Perhaps in June of 2001, when I flew to China for a year teaching
English, Gatwick to Copenhagen and then the long haul through the
night on a plane called the Knod Viking. I stayed for 13 years, but on
my only summer back, in 2003, I bought a copy of a Red Hat for
Dummies, and a programme to partition the disk of the PC in my
apartment back in Hainan. And I was sold and have used Linux on my
laptops ever since.
I remember that in those first years I was a regular visitor to
Distrowatch, and that question - which distro - seemed so important. I
think at one stage, after the windows partion had been deleted, I had
seven different distros ...
So I'd heat my brain at the keyboard for hours and hours and then go
out running in the late afternoons, when the tropical heat started to
fade. The university where I taught was in the countryside, surrounded
by rubber plantations with networks of unpathed roads between the
villages and footpaths through the plantations and paddies. It was
beautiful and peaceful, but so very hot to run in and I was able to
start the process of sweating out some particularly persistent western
toxins.
China!
I remember another teacher saying of people who visited China: if you
had a six hour stop-over in Hong Kong, the experience was so rich and
new that you could write a book; that if you stayed for a fortnight
you could produce an insightful longform article; and that if you
stayed for more than a year you'd have nothing to say. Overwhelming it
is.
But I think I'd like to say this: I'm not altogether sure that concept
of a nation state is so very useful. Perhaps if I could stop fiddling
with my dotfiles for a week or two, I could read a book on politial
science to find what I write here all neatly set out. The Chinese
government controls the lives of a huge number of humans, and it's
true that groups on the edges of this mass often get a very raw deal;
the British and American governments also control - or perhaps take
actions that impact - a huge number of people, and people on the
edges... And so on and so forth.
I don't really think of myself as political in any way and am very
tempted to delete those last few lines and instead write something
about five hundred thousand migrant workers waiting for the train
outside the main trainstation in Guangzhou in the cold evenings before
the Chinese New Year, or about sun burning my scalp through my hat
when I visited the Great Wall one summer, or the 42 hour train journey
from Guangzhou to Urumuqi. What a glorious country and how happy we
now are to be living somewhere else.
