellation of Malaysian visas, or worse. Under those demands, the Malaysian government ordered a crackdown on rioters, ending a month of misery and suffering.

At the same time, a group of twenty-two Malaysian Chinese leaders met in a Kuala Lumpur apartment to unite the Malaysian Chinese under a single banner. In some ways, they already had elements of the Community working on the ground. They had their own Chinese-language schools, where most Malaysian Chinese children attend for elementary school (though far fewer in secondary school). They had the “Bamboo Network,” the network of Chinese-owned businesses that spanned all of Southeast Asia, they had temples where they practiced Buddhism and Taoism, and they had their own political parties.

Besides unifying these elements into a single Community, there were two main tasks at hand. One was to establish a self-defense force to defend the Community. After all, they were not going to rely on the Malaysian police, who were often corrupt and notorious for their brutality (when they weren’t being willfully ignorant of anti-Chinese violence). The other was to establish ties with China the nation state, so that they could create China the global civilizational state. To do that, a contingent of ten people from those twenty-two leaders travelled to Beijing, where they worked assiduously to establish ties between their Community and the Mainland.

From that first meeting and its initial success of the Malaysian Chinese, Indonesian Chinese leaders, whose group had also faced extensive historical discrimination (especially by the former president Suharto), saw what they did and established their own Community. Furthermore, they saw strength in unity and reached out to the Malaysians, as well as also establishing ties with the PRC.

After that, Chinese Communities started popping up everywhere, radiating out of Southeast Asia. Thailand, where partial Chinese ancestry is common, and Singapore, where three-quarters of the population was Chinese, were the next countries to have Chinese Communities. In other countries, Communities were established to protect ethnic Chinese from racial discrimination, like in France, or to further business and cultural ties with the Chinese mainland and the Commonwealth. Each took a different flair, but in the end they were all one people with the single goal of preserving and promoting Chinese civilization. With that goal in mind, each new Community found the support of other Communities, and so the Chinese Commonwealth began.

[Unapologetic Chinaperson]

* * *

At the time of this writing, introducing a Chinese Community of America remains a hot political issue, one that many Americans, including Chinese Americans like our president, remain staunchly opposed to. But it was surprising to Chloe that the United States didn’t have one, even though the country has one of the largest Chinese diaspora populations in the world.

“You don’t have one?” Chloe said, and I would nod, and she would nod, and it would go on for about a minute before we settled in an equilibrium of mutual culture shock. “How could you not have one?” Chloe would then ask “The Community here protects us and unites the many different groups of Chinese we have,” referring to the tossed salad of Wenzhou Chinese, Chinese of the former French Indochina, and immigrants from the Chinese Northeast that made up the diaspora in the country.

To explain why I, President Sun, and other Chinese-Americans had no Community to call their own, I pointed out that it was not for a lack of trying. Several Chinese-American groups, mostly located in California, tried to set up an American Community during the past decade or so, and their efforts had all ended in ignominious failure. Even the Association of Chinese Heritage, the most successful group to date, only reached about five thousand members in its height and was regarded as a joke by most Chinese Americans. It did not help that Presidents Castro and Sun, the latter of whom is Chinese-American herself, spoke out against such attempts, as did most members of Congress. Similar groups came and went in Canada, Australia, the UK, and New Zealand, despite all four countries having sizable overseas Chinese populations.

One could say that the United States was powerful enough to resist Chinese pressure to cave into their demands. One could also say that the Chinese-American community was simply too big and diverse to unify under a single banner, though that fails to explain how Southeast Asian nations are able to host Communities with memberships of millions. Some say that the political resistance is all due to Monsanto lobbying, after a dispute with a Chinese-Argentine farmer led to a confrontation between the biotechnology giant, the Commonwealth, and the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture.

I gave my preferred explanation to Chloe. “We are a nation of diversity,” I said. “We are a nation of immigrants. Even when Chinese-Americans or Irish-Americans or Cuban-Americans or any other immigrant group wants to respect their heritage and culture, eventually they assimilate into the multicultural American identity.” Same thing for the other Anglo settler colonies; without a single ethnicity to define their national identity, they were able to better integrate their immigrants and lessen the need for a protective Community. And it is why most Chinese-Americans, Chinese-Canadians, and so on identify not as Chinese first, but as American or Canadian.

Chloe was immediately skeptical. “You say you’re American?”

“Yes,” I responded.

“But you’re Chinese.”

“I am Chinese. I consider myself Chinese-American, even though I was adopted and raised by a white household, so I don’t really know about anything Chinese.”

“But people see you as Chinese.”

That was when I looked back. I looked back at my childhood, growing up in a small town in Eastern Tennessee and raised by an adopted family. My mom and dad, both white, loved me very much, but even they could not fully understand the struggles of growing up with a Chinese face in an all-white town. How some of my classmates said “ching chong” to my face. How some people in that town thought I should go back to China or how I belonged in an internment camp, just like the late President Trump in the infamous Nerdgate video.

I knew what she was talking about. I may consider myself American, but to others, I was forever Chinese. And I, as well as my fellow Chinese-Americans, should embrace that.

I explained to Chloe how a Chinese Community in America would only make things worse. Americans have long believed that immigrants would work for a foreign agent to undermine the country. The most famous reaction to this was the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant Know-Nothing party, made up of Americans who feared that Catholic immigrants would work for the Pope. Likewise with Trump’s Nerdgate video. A Chinese Community would confirm the worst of these suspicions.

“So?” Chloe said. “You think they would create more hate against Chinese Americans? But you’re already hated. You, President Sun, you Chinese Americans will always be viewed as guests who the host can kick out at any time. That could’ve happened under Trump; imagine what would’ve happened if America elected someone smarter like Le Pen. Without a Chinese Community, you all would remain sitting ducks.”

I swallowed the last bit of my croissant and drank the last remaining drops in my cup of tea. We continued on, switching the subject to something less uncomfortable. We talked about how the Community in France worked, with how it balances the interests of the different subgroups of Chinese in France.

“You see, immigrants from the Mainland generally like the People’s Republic,” Chloe said, describing the relationship between the Community and the Mainland. “But the Indochinese Chinese hate it because they hate communism, especially the older generations. It’s the main issue that defines our politics. Either we integrate ourselves with the PRC, or we distance ourselves. Either we seek dual citizenship or official state patronage of our businesses or whatever, or we chart our own course.” Sometimes, she added, the issue results in leaders from both sides physically fighting on the headquarters floor.

Soon, it got dark and I stated my intention to wrap up this meeting. But before I could leave, Chloe told me she wanted to show me something. She rolled up the right sleeve of her blouse and pointed to her wrist. On her wrist was a jade bracelet, colored light translucent green mixed in with milky white. On its glossy surface, I could see our faces as distorted reflections, shimmering under the blue-white LED lighting of the cafe.

“Jade is very important in Chinese culture,” Chloe said, “as you know. To us, as French Chinese, these bracelets mark our membership in the Chinese Community. We use them as our identity cards.” On one level, she meant literally; these bracelets hold their identification information and wearers use them to access Community buildings and services, as well as to pay with E-Yuan. But there was another level to what she said. To wear this bracelet meant that you were part of the Community and the Commonwealth, a Chinese person, a member of a civilization that knows no bounds of time and space.

I noticed something rather odd that unlike a regular bracelet, it was connected to her skin, and it looked as if the bracelet was pinching a bit of it under itself. I asked her about it.

“The bracelet is part of us. At the age of 18, when we wish to join the Community, we have it surgically implanted. It’s just like with any implant or augmentation,” she said, reassuring me.

“If you wish  to leave the French Community,” she said, “we do not remove the bracelet surgically. Instead you get injected with nanoparticles that dissolve the jade into the bloodstream, so that even if you don’t have the bracelet visible, the jade will always course through your veins. The Community will always be a part of your being. China will always be a part of your being. No matter where you are, who you became or what you believe in, you will always be Chinese.

[Unapologetic Chinaperson]

It's hard to express how good this TL is. It's unconventional in its focus (China), it's absurdly detailed, and you're very good at getting us to feel for the characters. Great job!

How some people in that town thought I should go back to China or how I belonged in an internment camp, just like the late President Trump in the infamous Nerdgate video.

EXPLAIN PLEASE

Explanation for the name of that video/scandal.

Also of note: that video nearly caused WWIII.

[Unapologetic Chinaperson]

Just a quasi-update: School has started and has been a never-ending cycle of homework (particularly for Intro Statistics and Algorithms). So updates will be slow and unreliable. That said, I do wish every Atlasian a happy Year of the Dog!



Also a minor retcon: I'm changing President Macron's successor from Marine to Marion Le Pen. France is still getting a FN presidency ITTL, alas.

[Unapologetic Chinaperson]

February 14, 2040 - Beijing, China

She read the last line of the article again.

No matter where you are, who you became, or what you believe in, you will always be Chinese.

It was the first article she ever wrote at the New Yorker, back when she was new to the job. The magazine issue she held in her hand was crinkled from months of use, with some of its pages bearing the stains of long-forgotten coffee spills. She always carried it around, and every time she turned to that page that she wrote, she reflected on her own identity.

My name is Victoria Lee. I am a 23-year-old American, born in China, adopted by a white family from Eastern Tennessee. Since my adoption, I had never been back to my birth country. Until now.

She looked outside the plane window and peered below. Growing up in a small town near Knoxville, that American city formed her prototype of what a city was, and so she was amazed by the size of Baltimore when she went there for college. She could scarcely believe how nearly a million souls could form this giant city. Ten million souls was out of the question, yet she was confronted by that size when she moved to New York City after graduation. Surely nothing, she thought, could possibly be bigger than the Big Apple, the City That Never Sleeps.

But as Beijing came into view outside the airplane window, below the great blue sky, she saw a metropolis of a different scale. Below the shadows of the scattered clouds floating like wilted cotton balls, the capital city formed a quilt of gray and green, its highways and railroads weaving through a fabric of apartment complexes and vast parklands. In the distance, the hand of humanity had sculpted the surrounding plains into fields of glistening blue and black stretching to the horizon, forming solar farms that provided the vast amounts of energy needed to sustain Beijing. The mountains ranges beyond, which in a previous era may have awed the locals, seemed distant and miniscule in comparison to the man-made wonder that was the city.

As if the city itself beckoned the Airbus A500 towards its embrace, the plane descended. The highways grew from one dimensional lines to three dimensional arteries, as millions of mostly blue-white cars that plyed seas of concrete and asphalt and silicon came into focus. Buildings transformed from matchboxes and dollhouses to the monuments of engineering they were - glass and steel and concrete soaring into the air, their curves and lines reflecting the sun’s rays back into the sky. The people themselves, too, came into view, first as ants, then as flesh-and-blood humans living with their hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Their combined life energy was so strong, Victoria could feel it pulsating from thousands of feet in the air.

It wasn’t long before the plane reached the ground. On cue, the roof lit a bright pastel blue whose color filled the whole cabin, alerting the passengers that they had to get ready to depart. The speakers, too, had to signal the plane’s arrival. “欢印您到北京机场,” a gruff male voice said as if it came from a pilot, even though United Airlines had replaced them with artificial intelligence years ago.

Using her implant’s translation ability, Victoria heard “Welcome to Beijing Capital Airport” instead of the original Mandarin. But with a feeling of slight trepidation, she gave it a command. Turn off translation. On one hand, she wanted to hear the language of her heritage, but on the other hand, she didn’t know a single lick of it. She hoped that customs would be gentle to her, but she mentally prepared for the worst.

Her decision soon felt moot, though, as the artificial pilot repeated the sentence in English himself. She mentally shrugged and she stretched on her tippy-toes to get her luggage from the overhead bin. Slowly, she tried her way to the front exit, frustrated by the slow movement of the crowd of humans that stood around her blocking the aisle.

Waiting for even the tiniest bit of movement by the crowd, Victoria looked around and up. On the roof, curved green arrows glowed on top of the blue, pointing to the front as if the passengers were too stupid to know where the exit was. They did their job in vain as every other passenger hunched down to focus on their smartphones or dazed around as they connected their minds to the Internet. As Victoria’s eyes darted from one zombie to another, she realized that she had nothing better to do, and that this was perhaps the best time to plug herself into the Chinese internet.

“Welcome to China!” said a female persona in her head, thankfully in English. She had a tone that sounded like a cross between an NPR reporter and a biologics saleswoman. “You are now connected to China Unicom through the Beijing Capital Airport Wifi Network. China Unicom provides the fastest speeds with the most widespread coverage in all of China. Please enjoy the full extent of our services, from free public wifi to our special virtual-reality-only networks, and have an amazing stay.”

Funny how the network knew that I speak English, she thought. Even in this era of ubiquitous AI and daily data mining, she still managed to appreciate the small miracles that made her world function.

It wasn’t long before Victoria found herself at the front of the plane. There, a young female attendant stood in the front wearing uniform that, except for the blue and white United logo sown on her sleeves, was of pure red and gold, its silk fabric glowing under the yellow and blue lights of the plane. As she greeted passengers heading into the jetway, she found that most ignored her, though some passengers gave her a “Thank You” or ”谢谢” as they walked passed. Victoria looked at the attendant. She looked just like her - long black hair, mousey blue eyes, and skin as pale as the moon. Perhaps she would be this woman, she thought, had her life went slightly differently.

But Victoria noticed that the attendant had noticed her too. She was surprised; despite her upbringing, she had a Chinese face, just like most of the people on the plane. Yet the attendant gave her a look the she gave no one else. And as she was thinking, a female voice that belonged to the attendant played in her head. “欢迎你...Vic...Victoria.”

Instantly, Victoria turned her face to the attendant’s and made a confused look, realizing that it was her that gave that mind-to-mind message. The attendant gave a look of confusion in turn, followed by one of embarrassment as her cheeks glowed a bright tomato-red.

“Oh...ahm...you...ahre...sorry, my English not so good,” the attendant messaged, keeping her mouth in the form of an silent embarrassed grin. A bit of sweat dripped off her otherwise clean forehead.

As someone with poor foreign language skills herself, Victoria couldn’t help but sympathize with the flight attendant. She turned her audio implant’s translation functionality back on again and motioned the attendant to repeat herself in her native language.

“Are you Victoria Lee of the New Yorker?” she messaged again, the words now properly translated in real time.

Victoria, despite her poor Mandarin skills, decided to give the language a bit of a spin. “是的” she messaged. “Yes, I am.”

“Oh my goodness,” the attendant messaged, “I read the New Yorker every day, and your articles are my favorite!”

Now she felt flustered, realizing that she had a fanbase, albeit a small one. “谢谢” she said. “Thank you!”

“You’re welcome,” the attendant messaged, as Victoria made her way onto the jetway and into a new world.

[Unapologetic Chinaperson]

It is said that a country’s worth is measured by the qualities of its airports. An airport is, after all, the first building one encounters as one enters a country, and everybody knew that first impressions were everything. By that measure, China was no slouch. It was the most powerful nation in the world, so it built the best airports in the world. And it was only natural that Beijing Capital Airport was the best of the best.

Terminal 3 of Beijing Capital Airport was huge. Very huge. The roof formed a second sky that presided over the vast open space that encompassed a seeming infinity. Between pale white support beams that seemed to reach hundreds of meters into that second sky, thousands of tiny windows let in just enough light to choreograph a dance of time and space, blur the distinction of inside and outside, and create a harmony of yin and yang.

In stark contrast to the vast Norman Foster-esque roof above, the ground below was a sight of cacophony and chaos. It was the Lunar New Year, and right now billions of Chinese were criss-crossing the country to celebrate the holidays with their families. Every year, transportation hubs overflow with people squeezing into every nook and cranny to get from Point A to Point B, and Beijing Capital Airport was no exception. It was to her displeasure as she realized, while stumbling into the seas and mountains of the warm bodies shuffling through the terminal, that the next few hours were going to suck.

To Victoria’s slight relief, at least the lines were moving. Immigration was a breeze; her passport and visa stamps had RF technology embedded in them; that, combined with advanced facial recognition and X-ray technology, allowed people to walk through security checkpoints like nobody’s business. The trams were tougher. She boarded too late to get a seat, so she ended up standing in the exact middle of the aisle, surrounded by chatterboxes, crying babies, and men with halitosis.

Once she got off however, she was excited. After walking past some more security she found herself like a baby in a candy store. To her left and right were hundreds of duty-free stores selling everything from clothes to ice cream. There was an Apple Store, selling their latest iHolos for the low low price of one hundred thousand yuan. There was a Semir outlet displaying the latest in C-pop and K-pop fashion; this month it was BTS showing off the futuristic black neo-Punk outfits they plan on wearing for the Super Bowl. There was even an In-and-Out Burger, the second one she ever saw. The first one was in Las Vegas; after buying an Animal Style cheeseburger at that establishment, she realized that their food was overrated thanks to the loud mouths of jealous Californians.

But what interested Victoria the most was a Paris Baguette vending machine, tucked in an alcove between the In-and-Out and a KFC. The South Korean chain, despite filing for bankruptcy during the Crisis and being the butt of jokes from French people, has had a successful run over the past few decades, opening stores around the world from New Jersey to Nairobi. In line with the global automation revolution, they opened up thousands of vending machines like the one Victoria saw.

She hadn’t had anything to eat for over ten hours, so she squeezed through the crowd to get to that machine. Its many products were displayed in a window in a neat six-by-eight grid, the earthen textures of the pastries desaturated by the pale blue glow of the “Paris Baguette” sign above. Despite this, they still looked appetizing, especially to a hungry Victoria agonizing over the many choices the machine offered. Should she get the black banana bread? Or should she go with the Dutch Toast, with pre-applied nut spread covered with chocolate sprinkles?

“Hi Victoria,” a female voice said out of nowhere. She realized that it was the vending machine talking to her. “It looks like you’re choosing which of our pastries to buy. May I suggest a croissant?”

Ah, the humble croissant. There were croissants wrapped in plastic, fitting snugly in a nook located just under the “U” in “Baguette.” Victoria remembered ordering a croissant a year ago back in Paris, in Chloe Leung’s restaurant as she interviewed her about the Chinese Community. It looked just like the one on display now, and she remembered it vividly. The flakiness and freshness of the bread and the smells it conjured into the air. The final result of a family’s true love for baking, created over many generations from a mix of two cultures.

“Sure,” Victoria messaged the machine, mentally placing her order. It automatically deducted $8.24 from her account while the croissant slowly emerged from its pigeonhole, before it fell into a chamber at the bottom of the machine ready to be picked up.

Victoria snapped out of her contemplation, grabbed the croissant, unwrapped it and took a bite. The croissant was cheap and stale, she quickly realized, with just the slightest hint of plastic to enhance the flavor. She didn’t care, though; she was hungry and desperate. In five bites she ate it all before diving back and making her way towards the taxi terminal.

[Unapologetic Chinaperson]

The walls of the taxi terminal were made of glass. The glass had a slight greenish tint, which gave the lobby a bit of an Emerald City vibe. And just like the metropolis from The Wizard of Oz, the airport was filled with people from different walks of life. Such people included overworked salarymen, husbands who had quit their jobs after getting tired of being overworked salarymen, girls with anime hair, confused Europeans, even more confused Africans, and of course hucksters offering “tours” to popular tourist traps in Beijing. Aside from those wannabe tour guides, all of them had one thing in common - they all needed to hail a taxi, and they were willing to wait three hours in a queue to get one.

Being stuck in that queue, Victoria went through her mental checklist of things she needed to do. She needed to get her taxi and program it to go to 200 Xi Jinping Road. Yes, she recalled, that was the right number, and this was the correct Xi Jinping Road. It was there at the hotel where she would meet Maya Kuo, her friend from college, who had arrived a day ago from her hometown of Singapore. It was some time since they had last reunited, three long months ago.

And from there, now what? Why was she even here? On a surface level, this was a vacation. She and Maya would stay in hotels all across China for two weeks before returning to the States, where she would write up a summary of all the interesting sights and sounds she encountered during her stay. Lots of readers loved her stories, and this story would be the most exciting yet. It would be the perfect adventure, a mission to lands far away.

But Victoria wanted a deeper purpose. Introspection, perhaps. She wanted to connect back to her heritage, after an entire lifetime of separation. And she also wanted to find her biological parents, even though she knew this was a futile task. She had no leads, nor a roadmap or really any idea how to begin. But if she found an opportunity to find her family, she thought, she would take it without hesitation.

One thought passed into another, just like the planes that landed and departed outside, carrying thousands of passengers to destinations unknown. With little else to do except for watching those metal birds soar outside, she closed her eyes and plugged herself back into the Internet, reading and listening to today’s news with her mind’s eye and ear.

“Presidents Sun and Xie discussing Africa, joint mission to Alpha Centauri”

“Four university students kidnapped in Changchun; Neo-Rationalist Buddhists suspected”

“Democrats start taking a look at first Super Tuesday”

“Galbraith, McKesson square off in Maryland’s special Senate election”

“U.S. Senator Lee Carter (D-VA) contemplating retirement this fall”

“Rep. Emma Gonzalez (D-FL) blasted NRA ad as ‘exploiting racial minorities’ fears’”

Boring, she thought, other than the kidnapping story. She opened her eyes and let them wander, drifting from looking at the planes outside to the people inside. She noticed the details of the men and women standing around her. In front was a Asian man, probably Chinese, in a suit and tie. He was turned sideways from the direction of the queue, and though he said nothing, his sweat-covered face contorted into different expressions one moment to the next. Clearly, Victoria realized, he was having an argument over the Internet. With whom, she could only guess. Maybe he was doing intense business negotiations? Maybe he was arguing with his wife on where to go for dinner.

She turned around her to face another man, this one a somewhat tall white guy with dirty blond hair and cool hazel eyes. He was clean shaven, with a mere hint of blond fuzz lining his jawline. Like the Asian man in front of Victoria, he wore a suit, with a tie that had colorful tropical fish printed on it. His hands, which glowed with a light shade of pink, rested on the queue dividers, his long fingers drumming as if the man was waiting for something. His eyes wandered, sometimes looking at the ceiling, sometimes at the planes outside, and never at her directly, but even so he caught her attention and she couldn’t look away. Like Victoria, he looked bored, yet unlike her, he looked like he came to China to do something great.

He looked like a fellow American, Victoria thought, though he could also be European - she didn’t want to assume. Maybe he was even one of those rich foreigners who immigrated to China thinking that they could start new lives. Was he an English teacher here? Was he a good person, or was he one of those amoral losers who goes to foreign countries to hook up with local girls. The possibilities were endless, something she knew from her experience as a journalist, and there was only one way to found out.

“Hey,” she said softly. In the din of the terminal, nobody could hear her, not even herself.

She tried messaging him instead, hoping that he would have an open implant. “Hey,” she said, even quieter this time as if the entire terminal could intercept her message. “How’s it going?”

This time, the man noticed her perked up. “Hi,” he said to a smiling Victoria with his real voice. It pierced through the loud din of the terminal and grabbed her focus, like the only sound in the world worth paying attention to. He probably had an implant too - not a brain implant like she had, but a voice box implant to adjust and enhance his real voice.

“I’m good,” he said. “How about you?”

“Good,” Victoria said in a slightly louder voice. She still couldn’t hear herself, but the man did. He must have astute hearing, she thought. She observed how he was not surprised that this strange girl was suddenly talking to them. At the same time, she struggled to come up with more to say. “So, what are you doing,” she said, “here in Beijing?”

“Who, me?” the man said. “I’m a teacher,” he said. “I used to teach for Los Angeles Public Schools, but recently I moved to Beijing to teach at university. I just came back from LA after spending winter break with family.”

So he is a Western immigrant! Victoria thought, proud that one of her predictions was correct. “Do you teach English?” she asked, wanting to prove or disprove more of her assumptions about this figure.

“No,” the man said, grinning as if he was about to laugh. “I mean I help students with their English sometimes, but I’m a lecturer for the university’s Spanish department.

“That’s cool,” Victoria said, realizing why the man might have a voice implant. “I’m assuming you also speak Chinese.”

“Yeah,” the man said, ruffling through his short blond hair, which rippled under the cool breeze of the air conditioning. “I don’t want to say that I’m the best, but my students say it’s pretty good. Good enough to teach other languages with.”

“That’s better than my Chinese,” she said. “Like I’m Chinese but I barely know any.”

“Oh, are you Chinese-American?” the man asked.

“I’m actually adopted,” she said. “I was born in China but I was raised by a white family in Eastern Tennessee.”

“Easter Tennessee? That’s nice,” the man said, his eyes rolling towards the ceiling as if he had a strange thought. And he did. “That’s Democratic, right? Appalachia, right? So it’s Dem.”

“What did you say?” Victoria said, confused. She tried to make sense of the bits and pieces of that thought she managed to hear. Appalachia. Democrat. She thought of herself as a semi-junkie when it came to politics, and she was used to people bringing up politics at the most random times, but this still surprised her. Especially considering that it was American politics in the middle of the capital of China.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” the man said. “I just have a tendency to think out loud. Yeah, it’s a nice place. I’ve been there once. Lots of mountains to hike in.”

“Yeah it’s super duper gorgeous,” Victoria said. “I actually grew up in a town right next to the Great Smoky Mountains. It’s Sevierville. It’s a very touristy town in Appalachia.”

Victoria looked at him with a quizzical expression as she took a step back, to fill in the space left by the moving queue. The man noticed and stepped in kind as she searched for questions to ask himself. “If I don’t ask me, what’s your name?” she asked.

The man ostensibly paused for a second before he said anything, but Victoria thought she heard him mumble something out of the corners of his mouth. “I’m Timmy, Technocratic Timmy,” he seemed to say, but she wasn’t sure.

“My name’s Timmy,” he said again, this time for real. “Timothy Miller to be precise.”

Timmy. She repeated the name in her head again, over and over.

It was something she did every time she hears that name. And every time she hears it, she thinks of that six-year-old boy she used to play with.

Timmy.

[Unapologetic Chinaperson]

LOL at Timmy being in this.

I swear if I get a reference that'd be cool but I don't expect it.  Just have Madigan please be dead and universally remembered as a horrible human being.

Lisa Madigan?

[Unapologetic Chinaperson]

LOL at Timmy being in this.

I swear if I get a reference that'd be cool but I don't expect it.  Just have Madigan please be dead and universally remembered as a horrible human being.

Lisa Madigan?

Michael.  Why?  Did Lisa beat Cheri Bustos in the 2020 Senate Race in this TL?

Oh. Michael Madigan is dead by 2040, but there are people way more hated than him. (Such as Trump, for example.) Lisa never becomes Senator, though.

[Unapologetic Chinaperson]

Even the best of Chinese efficiency could not resolve the mess that the Lunar New Year caused every year. Three hours was a long time waiting in line, and without anything better to do the two kept talking.

Victoria gave her name and her occupation after Timmy completed his own introduction. Timmy nodded along as he listened, painfully aware that it was years since he read any American magazine, let alone the New Yorker in particular.

They soon took turns diving into their own life stories. Victoria spoke of her experiences growing up Asian in Appalachia, of family and friends, buddies and bullies, God and monsters, racist rednecks and cunning scalawags. She described her adopted parents; her dad a park ranger and her mother was a high school biology teacher. As people who valued learning and education, they encouraged her to do well in school. She described the look on their faces when she told them she was accepted by Johns Hopkins University, validating their hard work of raising her, their treasure. She told him about the friends she made there and how they opened her mind up to the world. She even mentioned the celebrations the university had when one of their own - Crystal Sun, Class of 2017 - was elected President of the United States.

Their conversation became as winded as one of the many trails that weaved through the Appalachian mountains. As a little girl and the child of a ranger dad, she often hiked with him, taking note of the trees and ferns that grew alongside the trails and observing the little animals that scurried along. She grew up with the outdoors, but only a small part of it; her parents were frugal and didn’t travel at all. It frustrated Victoria, since all her life she wanted to see the world. That was a big reason why she became a journalist, she explained. Going to France, the first foreign country she visited as an adult, was an eye-opening experience, as she finally experienced what she previously saw only in books and on websites.

Knowing that Victoria was a trained writer who wrote for one of America’s most prestigious magazines, Timmy let her do most of the storytelling. He was perfectly content with letting his ears listen to Victoria’s life as his eyes observed the going-ons of the world outside, with its soaring planes and its scurrying people. He kept his own stories short. He described his experiences growing up as an average boy in sunny suburban Orange County. He described his interests, namely politics, telling about the fun he had as a young man exploring the nooks and crannies of American politics.

“It’s actually a Republican place,” Victoria corrected as they went back to discussing how Republican or Democratic different parts of America were. “Most people think Appalachia’s super-duper Democratic, but that’s Kentucky and West Virginia. Most of eastern Tennessee is pretty Republican. Sevier County’s actually an exception because of all the unionized park rangers and tourist workers who live there.”

“Yes,” Timmy said as he was being corrected. “I remember now. Appalachian Tennessee was always pretty Republican since the Civil War. They didn’t have a mining union tradition like the other places you mentioned.”

“Yeah,” Victoria said. “But unions are important here nowadays. Both of my parents were in unions. My mom’s part of the state teachers union and my dad is part of a park ranger union. Basically unions determine who you voted for. If you’re in a union you’re Democrat. Otherwise you’re Republican. Simple.”

“Cool,” Timmy said as the two shuffled with the moving line. “But I wouldn’t say simple. Back when I was your age all of Appalachia was so Republican like you wouldn’t believe it. If you went there you didn’t have to guess if they’re union or not or if they were Democrat or Republican. They were all Republican. You can’t get more simple than that.”

“That’s true,” Victoria said. “That was true when I was really little. But then the Realigner came and changed everything up.”

“He’s called the Realigner for a reason.”

“Duh,” Victoria said, blowing off a strand of hair that was hanging in front of her face and blocking her view of Timmy.

“I mean,” he said as he gazed at a Qantas plane that was about to land, “where I’m from, OC, we used to be super Republican before we became Democratic. But then the Realigner raised everyone’s taxes to pay for all of your stuff and everyone became super-pissed at him so they went back to being Republicans.”

“Hey hate the game not the player,” Victoria admonished as she struggled to keep that strand of hair away from her eyes.

From there they kept talking about politics, from the rise of China to President Castro’s hairstyles. Along the way, Timmy mentioned an obscure website called the Atlas Forums that he used to go on a lot as a college student.

“So you went by ‘Technocratic Timmy’ on that site,” Victoria said. “Oh okay now I get it.”

“Get what?” Timmy said, not remembering how Victoria picked up on his old screen name.

“Nothing,” she said. “You mentioned that you still remember a lot of people on that website.”

“Oh yeah I do remember quite a few old Atlasians,” he said. “Like the President. Crystal Sun used to be an active poster.”

“Wait...what the pineapple?!” Victoria said, borrowing a catchphrase from Amber Glass, one of Sun’s political opponents.

“Yeah she went on there as a poster,” Timmy said. “I think we even talked on Discord,” he added, mentioning the once-popular social media platform that was later be bought by VirtualEarth. “She wasn’t super-memorable back then. She was mostly your standard Democrat, pretty socially liberal, though even back then she had somewhat fiscally moderate tendencies. We left the forum at about the same time, though, so I was also all ‘WTF’ when I realized that she was the Atlas poster ‘NJ Dem’ all those years ago.”

“I wonder,” Victoria said, “do you two still talk now that she’s President?”

“Haha nope,” Timmy said, chuckling and tapping on the Plexiglass queue dividers.

“So the President used to go on Atlas. Who else?”

“One other guy I remember well was TD. ‘The Doctor’ was his full name.”

“Like ‘The Doctor’ from Doctor Who?” Victoria asked after trying to remember the name of that show.

“Yep exactly,” Timmy said. “It was a very popular show when I was a kid, more popular than...uh I don’t even know what’s the most popular show on TV right now!”

“The Spongebob anime?” Victoria suggested.

“Thank you!” Timmy said, looking relieved. “Yep. He wrote this huge future timeline called ‘Between Two Majorities’ that predicted everything.”

“What do you mean everything?”

“Everything,” Timmy said as he and Victoria shuffled forwards in line again. “He predicted the Crisis and he predicted that there would be a Realigner who would follow eight years of Republican domination.”

“He predicted the Realigner?” Victoria asked, looking confused.

“Oh you don’t understand how bold that kind of prediction was,” Timmy added. “Nobody would’ve thought that there would be a Realignment, not after Trump. This may sound ridiculous to you but everyone back then predicted he would turn America into a fascist dictatorship. Or that Republicans and Democrats would get so divided there would be a legit Civil War Two. Nobody thought that America would get so liberal or that it could even elect someone like the Realigner.”

“No I get it,” Victoria said, trying her best to show she wasn’t totally ignorant about pre-Realignment politics.

Timmy listened as he rolled his eyes again in contemplation. “Okay, now that I think about it, TD didn’t get everything right. He thought Trump would resign and that the Realigner was going to be the former Treasury Secretary Richard Cordray. He also thought China would collapse, but he admitted that he was totally guessing about that, so I'll excuse him for that. But for the most part he was mostly correct about everything. He was also brilliant in style as well as substance. Like you, he was an amazing storyteller, one of the best I've ever read.”

“Oh thank you!” Victoria said, instinctively going into full cutesy-pose mode after hearing the compliment.

“This is the third time I complimented your writing during this conversation,” Timmy said, smiling. “So who else was there on the Atlas who I could remember.” He paused, then had an insight. “Now that I think about there was someone who you remind me of in particular, in backstory and I guess in demeanor. I just remembered her name.”

“Who was it?” Victoria asked, bobbing with excitement.

“Her name was Kamala.”

[Unapologetic Chinaperson]

“Kamala Harris?” Victoria said, mentioning the name of the FBI Director.

“No not Kamala Harris,” Timmy corrected. “If Crystal Sun and Kamala Harris were both on the forum the place would’ve exploded a long time ago. No this was a different Kamala. She was a girl from South Dakota who was on the forum for several months, maybe almost a year even. She was a good person, very independently minded, and she even had an amazing timeline everybody loved. But one day she said she had some real-life commitments to attend to, and so left the forum. A lot of people missed her and waited for the day she would come back. That day never came.”

“Wow, that’s sad,” Victoria said.

“To be fair I left a short while after,” he said. “Atlas was becoming a distraction from my own life, so I totally understand Kamala’s motivations.” He shuffled his feet and looked at his reflection on the polished tiled floor. “One day, a few years after I left the forum I was waiting in line at a Starbucks. It was a line like this one, except that it was way shorter.”

“How long do we have to wait?” Victoria mused, looking at the front of the line.

“Actually I think we’re almost done,” Timmy said, pleasantly surprised. “Probably not even fifteen minutes are left.”

“Oh thank goodness,” Victoria said with a sigh of relief.

“Anyways there was a girl in front of me, with brown skin and dark curly hair, who was on her phone with someone. I forgot what they were talking about, but I remember that she was pretty angry. When they finished talking I head the person on the other side saying ‘Bye Kamala’ before they hung up. I wondered if this was the Kamala I and so many other Atlasians got to know.”

“Did you ask her if she was Kamala?” Victoria asked as she watched a Ethiopian Airlines plane fly into the sky.

“Nah,” Timmy said, “I didn’t want to sound like a stalker. Instead I pretended that nothing weird was happening and I just ordered my drink. This was back in the dinosaur age when the barista called out your name when your drink arrived. So they called my name, I got my drink, and I sat down at a table close to the counter. Guess whose name they called out next.”

“Kamala,” Victoria said with a silent chuckle.

“Correct,” Timmy said, satisfied with the answer. “And actually, guess what happened next. She came up to me and asked if I was Timmy from Atlas.”

“Really?”

“Yep,” he said. “I think she recognized me from the pics I put on the Discord.”

“Oh wow,” Victoria said, nearly stumbling this time as the line moved again. “What happened after? Did you keep talking?”

“Yeah. We talked about a lot of stuff, like politics, but Kamala especially talked about what was going on in her life. Basically after leaving Atlas she had to get on with her actual life, but once she got that fixed she was doing pretty well. She started going to UT Austin but she wanted to change majors, so she decided to transfer to the University of Southern California. That was actually pretty lucky for her, since SoCal managed to get out of the Crisis pretty good. We didn’t get destroyed - at least not until the earthquake, but that was after the Crisis - and we had a relatively decent economy.”

“But back to Kamala,” Timmy continued, “she found a job here after she graduated. I forgot what it was, but I think it was at some news company like Vice or Buzzfeed. We kept in touch. I introduced her to my friend group, including my girlfriend. She was all-in-all good friend, just like on Atlas. But then, just like on Atlas, she left us.”

“Oh no what happened?” Victoria asked. “Did she die or anything?”

“Well,” Timmy replied with a look of nervousness crystallizing in his eyes. “She started leaving the country a lot, going to India and Madagascar where her family was from. Usually she would come back to LA and tell me and her other friends about all the cool stuff she did overseas, like helping out family and doing humanitarian work.”

Timmy put his hands in his pockets and looked down. “But then one day, she went on what we thought was another one of her trips, she just disappeared. She was just gone. A few days after she left the US, she stopped replying to text and Facebook messages. Her family in both the States and overseas also realized this and tried to contact her, but she didn’t reply to their messages either. We all got really worried. Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months, and before we knew it it was a year since she last replied.”

“Oh my god I’m so sorry,” Victoria said, the first hints of tears appearing in her eyes.

“Since then her family has prayed that she would return, to no avail. Everybody I know assumes that she passed away when she was abroad, but nobody really knows what happened. The State Department doesn’t know either, her family contacted them and they couldn’t get a hold of her, and neither does the Indian or Malagasy governments. For all everybody knows she just vanished without a trace.”

Victoria sighed and sulked, looking at her own reflection on the floor below. “I’m sorry for your loss, Timmy,” she said.

“I actually think she’s still alive,” Timmy said. “Everybody else thinks she’s dead, but I think she’s out there, hiding somewhere. Don’t ask me why I think this. I just know.”

Victoria looked at Timmy’s wandering eyes again. “You know,” she said, “I also had someone in my life disappear, never to be seen again.”

“Who?” Timmy asked with a plain tone, his look of sad remembrance turning into one of curiosity.

“He had the same name as you,” Victoria said. “Timmy. Timmy Gonzales. I knew him growing up in Sevierville, when I was really really young. He was my best friend when he was six.”

“What happened when you were six?” Timmy asked. His voice was soft and quiet, but its gravity alone was able to cut through the noise of the airport.

That was when Victoria let the waterworks begin. “He...he...That was when his family was deported by ICE.”

“Wait, wait, what? Like deported deported?” Timmy said, his usual contemplative personal wiped out by a look of complete shock.

“Y-y-yeah,” Victoria said. “Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.”

“What.” Timmy said with a frozen face. “What. The. Pineapple.”

“Yes,” Victoria said. “I was going to ask my mom to drive me to Timmy’s place when she told me the news. Several ICE agents showed up at his house and took his parents and his brother to a detention facility. They didn’t know where Timmy himself went at the time.”

“Okay,” Timmy Miller said, “Let me get this straight. Timmy’s parents and brothers were detained and I’m assuming deported. They were illegal immigrants, right?”

“Yeah,” Victoria said. “Everyone except for Tim.”

Timmy’s face sunk further into resignation. “Oh my frickin’ god,” he said as he cursed the late President Trump’s name and looked around for something he could kick. Growing up in southern California, deportation stories were nothing new to him. But he never expected to meet someone who would just up and tell him about the time their childhood friend got deported.

“And then,” Victoria said, pausing with each sob, “they deported his family back to El Salvador. I heard that they were murdered by gang members as soon as they returned. Those gangs remembered that they escaped them, and those gangs wanted revenge, so they shot them. Just...shot them.”

“Jesus Christ,” Timmy said. “What happened to Timmy himself?”

“He was born in America so they didn’t deport him,” Victoria said. “He left Sevierville to live with his aunt and uncle and their five children. That’s what my parents said. Since then, I never heard about him ever again. But even so, sometimes, I hear his voice, his soft, 6-year-old voice, in dreams and in daydreams. It’s the only part of him I still vividly remember.”

“Jesus,” Timmy mused. Looking to break the somber tone of their recent conversation, he took off his backpack and rummaged through it, before stumbling across a soft mass covered in a thin sheath of paper and aluminum foil.

“In-and-Out Burger?” Timmy asked. “Best burgers ever. I’m so glad they now have stores here in China.”

Victoria, still wiping off dried tears off her cheeks, suddenly felt awkward. But she didn’t had to say anything, once Timmy noticed that they had finally reached the end of their three hour wait.

“I think I see daylight,” he said as he unwrapped the foil.

“Wait, what do you mean - oh,” Victoria said as she saw the Asian businessman in front of her step through a pair of automatic glass doors into the outside world. Several pod taxis were lined up in front of the terminal, their blue and silver paint making them look like iridescent pearls on a necklace. The man got into one and in five seconds pulled away from the curve, driving itself to somewhere far away. She knew that she was going to be next.

“Bye Victoria,” Timmy said, waving his hand. “I hope you have a nice vacation.”

“You too,” Victoria said. “It was a nice talk we had. I hope that we can see each other soon.”

“Ha, I hope so too,” Timmy said as he bit into his lukewarm burger, thinking about his plans to do great things.

[Unapologetic Chinaperson]

March 7, 2023 - Sevierville, Tennessee

The boy was six years old and already knew how to generate electricity. A plump yellow lemon sat on the carpet in front of him, with two pennies stuck into them like mini-Mickey Mouse ears. Calmly, the boy grabbed a pair of alligator clips and attached them to the pennies. A tiny red LED at the other end of the wires glowed. It was a dim glow, barely visible under the rays of the evening sun, yet it was there, pulsating like a beacon of hope.

But there would be no hope for little Timothy Gonzales today. As he admired the lemon battery he had created, he heard knocking downstairs, followed by heavy footsteps. Then screaming.

“They’ve come!” the boy heard his older brother say, the two words piercing the air like the shriek of a witch. Without hesitation, Tim dropped his circuit and ran to the kitchen, where he found four men clad in uniform surrounding his parents, who stood there helplessly as they awaited their fates. The uniforms they wore was nothing special - black vests worn over olive long-sleeve shirts, with black pants and baseball caps to complete the outfit. Three letters - I.C.E., Immigration and Customs Enforcement - were printed on their vests, the bone-white ink stained by years of accumulated dirt and grime.

Tim saw fear in his parents as he stood helplessly surrounded by the four men. he saw the almost-invisible sweat that beaded on their foreheads and observed their chests heaving up and down with each breath of air. He saw their eyes looking at him, their son, with a sense of pleading. This will be okay! they seemed to say.

In contrast, none of the four ICE men showed fear on their faces. They looked bored instead. While three of the four men patiently stood watch over the parents, their hands resting on their guns and handcuffs, the fourth was writing something on a pad of yellow lined paper. To those four men, this was simply another Tuesday, another day on their job.

“Mommy!” Tim said, jumping up and down to get their attention. “Mommy! Papi! What’s happening?”

“Mi hijo, don’t make too much noise,” the mother said, trying to calm her son down. “It’s going to be okay. It will be okay.”

“This isn’t okay!” Tim said, knowing that ‘okay’ did not mean seeing his parents in handcuffs. He realized that his parents would say anything to reassure him, even if the world around him was splitting apart into shards of despair and darkness. He asked the ICE men. “What are you doing with Mommy and Papi?”

The ICE man with the yellow notepad turned to face Tim. His face, one of around forty or fifty years, had a five o’clock shadow on it, with several stray hairs poking out of the sparse wrinkles that criss-crossed his face. Underneath the calloused skin, blood rushed to his cheeks, creating a pink hue that was accentuated by the orange of the sunset. Little Tim could tell that it was a face that had seen all sorts of things over the years.

“Young man,” the man said softly, “we’re here because we have an important job - to uphold the law. Laws are important, right?”

Tim nodded slowly.

“Without laws and rules, we wouldn’t be safe. Imagine if someone tried to rob a bank. That’s bad, right?”

Tim nodded again.

“Or if somebody tried to rob your house. That wouldn’t be nice, would it?”

He nodded yet again, but now he had a question. “If robbing houses is bad, why are you doing that right now?”

“Tim!” his dad said in panic. “Don’t question them! Don’t say anything that can get you in trouble!”

As soon as he said that, a door exploded. Two more ICE men stormed into the kitchen as they carried Tim’s 14-year old brother from the living rooms, their hands trapping the young man in their unshakable grip.

“You can’t deport me!” Tomas said as he resisted their grips, twisting his body as the two ICE men struggled to restrain him. “I’m more American than you redhats! F[in]k you guys! F[in]k Trump! F[in]k you deplorables! F[in]k all!”

“Tell that to the judge, boy!” one of his captors said, his face tomato-red with heat and anger and his armored vest drenched with sweat. “You ain’t going anywhere!”

The man with the notepad turned to look at the struggle scene before he turned back to face Tim. “Sorry young man, but we’re going to have to leave soon.”

“Are you taking my parents?”

“Yes, we have to. It’s our job.” He walked over to the rest of the men and motioned for them to leave the door, taking their three arrestees with them.

Panicking, Tim ran up to the notepad man with a plea. “Can I come with them?”

“Unfortunately no,” he said as the ICE men escorted his parents out of the house, making sure that they kept their heads down as they walked out of the door. “But you can’t be alone in your house, so you will have to come with me.”

“Really?” Tim said as the other ICE men finished handcuffing Tomas.

“Yes,” the notepad man said, “that’s how it works young man.”

Tim watched Tomas follow his parents outside, walking towards a black van parked at the curb right outside their home. No longer physically resisting but still muttering curses against everything under heaven, Tomas gave one final look at his brother. He said no words to Tim, but the message his eyes sent a message as clear as day: Get revenge.

Tim slowly closed his eyes, feeling the tears that had welled up, and opened them again. Nobody remained, with the exception of the notepad man who stood at his side. As Tim turned to see the aftermath - toys scattered on the ground, the broken kitchen door - he felt a thing of dirty plastic and fabric rest on his shoulder. It was the man’s glove.

Turning back around, Tim looked at the notepad man again, with his well-worn face and the resting countenance he had kept the whole time. Like Tomas, he too had a silent message. You, he repeated once more, are coming with me.

[Unapologetic Chinaperson]

February 14, 2040 - Beijing, China

Tim returned to being Victoria and the old Sevierville sunset gave way to the bright Beijing afternoon as she woke up from her mid-ride slumber. Nervously, she looked around, checking that she wasn’t still in a dream. No ICE men, she observed to her relief. In fact, there was nobody else in the pod at all, save for the pod taxi’s AI system, which didn’t count. It was, as far as she knew, just herself and her alone.

“Wakey wakey, rise and shine,” the AI said, speaking to Victoria in English with a light female voice, her accent containing a hint of stiff-upper-lip Britishness. “I hope you had a nice nap.”

“Yeah that was some nap,” Victoria mumbled, too quiet for any human to hear. She shifted her weight in her seat, which was a big semicircle covered with aquamarine fabric that was attached to the rear of the pod’s circular frame. In front was a ledge lined with stripes of blue LEDs. It was made for passengers to rest their elbows on, and that was what Victoria did, as she mused on what was going to happen next for her.

“Are we there yet?” she asked the AI, consciously repeating that cliche line.

“Ten minutes,” the taxi responded. “We’re almost there.”

“Great.” Victoria leaned against the curved window of the pod and observed the moving landscape around her. The organized complexity of the airport, with roads and terminals weaving whichever which way, had given way to vast spaces of green punctuated with apartment complexes. Vines and other greenery wrapped around the glass of those buildings, as those buildings were designed to be one with the nature around them, a nature that was sculpted by man yet no less real. Below the shadows of these buildings, which towered thirty, forty, or even fifty stories in the air, were malls, parks, and other buildings, covered by glass domes that undulated with the hills and valleys of outer Beijing.

Cutting between those buildings was the highway, one of the many members of the Beijing Ring Road system. On the autonomous-only road that Victoria’s taxi cruised on, the other autos looked less like vehicles and more like speeding bullets, or like falcons flying through their air chasing down their fearful prey.

But even as she looked at the scenery outside and the plush interior inside, she couldn’t help but think about the nightmare she just had. She thought about how she became, for that one fateful day, Tim Gonzales, and how vivid the experience was. This wasn’t a dream or a nightmare, she realized. This was a vision.

She had had thoughts about Tim before, how they played together before that moment came. She had thoughts about what could have been, how they might still be friends or even a couple today. Sometimes she thought about what his voice would sound like all grown up today, and sometimes that voice would play all day in her head. Sometimes it felt real, as if Tim was speaking to Victoria through her implants or her dreams or whatever.

It was a lot of think about, and under the warm Beijing sun she was about to fall asleep again. But then the pod slowed down, took an exit ramp and went through a boom gate before stopping in front of her destination.

“We have arrived,” the taxi said. “Have a nice day!”

[Unapologetic Chinaperson]

Victoria felt like a queen in the shadow of the Dong Feng Hotel. With every step she made, the sidewalk made a soft fuzzy green, leaving her footsteps and her suitcases’ track marks glowing against the chrome concrete. To her left and her right, vibrant beds of red roses and hot-yellow chrysanthemums blossomed in the 70 degree February weather, striking a contrast against dark green leaves. She could hear horticulturalist drones buzzing around as the dodged the rhythmic spurts of fountain jets.

The hotel itself was massive, stretching forty-so stories into the air. Flanking it were about ten apartment buildings that were equally as tall, gleaming under the sun as their leaves trembled in the cool northern wind. And to think this was a suburb, Victoria thought. To her American mind, a suburb was a sprawling monstrosity of detached homes, each with two autos and a dog. But in China, Manhattan would barely count as a suburb.

With a calm and cool stride, Victoria walked in the hotel lobby and felt a blast of air-conditioned air. It was a relief, she thought as she admired the room. It was built like a large half-circle, with its curved side made out of glass windows and its flat side being a faux-mahogany wall with fancy watercolors of Chinese landscapes. On either side of the lobby were several small wooden tables that had gold-trimmed cigarette holders and piles of magazines on them; they were surrounded by tan upholstered chairs that looked extraordinarily comfortable. To Victoria, used to her parents’ asture house, her tiny Baltimore dormitories and her even tinier New York apartment, this was an epitome of luxury.

But what struck her the most was the design or the check-in counter. It was not a counter at all. Instead it was a metal circle that looked like a teleporter pad from Star Trek. Two semicircular koi ponds partially surrounded it, glowing a sapphire blue; the partition between them formed the bridge to get on and off the pad. She knew what to do - there were signs around it - but she still stepped onto it with trepidation. She was very familiar with hotels; not only did she stay in lots of them when she reported in Europe, she also worked at the Sevierville Clarion as a teenager. All of those hotels had traditional check-in counters, even if some of them were self-service. But this? She may as well be in Wakanda.

As she stepped on the glowing circular pad, Victoria felt a strange relaxation as the system scanned her implant and the koi ponds cycled through the colors of the rainbow. This was much more convenient than the usual check-in counter system, where even one forgotten paper can screw everything up. Though in the back of her mind, Victoria wondered how this would work for people without implants or smartphones.

In practically no time, her check-in was complete and the mahogany walls parted to reveal a chrome elevator cab. Victoria stepped in carrying her suitcases and the doors calmy closed behind her, leaving her alone in the cab with the faint stench of cigarette smoke. “Lobby to Floor 23,” the cab said as it automatically sent her to her floor. As she turned around, she noticed there was also a manual button panel that, to her bemusement, had a ton of buttons that were missing. She was used to hotels leaving out the 13th floor, and she knew about the number 4 being bad luck in East Asia, but this hotel went the extra mile. Besides 4 and 13, the number 2 was missing, as were 12, 14, and so on, thus making the “52” floors more like 45.

Soon, she landed on her floor and she headed straight for her room, which conveniently was just two doors away from the elevators, on the left. She unlocked the door using her mind as the room key; at once the door greeted her with a digital “Welcome to Beijing!” message before opening up.

The room was as fancy as the lobby, with its faux-mahogany flooring, smooth quartz-looking ceiling and intelligent walls. Two fluffy beds formed the centerpiece of the main room, with a kitchenette snuggled into an alcove. Taking a look at the bathroom, Victoria found that the shower had gazillions of buttons to allow her the perfect shower experience and that the toilet was obviously imported from Japan.

Victoria noticed two opened suitcases half-filled with scattered clothes, lying in the corner of the room. Maya had arrived; she was not here at the moment, but Victoria should be prepared to meet her old college friend. In the meantime, she casted her suitcases aside and fell into the bed closer to the window. It was a long day, she was tired, and she didn’t care if she was going to be eaten by a mattress today.

Maybe some good old-fashioned television would be good, she thought. To her pleasant surprise, she found out she could turn on the hotel TV - or rather, the hotel’s smart walls - with her implant and even change the channel. In most American hotels, you still needed to fumble with whatever germy remote they gave you, though all the Las Vegas hotels upgraded to this sort of electronic compatibility to placate their Asian guests.

More important than knowing how to change the channel was knowing what channels to change to. Tired and unfamiliar was Chinese media, she aimlessly scrolled through state news reports on the Sino-American dialogue, WWII-era dramas, and documentary films about long-lost Chinese artifacts, in the vague hope that she would stumble on something exciting to watch.

Soon, after several minutes of channel surfing, she stumbled upon a familiar show: the Spongebob anime. This was a show she could watch, she figured. Hopefully her translation software knew how to handle Japanese-translated Chinese.

“Are you ready Patrick?” Spongebob said as the two lied in ambush in front of Plankton’s secret lair in Rock Bottom.

“Sure am,” Patrick said in agreement.

“Good,” Spongebob replied, nodding. “On the count of three, two-”

“One!” a girly voice screamed as the front door burst open. “Guess who’s here?”

Victoria immediately jumped out of bed and ran to hug Maya. “Ohmygodyou’rehere!”

“I can’t believe we’ve been apart so long Vicky!” Maya said as the two embraced each other in their bear hug.

“Do you have Singaporean candy?” Victoria asked. “Haw flakes? Wang Wang biscuits?”

“Even better,” Maya said as she let go of Victoria and opened her knapsack to grab a handful of cubes wrapped in silver. “Powdered Milo.”

“You mean the drink?”

“Yep. You just put it in water and you drink it. No shaking required!”

“Wow,” Victoria said as she sat back in her bed. “I’m so glad we’re together again. This vacation is going to be so awesome!”

“I know,” Maya said as she went into the bathroom to fix up her hair.

Victoria rolled on her bed and looked outside as the smart wall kept on playing Spongebob in the background. The sun was setting and the bright blue sky was turning into a purple and orange twilight. In the distance behind the lush green foreground of parkland and preserved forests, the skyline of Beijing began to light up, as befits a city that never sleeps.

“It’s getting late,” Victoria said. “Do you have any plans for what to do tonight? Dinner?”

“Even better,” Maya said as she got out of the bathroom. “I know this place in Sanlitun - that’s the main entertainment district - that’s really great. It’s very secret - you have to be in the know to get in. Like, really in the know.”

“Nice,” Victoria said. She was always the more cautious type in comparison to Maya, but this seemed exciting. Hopefully she had enough energy to go out tonight.

[Unapologetic Chinaperson]

February 14, 2040 - Sanlitun, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China

“Here we are!” Maya said to Victoria as the two climbed out of their pod taxi. Maya did so with great excitement as she looked forward to dancing the night away. But Victoria stumbled out like a zombie, fixed in awe at the city lights of downtown Beijing.

“So this is the place,” Victoria said, slackjawed as her words floated into the cool night air.

“It is indeed,” Maya said.

“Not even Times Square is like this,” Victoria mumbled as she scanned the sea of glass and concrete surrounding them. “I never saw so much light before.”

The two stood like ants on the mile-wide street flanked by postmodern Apple Stores, mile-high IKEAs, and other monoliths to capitalism. Strings of thousands of LEDs blinked on and off as they traced the edges and outlines of megamalls and IMAX theaters like lines of a Mondrian painting. Billboards advertised everything from Huawei implants to Tencent smart homes, Hyundai taxi rentals and Colgate toothpaste. Even the sky itself glowed, as blues, greens and oranges fought for themselves on the canvas of the heavens.

“Haha you mentioned all this light,” Maya said. “May I add a bit more?”

“What?” Victoria asked.

“Look at me.” Maya’s party dress was one of complete darkness, jet black from the carbon fibers that gave it strength with beauty. But in one go, Maya made a complete pirouette and let intricate flowers of light bloom on the fabric. Veins of fiber optic light lit up Maya's leaves and petals as her light coursed through them, the colors of rose pink and jade green ebbing and flowing like the artificial stars around them. Around her neck, her necklace glowed at the same time, its light emanating from inside the six translucent pearls that made up the centerpiece.

“Dang girl,” Victoria said as she looked between her own dress and Maya’s. Her dress, a white one with gold trimmings her parents picked out back in Sevierville, paled in comparison.

“Designer cheongsam,” Maya said, using the Chinese term for the type of one-piece dress she wore. “The future of fashion. Technologically advanced and extremely sexy. Made in Singapore.”

“Okay,” Victoria said. “Thanks for making me feel not sexy.”

“Oh come on, you’re plenty sexy,” Maya said. “I can get you your own cheongsam next time if you want. I’m sure there’s a fancy dress store around here.”

“Nah it’s okay.”

“You sure?”

“Let’s find the place okay? We can worry about this when we’re drunk and everything.”

Maya rolled her eyes, her advertising efforts having clearly failed. “Follow me,” she said, pointing to a nearby alley.

“It’s in there?” Victoria said?

“Yes?” Maya said. “You think a place as sketch as this would be on this main road?”

“No?”

“Good.” With Maya in the lead, the two walked into the alleyway.

In stark contrast to the infinite expanse of street they were dropped off on, the alleyway was barely wide enough to fit two people, let alone two thousand. Victoria struggled to even breathe as she struggled through the sea of people streaming in and out of the stores and bars around her. She was particularly hypersensitive to her dress snagging on something and ripping to shreds, a possibility Maya didn’t have to contemplate with her form-fitting carbon fiber cheongsam.

“Hey,” Maya said, barely audible above the din of the night time crowd. “How are you doing with that cheap dress and no makeup?”

“No makeup?” Victoria asked as she struggled through the crowd.  “I spent an hour putting on this dress and my natural makeup. Just ‘cause y’all are complaining that my face doesn’t look like plastic doesn’t mean that it doesn’t look good!”

“Haha sure,” Maya said as she made her way to the entrance of their establishment.

“So this is the place?” Victoria asked as they stopped under a ice-blue neon sign.

“Yep,” Maya said. “蓝月酒吧。 Blue Moon Bar.”

“You sure?”

“Yep.”

Victoria took Maya’s word for it; to her, the hanzi may as well be alien writing. Nervously, she looked around at the concert of neon surrounding her. Above, red lanterns hung from wires, swinging to and fro in the evening air. White raindrops drizzled from the trees above in the form of LEDs as they too swayed back and forth in the gentle Beijing breeze.

Right now, Victoria thought as she tried not to get a seizure from all these flashing lights, all she wanted was a drink, whether it be a bottle of pop or a can of Natty Boh. Nothing else mattered. Especially not getting an argument with your friend, especially not one who was also your tour guide. Victoria forgot how many times Maya went to Beijing, and she suspected that Maya lost count herself. Being part of a Chinese Community, she thought, has its perks.

“Vicky,” Maya said, interrupting Victoria’s train of thought, “we’re here. Just stay close to me. I’ll get us in.”

Victoria looked at Maya as she walked towards a woman guarding the entrance of the Blue Moon. The woman had snow-white skin, her hair as black as charcoal. Her lipstick was redder than blood and her eyeliner was thicker than it. Her fashion matched her vampire makeup. She wore a bold red miniskirt held in place by a black leather belt with a buckle that had “蓝月” printed on it in gleaming silver. And her white top was scandalously low-cut; between that and her wearing a push-up bra, the woman would not look out of place on VirtualEarth After Dark.

As soon as she saw Maya, her normal stoic appearance gave way to a gleaming smile. “Welcome back Maya!” she said as she turned towards her with childlike glee. “We missed you for so long!”

“You don’t worry,” Maya said, “I’m back to play.”

At once, Maya placed her right hand on the vampire woman’s outstretched palm. When they connected, they glowed a deep neon green, with streaks of milky white coursing along their veins as if their hands had become made of jade. “You have indeed returned home, Maya.”

“I sure did,” Maya said as she let go, the glow disappearing as soon as it appeared. The vampire let her pass as Maya gestured Victoria to follow her.

Victoria tried to follow Maya, but the vampire immediately stopped her. “This is a restricted establishment,” she said with her usual stoicness having returned to her face. “You cannot follow her unless you too are a Member.”

“Uh,” Victoria said. “Can I at least try the palm thing you just did with Maya?”

“Yidong,” Maya said, “she’s with me. She’s my best friend.” The two didn’t hear her, however, as Victoria for whatever reason tried to repeat the gesture. To Victoria’s dismay and non-surprise, nothing happened when she placed her own hand on Yidong’s palm. No green light, no nothing.

“I said,” Maya repeated, louder this time, “she’s with me. I’m letting her come with me.”

“You are?” Yidong asked as she turned to face Maya. She turned back to face Victoria, who was slapping Yidong’s palm repeatedly with no effect, with a look of uncertainty. “Are you her friend?”

“Uh, yeah I am,” Victoria said, keeping one eye on Yidong and the other on Maya.

“Oh okay,” Yidong said. “Maya is one of our most trustworthy Members. Her word is golden. You may enter the Blue Moon.”

“Thank you,” Victoria said as she walked into the Blue Moon. Grabbing Maya’s arm, she followed her into a pitch-black sanctum, which fell further into total darkness as soon as Yidong closed the doors on them.

“What’s happening?” Victoria asked as she tried to find her own face in the complete void of light and color.

“You’re in for a surprise,” Maya said. Though she couldn’t see her at all, Victoria knew that she had a huge smirk on her face.

They soon felt the ground below them being gently lowered as the whirls of elevator gears grounded above them. One second, then two seconds, then three. They landed, and behind them, the elevator doors opened to a world of psychedelic color that was the Blue Moon Bar.

[Unapologetic Chinaperson]

“欢迎你” a voice greeted them as the door opened, cutting through the din of the bar. Victoria turned around and saw a young woman barely older than her standing at the threshold. Befitting the name of the establishment, she was sporting blue. Blue hair, blue dress, blue skin. Her eyeliner was blue, and so were her lips. On the top of her head were a pair of cat ears with blue felt fur, twisting and turning just like they would on an actual kitten.

“Hi,” Victoria said as she fixed her gaze on the charming yet disturbingly realistic cat ears. Surely they were just one of those gimmicky headphones that she sometimes saw her classmates wear on Halloween, she thought.

“That’s Kiki,” Mayu said. “She’s an employee here. If you want her to get you drinks she’ll be more than happy to serve you.”

“Welcome to Blue Star Bar,” Kiki said, in heavily-accented English. That was when she also noticed Kiki’s tail, which was a large long ball of fluffy blue fur swinging back and forth between her legs.

“I’ll show you the rest of the bar,” Mayu said as she cheerfully guided Victoria deeper into the cave. The entire place smelled of tobacco, alcohol and liberation. The lights above gave the cave a deep red glow, punctured by jelly-bean colored spotlights. Electro house music blared through speakers embedded in the walls, which displayed bouncing designs that blended ‘80s aesthetics with ‘30s tech and ‘40s postmodernism.

Like with Kiki, Victoria couldn’t look away from the other bar patrons. Some looked like regular people until she saw cat ears or fox tails. Some had anime hair and technicolor skin. One even had rainbow skin that continuously changed color like the surface of a soap bubble. And it looked like people from all over the world patronized this bar, from football fans in beer-stained jerseys arguing in Italian, to suave businessman in sharp tuxedos discussing the latest business deals back in Nigeria.

Victoria and Maya walked passed a group of Asian girls mingled amongst themselves sipping mimosas. Or rather, Asian-American girls, as Victoria instantly recognized; despite their Asian appearances, their accents and Western makeup made them as foreign as the foursome of white frat bros standing next to them having a passionate group PDA session together. The fact that they were wearing  “Rock 4 Senate” T-shirts with Dwayne Johnson’s face pasted onto a white background also helped to identify them.

“This is a popular migrant bar, right?” she asked Maya.

“You mean for expats?” Maya replied, using the outdated term for Western immigrants in China. “Of course! It’s a very popular place for foreigners, whether they’re American or European or African. Lots of Americans go here to enjoy the sexual liberation they miss at home.”

“Ha ha ha,” Victoria laughed humorlessly. She always cringed when she heard foreigners talk about America as the world capital of sexual promiscuity and moral degeneracy, as if it was Blue Moon blew up into a country and as if places like God-blessed Appalachia didn’t exist.

“And,” Maya added, “despite being underground, lots of Western artists come to this bar to perform, especially in secret. Last month, it was Steve Aoki playing his new EP here. Before that it was Post Malone trying to be relevant again.”

At once, the music got a lot quieter, and the DJ signaled the entire bar to give him their undivided attention. He was a white man, probably American, with enough energy to fill up ten younger men. He wore an eclectic wardrobe - a blue baseball cap with unintelligible text on top of sunglasses, gold chains, and a black trench coat that came straight out of The Matrix films.

“Hope that y’all be havin’ a great time tonight!” the DJ said as he took off his sunglasses and raised a V-sign in the air. To Victoria’s surprise, he spoke with the sort of Tennessean drawl she was so familiar with. Why some white guy from Tennessee would go all the way to Beijing to DJ at this sort of crazy place was beyond her.

“Before this piece ends I want to give y’all your favorite gift from me!” he said through a bunch of female-sounding screams. “That’s right! It’s that time again. It’s time to see me shirtless!”

Without the slightest hint of shame or hesitation, the DJ ripped off his leather trench coat with the stroke of his left hand, revealing iridescent feathers that covered his entire upper body from back to front. Almost every square centimeter of his skin below his neck, from arm to chest to belly button, was covered with a thick coat of down feathers that made his body a canvas of every color known to man. The red light of the bar blended with reflected blues and purples on feathers that ruffled with each twist and turn he made with his unusual body. This was a guy, Victoria saw, that was not afraid of his own body or who he was. He didn’t just have the colorful appearance of a peacock; he had its attitude as well.

“I love you DJ HillGoose!” a random man in the crowd screamed.

“Thank you, thank you very much,” HillGoose said, quoting a line from his fellow Tennessean, the late Elvis Presley.

“Can you come down and dance with me?” another man said. “My sister can DJ for you!”

“Ooh, I want to touch your feathers!” a third said.

“Why don’t you do your face?”

“Cheapest price for goose surgery?”

“Now now,” DJ HillGoose said, “I know that y’all want a piece of me, since I’m a goose and y’all are not, but don’t forget we got an entire night of music we gotta play! Now, I’m going to play for y’all an old classic from the early aughts. Pre-Crisis 21st century style, made from Russia with love! Everyone, boy humans and girl humans and fellow animals, much love and no hate, 7th Element by Vitas!”

With a sleigh of hand, the song began to play. Giant technicolor polka dots started bouncing about on the walls of the bar.

Ya prishol dat' etu piesnyu...
Ya prishol dat' etu piesnyu...
Ya prishol dat' etu piesnyu...
Ya prishol dat' etu piesnyu...

It was a catchy song, Victoria had to admit, even if it was a strange one, and she started dancing to the electronic beat. With each beat of music came a beat of the heart, the synthesizer and the drums moving the melodies to and fro as Vitas used his incredible voice to sing his song for the sake of love.

Chandra Brambra Chandra Chandra Bendram...
Chandra Brambra Chandra Chandra Bendram...
Chandra Brambra Chandra Chandra Bendram...
Chandra Brambra Chandra Chandra Bendram...

She was enjoying it so much that she didn’t notice Maya disappearing from her view.

But notice she did, eventually, and with realization came panic. “Maya?” she said as she scanned the pulsating environment around her. “Maya?”

No response, nothing but the continued din of the bar and the smooth singing of Vitas.

“Maya?” she repeated. Still no response. “Maya?” She was so concentrated in trying to find Maya that she didn’t notice herself bumping into someone.

“Oh, sorry,” Victoria said as she reflexively backed away from her. The woman had dark hair and an olive complexion. She wore a dress of deep olive green covered in sequins and LEDs, while she held a martini in her right hand.

“Oh are you okay?” the woman said as she turned around. From her accent Victoria could tell she was a fellow American, though she couldn’t pin down what part of America she was from.

“Thanks,” Vicky said.

“You’re welcome,” the woman said as she paced in front of Victoria. “How are you doing tonight? I heard that you were finding your friend.”

“Yeah.” Victoria said as she did another 360, to no avail. “Ugh I can’t find her. Why y’all so good at hiding?”

“Who, me?” Maya said as she appeared from behind the woman in green, scaring Victoria out of her skin. “I must be good at hiding!”

“Why y’all trying to scare me?” Victoria said. She noticed Maya holding something very strange in her left hand. It was a cocktail, one made up of some red liquid that emitted white and gray smoke into the room. “And what in tarnation is that thing?”

“Liquid smoke cocktail,” Maya said. “Made with whiskey and smoky ice. Want one yourself?”

“First one’s gonna be on me,” the lady in green added.

“God, why are y’all so weird?” Victoria said. She remembered her parent’s advice to never accept random drink offers from strangers, and everything about this scene seemed suspicious. But Maya was her friend. Guess it was fair game now. She was getting bored and wanted something to do, and who would turn down free alcohol?

So with that in mind, after deliberating on whether to instead go for a more traditional mimosa like those Asian-American girls, Victoria ordered a liquid smoke cocktail too, paid for by the lady in green. Once the bartender finished her connection and served it to her, she couldn’t help but stare into the gray-white vapor clouds the blood-red liquid emitted, losing herself in the mist as the voice of Vitas continued to float into the air.

Chandra Brambra Chandra Chandra Bendram...
Chandra Brambra Chandra Chandra Bendram...
Chandra Brambra Chandra Chandra Bendram...
Chandra Brambra Chandra Chandra Bendram...

[Unapologetic Chinaperson]

Suddenly, two voices, one male and one female, appeared out of nowhere. Victoria snapped out of her trance and turned around, placing the liquid smoke cocktail on the counter without a drop of it consumed. The lady in green was talking to a couple. One half was a black woman in a blue ocean dress, with her hair cut extremely short (she would be a “Grace Jones-looking chick,” people older than her would say). She was holding hands with a white guy in a tan suit, whose long flowing hair contained streaks of blonde dye like an upside-down tulip.

“I saw you talking to this girl over here,” the man said to the lady in green.

“Oh her?” she replied. “She was looking bored when we bumped into each other. I already got her friend some liquid smoke and I offered her if I could pay for her first drink of the night. You can’t not have fun at the Blue Moon.”

Victoria apprehensively looked at the trio talking about her. “Um,” she stammered, determined to bring herself into the conversation. “Hi?”

“Hi!” the man said as he turned to Victoria. “You must be Maya’s friend.”

“Yes I am,” Victoria said, not sure whether to trust this guy either.

“Hi,” the woman in ocean blue said as she took charge of the conversation. With a warm smile on her face, she extended out her hand in gratitude. “Nice to meet you, what’s your name?”

“Victoria,” she said as she shook the woman’s hand. She seems trustworthy at least, she thought.

“Victoria?” the woman said, smiling “Nice name! My name is Tiana Sorenson, and this is my boyfriend-”

“TexArkana!” DJ HillGoose called from his perch on the other side of the bar. “Can you do me a favor? I need your help!”

“Sure thing Goose!” TexArkana said as ran and dove into the main crush of people, as if he never wanted to be seen again.

Victoria and Tiana, after staring at TexArkana’s response to his call to action, looked back at each other. A few seconds passed before Tiana decided to break the silence.

“That’s...a name of his,” she said, trying to explain her boyfriend’s alias.

“What do you mean?”

“Like this was a forum name of his on this obscure forum he and HillGoose were both on many years ago. I dunno, for some reason they call each other by these names instead of their real names. I love the Blue Moon, but sometimes its culture can get really weird.”

“Really?” Victoria wondered in the back of her mind if that forum was the Atlas Forums, though she was not interested in vocalizing that question. It seemed rather unlikely to have someone like Timmy and people like these two guys be on the same obscure forum so many years ago, she thought.

“Yeah I guess,” Tiana said before telling Victoria’ the man’s real name. As she did so, Tiana sat down at the counter with Victoria and flicked her wrist. The bartender knew exactly what she meant and gave her another mimosa.

Victoria looked back at her own smoky liquor cocktail. To her disappointment, most of the smoke had already disappeared, leaving a rather boring red liquid in its wake. Even so, she started to take sips as the two struck up conversation.

“So where are you from?” Victoria asked.

“Jersey born and raised,” Tiana replied. “Went to Drexel University, first as premed, but that was way too hard, so I switched to International Business with a minor in Chinese.”

“You always wanted to move to China right?”

Tiana sighed as she took another sip of her mimosa. “It wasn’t really moving to China so much as escaping the US. Because if you look at this” - she pointed to the back of her hand, the deep brown reflecting off the illumination of the strobe lights and polka dots - “this is not something Americans appreciate. Trust me, if I had a penny for every piece of racist sh*t that was directed at me, I would be the world’s first trillionaire.”

Victoria interrupted. “Isn’t Barron Trump - wait no, he’s not there yet my bad.”

“No,” Tiana said, “but he’s close. Back on topic, the final straw was when his d-bag father decided to run for President by saying that Mexicans are rapists. Then he won! And I was like ‘LOL AmeriKKKa, if you ain’t gonna respect a strong black woman like me I’m gonna take my talents elsewhere!’”

Victoria nodded along as she took another sip of her cocktail. Looking around, she noticed that the woman in the green dress was also missing.

“And so like that,” Tiana continued, “I packed my bags and left America. Fun fact - most people who want to leave the US and Trump think of going to Canada. So much so that when he was first elected, the Canadian immigration site crashed. But me? Not Canada. Same white supremacy BS up north. For me, it was Asia or bust.”

Victoria was going to take another sip, but realized she had drank all of it. As Tiana spoke, she quietly motioned for the bartender for another smoky liquor.

“So,” Tina said, “I settled in Guangzhou, got a job there teaching English - not pretty, but hey, whatcha gonna do to put food on the table. That was when I met my boyfriend.”

Victoria took her refill from the bartender and took a sip, anxiously awaiting the next phase of Tiana’s story.

“He was cute, tall with dyed brown hair fashioned like the Korean idol style that was popular back then. We met each other in the most unlikely of places - walking past each other in the train station. Man, when I laid eyes on him it was as if time stopped for us. The crowd of people surrounding us and the trains zooming this way and that just melted away. It was just the two of us, me and him, standing there on that train platform.

“I guess it takes a special something inside of you if you’re a Chinese guy wanting to date a black girl. I mean sure there were some people who stared at us, but we didn’t give a rat’s ass about those guys. We went out, and it was amazing. We went everywhere together. Parks, beaches, the movies, bars like this one, you name it. I didn’t think it would end, especially not in the way it did. But it did, as everything must.

“It all happened when he decided to show me to his parents. I could tell it was something he kept pushing back, but it had to happen someday. Like my parents back in America knew at that point, and they were happy with it.” She paused for a moment. “Now that I think of it, they must’ve been super happy that I was alive. Frikin’ Crisis and all that bull.”

“Anyways, that day I had dinner with his family. His mother was an amazing woman, I should tell you - she was super open-minded, made the best food, couldn’t get a better woman than her. But the dad - oh boy. He literally stared at me the whole time like this.” Tiana got up from her seat and put her face two inches from Victoria’s, making sure Victoria could feel each and every damp breath that landed on her nose and lips. “You could darn well tell that he was not happy with me being there. Said how ugly our children would be under his breath.”

“We broke up soon after. After I left, his parents got into a fight and his dad gave his mom a black eye. It was a sad time for both of us. Some people, man. People can be so cruel, no matter where they’re from.”

“That’s so sad,” Victoria said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Tiana continued. “It’s life. After we broke up, I continued to work in Guangzhou before I found a better job at Ping An in Beijing. And in hindsight, it was frickin’ good timing. The week after I left, that’s when the protests happened.”

“The protests?” Victoria asked. “You mean the Guangzhou Uprising?”

“Uprising, riots, massacres, it’s all the same sh*t,” Tiana said. “We Black people wanted rights, but instead we got oppression. As usual.”

Victoria nodded slowly as she recalled the sequence of events that happened that fateful summer. Teenage boys tortured a biracial teenager to death. African and Asian minorities started protesting in Hong Kong and Guangzhou. Counterprotests flared up. Police came in with fire hoses and rubber bullets, and the ambassador from Burkina Faso ended up in the crossfire. Censorship, condemnations, and chaos ensued.

“Wrote about it once,” Victoria said as she started to feel the effects of the alcohol course through her veins.

“How was it?”

“Put five people in a room to talk about the Uprising and you’d get seven opinions. You have your President Castros.”

“President Castro?” Tiana said. “Mm hmm. He ain’t perfect, but that man was a real king. Wasn’t afraid to stand up for what’s right, unlike some people…”

“Then “you have these Chinese tourists I interviewed once about the August 7 Incident,” Victoria continued, using the official name for the Guangzhou Uprising. One of them said that it was proof that Africans needed to be deported. Another hated the PC that the government enforces because of this. Another was fine with immigrants wanting equal rights, but they wanted ‘special rights’ instead, and that’s bad.”

“Ha ha typical,” Tiana said, taking a swing at a mimosa. “God Chinese people can be racist. Like the ‘PC’ you said that guy complained about? That’s all fake. It’s all fake. ‘Social Progressives’ my ass. They don’t give a rat’s ass about the rights of immigrants or Black people. We’re just cheap labor to them. Their education and censorship efforts to promote ‘ethnic harmony’ is just so they can keep their trade deals with Africa without actually doing anything. And hoo boy don’t get me started on that one.”

“One what?” Victoria said, as Tiana’s words blended in with the music and love of the Blue Moon.

“But,” Tiana added, pointing a finger at her, “don’t get the wrong idea. Not all Chinese are bigots, just like not all Americans are. There are plenty of Chinese people willing to fight for justice and equality. Like my ex-boyfriend. There’s nothing more shocking than when your parents send you news - gotta get around that censorship! - and your frickin’ ex-boyfriend is on the cover out on the street! Now that is commitment. That’s allyship.”

“That’s nuts,” Victoria mumbled, slouched with a third cocktail in hand. “Was he okay?”

“You have to be grateful for guys like him,” Tiana said, ignoring Victoria’s question, “If I were to be completely honest, I miss him. I don’t know if I’ll meet another guy like him.”

Tiana took a sip from her cocktail when she realized what she said. “Uh, my boyfriend didn’t hear that, did he?”

“You mean TexArkana?,” Victoria asked, “I want to know, how did you meet him? That must’ve been an interesting story.”

“It is,” Tiana said, “it all started when-”

A cacophony of female voices interrupted Tiana with their incessant chanting.

“Chug! Chug! Chug!”

“Who in God’s name are those girls doing here?” Tiana said. “Like is this some sorority date party or what?”

“I don’t know,” Victoria said. “I don’t know if-”

“Is that Maya?”

Victoria perked up, got off her chair, and stumbled in the general direction.

“Is it.”

“Seems to be like it.”

“And are those...” Victoria stopped when she saw the scene. Her words came slowly and quietly, but her shock was just as clear.

“Oh. My. Goodness.”

It was the “Dwayne 4 Senate” girls again, standing around Maya as she held up a beer stein to her face, clumsily drinking from it and spilling beer all over her expensive dress as the girls chanted her on.

“Chug! Chug! Chug!”

Maya had finished her fourth (fifth? sixth? nobody knew) beer stein when she spotted her friend. “Hey Vicky, you wanna try this out?” she said in a slurred voice. “Great way to get it!”

Victoria did not hear Maya’s words as those sounds melted in with the background music. Her senses had become less an accurate a depiction of reality and more a creative interpretation of it. The bar became a watercolor sunset, like the paintings she saw earlier that day hung up in the hotel lobby. Maya became the face from The Scream and time itself became one of Dalí's surrealist clocks, before they decomposed into the shapes of Malevich and the lines of Kandinsky. The gay and lively beats of DJ HillGoose became the haunting notes of Ravel and Pärt, which played on as reality itself was reduced to nothing.

[Unapologetic Chinaperson]

Victoria woke up on an infinite plane. There was no horizon, no sense of direction, just a unending, dazzling white infinity. Light touched everything, every surface, in every direction, but there was no sun or other light source from which it came from. The light just was, and so was she.

There was no sound, nothing but her own breath. Carefully, she got up. The ground, if one were to call it that, was smooth, like the texture of polished marble, but with the appearance of plain Tupperware, a smooth, almost slippery surface of nothingness. But it was reflective. As she got up, Victoria saw a reflection of herself staring back at her, admonishing her for her past misdeeds and questioning who she was.

She stood, her two feet planted on the ground, staring at her other self for a good minute or so before two people showed up on the other side. They walked up to Victoria’s reflection as if it was the true Victoria, real in every way except for the reversed gravity. They were an elderly couple, a short woman with curly hair hidden under a polka-dotted scarf, and a man in a well-worn blue coat and blue jeans. They put their arms around the shoulders of Victoria’s reflection, smiling.

My parents.

It was like that scene from Harry Potter; what Harry wanted most in the world, above all else, was to be reunited with his parents. So did Victoria with her biological parents, it seems. Delicately, she raised her arm and waved at them from above the threshold. On the other side, all three - mother, father, daughter - waved back.

Are you real?

And as if to answer her question, the two vanished, leaving Victoria alone with her reflection.

“Victoria,” said a disembodied male voice, “follow me.”

Who are you?

No answer. Instead, she started walking. Where to, she did not know, but walks she did to the edge of infinity.

After what felt like an eternity, something appeared in the distance, from beyond the horizon if a horizon existed. At first, it was a mere point, but as she walked closer she could make out its details. Gray rectangular prisms began to jut out from the ground. They looked like skyscrapers, but they had no windows nor any discernible details, other than a uniformly grainy texture that was reminiscent of concrete, covered by a thin layer of gray dust. Heaps of gray bricks with the same texture surrounded them, scattered about like piles of rubble.

Something started the permeate the previously stale, odorless air as she walked into the abandoned city through a gap in the rubble piles. It was the smell of ash and dust, the smell of the aftermath of a great catastrophe, the smell of death.

The eternal silence, too, was broken by a mysterious female voice that crackled over the radio static, as Victoria walked amongst the ruins.

“One, one, three, two, five, eight…”

As she walked, she observed her surroundings. That pile of bricks that fell apart as soon as she looked at it. The tilted prism that looked like it was about to snap in two. The remains of a prism that had already fallen, its top half having crumbled into another rubble heap.

“Two, seven, five, zero, one, six…”

As she walked, she felt something roll from underneath her. It was a human skull, covered in the gray dust that covered anything. Yet despite the macabre scene, she kept walking. There was something greater she needed to see.

“Seven, eight, nine, one, one, two…”

And then she saw it. It was a hand, lying lifelessly amongst a smallish rubble pile at the base of a half-collapsed prism. She recognized it, and ran over to confirm her suspicions.

My father.

She uncovered just enough bricks to find a face. He looked almost the same from the reflection, but instead of a coat he wore a janitor’s outfit. His hair was disheveled, his face covered in dust, and all color was gone from his skin. One eye was closed, but the other was half open, enough to show that he had the glazed look of the dead.

Dad!

“I’m sorry, Victoria.”

It was that voice again.

“It’s okay,” Victoria said as she began to sob. “It’s okay. You don’t tell me that he’s dead!”

“Victoria, I’m sorry about your dad. But your biological mother is still alive.”

“She is?” she said, swallowing tears as she held the hand of her biological father.

“Yes.”

“Tell me!” she screamed. “Tell me where she is!”

“I can’t tell you now. But if you join me, you two can be reunited.”

“What do you mean ‘join me?’”

“I’ll show you.”

Out of nowhere, a young man walked up and offered Victoria his hand. He was thin yet muscular, clean shaven with green eyes and an olive complexion. He wore a plain blue t-shirt and blue jeans, not unlike what Victoria’s dad wore as a reflection.

Letting go of her father’s hand, Victoria stood up and touched the man’s, palm to palm as if they were reflections in a mirror. As they did, she felt energy flow through her, energy that was at once strange, yet comforting.

“Tim,” she said, recognizing the man standing in front of her. “Timothy Gonzales.”

“Victoria,” Tim said, nodding, “you shall soon be home.”