If You Love Me, You Have Nothing to Fear Ah Zi (bio) Keywords Ah, Zi, Chinese fiction, internet memes, digital world, censorship, protesting, He was always surprised when his images came back to him, even though he anticipated their return. It was like the quick blackening and curling of paper as he put a match to it, knowing it would catch yet startled by the reaction. He didn’t take it for granted. It was satisfaction enough to send them out. He was changing the locks in his basement office at three in the afternoon, and for once he wasn’t thinking of his images. He’d cleaned his entire office, and hung new, brightly patterned divider curtains. He’d organized his desk. It now looked like the desk of a busy but focused man, one who worked for his own purpose and pleasure. The lighting was terribly subterranean, but it couldn’t be helped. As he disinfected, refurbished, and categorized, he regularly looked over at his mobile phones, piled on a filing cabinet by the bathroom at the far end of the room. A screen would gleam now and then, revealing nothing of importance. He was refitting the brass covers onto the door when he heard the sound of metal vibrating against metal. Short, then long. The first buzz sent his pulse thudding, but then he recognized the pattern of one of his work phones. It couldn’t be her— he was sure he’d given the reporter his personal number. She hadn’t told him when to expect her call, but he had a feeling it would be soon, that she was preparing for it, just as he was. Fitting his new key into the cylinder, he turned it experimentally back and forth, moving with measured slowness. A work text, then. He would check after he was done installing the locks. Not like his wife, who always flipped to the last page of a story, wanting immediate results. She reacted to her phone like a marionette. The bolt snapped back with just the right amount of resistance. Usually his images took a few days to reappear. He preferred to call them “his images” rather than that frivolous word “memes,” used among his younger colleagues. He was of course aware of “eldermemes”—his daughter used to say it with glee. But they could call it whatever they [End Page 331] wanted; for him, it was the work itself that mattered. He was occasionally given a specific image or concept to work with, but because of his experience, he was permitted to look for and even create his own designs. This gave him tremendous pride, though he was aware that it was his captions that were most valued—and the reason for his employment. It was a matter of language; specifically, the divide between simplified and traditional characters. Divide was of course a controversial way of putting it, but anyone who was any good in this line of work, whether local or on the mainland, Putonghua- or Cantonese-speaking, knew it was unwise to ignore the difference. And it wasn’t even about the characters, or syntax, or the most up-to-date phrasing, but about the particular tonal mix of vernacular, archaic, and formal. If the Cantonese captions had even a hint of being studied, or a slight kink in the fluency, his audience would know something wasn’t right. They would immediately sense in their inner ear that skewed accent, which even for the most sympathetic readers lacked authority. They were mistrustful, his audience, because they were lost, and as a native Cantonese speaker himself, he knew how to sway and delight them—and especially how to infuriate. As for his work, he mostly created the kind of images that inspired awe and fellow-feeling, like a rarely photographed wild animal or an unusual success story. Increasingly, however, he was being asked to respond to current news stories, especially those unjust incidents that would inspire rightful anger. That was complicated, because terrible events were happening daily at hyperspeed, and he had to get the certified account of the event before he could write about it, which could...
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Jul 23, 2022
Jakob Ohme + 3
Open Access