Make Shift

by Gideon Lichfield

  Her mother called her back ten minutes later. “¿Qué pasó? I was busy but then I saw your call.”

  “Nothing,” Chela said. “Butt dial.” A desperately anachronistic concept, but her mother had loved the idiom when she discovered it, back when Chela was a teenager, and they still used it for that reason.

  The (other?) sixty-two-year-old woman called her back two hours later. “I’m so sorry, I forgot, is now okay?” Would Chela’s mother be so flustered about missing something? Maybe for a stranger. Was it her mother’s voice, distorted? She wasn’t sure.

  Normally Chela would have said no and insisted on rescheduling, but she was so worked up she thought it better to get it over with. “No problem, these things happen.” Soothing, that was her interviewing persona. Her mother would never recognize her in it.

  There was a silence. It was time for Chela to do her intro talk. Instead she blurted out: “Why did you request an interview?”

  She held her breath, waiting for the woman to say my silly daughter works with you and she kept bugging me until I decided to just get it done and then maybe won’t she get a surprise when I tell her triumphantly I did it. But the woman sighed and said, “I don’t know. I have some things to say. Sometimes it’s easier to tell these things to a stranger.”

  Yes, that could be the reason, Chela thought, even as she made a note to offer this woman who might or might not be her mother the list of therapists provided by the organization, with a special note on those who practiced the talk therapy. That could be why Mami wouldn’t tell me. Meanwhile, the sixty-two-year-old was off, talking about her life and her difficulties and her long-ago childhood. She was an excellent subject, verbose but clear, with interesting stories from an interesting if unremarkable life, and she wasn’t Chela’s mother.

  EVEN SO, WHEN SHE CALLED HER MOTHER THE NEXT DAY AT LUNCH TIME, SHE FOUND herself expecting at every conversational turn for her mother to come out and say Guess what? I did the interview you’ve always been wanting me to do.

  “Mami,” she said when she couldn’t take it anymore. “Why don’t you want to do the interview?”

  Her mother, who had been telling her some story about her prima Graciela and her kids, stopped and looked at her. “Hija, if it means that much to you, I’ll do it.”

  Inside her head, Chela screamed. Of course it means that much to me, I’ve been asking you to do it for months, how could you not notice? “I don’t want you to do it if you don’t want to,” she said, calmly. At least, she hoped she sounded calm. “But I don’t understand why you won’t. All those things you’ve been through . . .” Chela paused, searching for examples, for the right examples. “When we were kids, and you had to deal with the pandemic, all by yourself. Or when you came to this country, and found a job, and what that was like. Or when there was that riot here, and you were working the whole day and couldn’t get home, had to sleep at the shop at night . . . Those things are important. Don’t you want us to know about them?”

  “Ay, hija,” her mother said on a long sigh. “Don’t you know, these things, they are not so easy for me to talk about?”

  Chela didn’t know. Of all the reasons she had imagined for her mother not talking to her, the idea that it was difficult, painful even, had never occurred to her.

  “I didn’t think you needed to know those things. I thought you just wanted me to do this thing for your work.”

  “No, Mami!” Chela almost yelled it. “I don’t need you to do that for my work, I wanted to know for myself! So I could understand.”

  Her mother dabbed at her eyes, and fussed, peering at the screen to check her mascara. “Look now, I can’t cry here, I have to go back out to work.”

  “I’m sorry, Mami,” Chela said. “I just want to understand you, and—”

  “And you want me to tell all this to some stranger who will record it in a machine, so that other people can listen to it whenever they want to, for posterity you say?”

  “You don’t have to,” Chela said, forlorn, and also a tiny bit resentful that she had been put in the wrong so effectively.

  But her mother went on: “If you want to know about those things, of course I’ll tell you. If you want you can even record us talking or qualquier cosa que haces. But I don’t want to talk about all of this to strangers.”

  “Of course, Mami, of course I’ll do it with you.” Chela was sniffing now too, and thinking about how she would show her mami the way the app worked for her, the spinning colors of the randomization, so unnecessary and so pleasurable; the mystery of the avatar; the coding, even. But probably her mother wouldn’t care enough to pay attention to all those minutiae, probably she was exaggerating what it would be like, as usual, pinning her hopes up too high. “When’s a good time? We—we can even do it in sections if you like, if you don’t have time to get through it all at once. Should I come over?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe we could do it like this, on a call, instead? It might be easier.”

  Chela swallowed her disappointment. Her mother needed the distance. Since she was making the effort to talk about things she didn’t want to talk about, it seemed only fair.

  “But tell me, hija, why do you care so much? You know all these things that happened.”

  Chela held back it’s my job because that was only partly true and because she wanted to meet her mother’s willingness to talk about herself at least halfway. “I might not know all the things, and anyway I’m sure we remember them differently,” she said, aiming for a reasonable tone. “Also . . .” This was harder. “I guess . . . I listen to old people’s stories all the time. I want to hear yours.”

  “It’s not going to be so exciting,” her mother grumbled. “You are imagining me much more important than I am.”

  And Chela told her mother what she would have liked to be able to say to every elder as she interviewed them. “No one is more important than you are.”

  5

  Jaunt

  Ken Liu

  Archival VNN footage of Ruutuutuu Protests at the Port of Seattle, Pier 91, July 10, 202X

  [A MAGNIFICENT CRUISE SHIP, PACIFIC UNICORN, IS DOCKED AT THE PIER, READY TO begin its seven-day tour of the Inside Passage. Luggage is being loaded; passengers in long lines are embarking; everything seems perfect: a normality that everyone has been craving for many months during the pandemic.

  Except . . . a swarm of small boats—dinghies, speedboats, kayaks, even a few fishing trawlers—numbering in the high hundreds have congregated in front of the cruise ship, filling much of Elliott Bay and blocking its course. Protesters throng the pier, holding up signs with the mustachioed cartoon rutabaga that has become the symbol of the movement and shouting “Shut it down!”]

  Interviewer: Unicorn Cruises say that they’ve implemented every precaution for the safety and health of the crew and the passengers. All their ships have obtained the STERLING-20 certification—

  Protester: STERLING-20 is a worthless piece of marketing spin. The certification process was created by the cruise industry, for crying out loud. The truth is, there is no way to run cruises safely. None! Have you forgotten what happened barely two years ago? My parents were stuck on that ship wandering the Pacific with no port to take them in, and they both got infected. My mother died. Do you understand? Died. How can you pack thousands of people into close quarters like cattle, feed them at trough-buffets, recirculate the same air in every room . . . and believe this can ever be safe? It’s a goddamned lie.

  Interviewer: There’s been no evidence of another pandemic—

  Protester: [mimics] “There’s been no evidence . . .” Where have I heard that before? The virus hasn’t gone away. We’ve got to live with this thing for the foreseeable future. And the next pandemic will come—it’s not if, but when. No more cruises. No more tour groups. No more jumbo jets stuffed full of sweaty bodies breathing on one another for twenty-plus hours. No more tourism. Shut it all down!

  “See the World Like You’ve Never Seen it Before
”—video advertisement for Unicorn Travel Enterprises, produced by TIDE=/=AL Partners, September 202X

  [THE GREAT PYRAMID OF GIZA LOOMS IN OUR VIEW LIKE A MOUNTAIN.

  The camera holds still as time speeds up. The sun rises and sets; the stars spin overhead; shadowy figures flit in and out of frame like mayflies dancing with eternity; the pyramid’s shadow sweeps across the sand like the gnomon of a world-pacing sundial. New Age music plays.

  Then, just as the sun is low in the west once more, the music stops, time returns to normal, and the camera begins to move forward, swaying slightly from side to side.]

  Woman (O.S.): They tell me the record for climbing to the top is six minutes twenty-nine seconds.

  [We’re running toward the base of the pyramid. Faster and faster. Despite the optical stabilization, the swaying becomes more pronounced.]

  Woman (O.S.): (Panting) I signed up to be first in line today so I wouldn’t have to slow down for anyone else.

  [We reach the bottom of the pyramid. The camera tilts up. The jagged blocks seem to scrape heaven.

  We climb. Although the action cam is clearly streaming the POV of the climber, we don’t see her hands or feet. In fact, for viewers who are used to consuming such footage, there’s something distinctly odd about the camera angel and movement—too close to the surface, perhaps?]

  Woman (O.S.): Talk to you again at the top.

  [Up-tempo, pulse-pounding music plays. We hear the sounds of her exertion over sped-up footage of the ascent. Most of the time, the unsteady camera is focused on the limestone block or blocks right in front of the climber. But from time to time, it swerves for a peek at the apex. Closer. Closer. It’s frantic, thrilling, exhilarating.

  Finally, we reach the top.]

  Woman (O.S): Oh . . . Wow . . .

  [The camera swings around to give us a dizzying view: the Pyramid of Khafre nearby, which appears even taller than our summit; the sprawl of Cairo in the distance, reminding you that almost five millennia of history have been compressed under your feet; the hazy horizon all around you, promising unknown, arcane knowledge; the vertiginous sensation that you’re about to plunge hundreds of feet to your death . . .

  Only then do you notice the unusual scene on the slanting face of the pyramid below you: dozens of robots scrambling up the limestone blocks after you. Each robot is about the size of a large dog, with four padded feet that grip tightly onto the limestone blocks, a camera in front, and a screen that shows the face of a climber-teleoperator. A quick scan of the screens reveals that the climbers come from all over the world.

  A robot hand rises into the camera’s view, waving.

  The screen splits to show a woman in climbing gear strapped into a full-motion harness waving. Her movements have been mapped into the movements of the robot. She lifts off her full-immersion goggles, wipes the sweat from her face, and proudly holds out her watch for the viewer.]

  Woman: Six minutes and twenty-six seconds. Not too bad.

  [The Unicorn Travel logo swerves onto the screen, followed by a link to their web site.]

  Woman: And I’ve still got enough time to shower before work.

  [Text on screen: A NEW WAY TO TRAVEL: EVEN BETTER THAN BEING THERE.]

  “Opinion: It’s Time to Admit It: We Were Wrong to Oppose the Ruutuutuu Movement,” by Johanna Tung, Boston Globe, July 10, 203X

  LIKE MANY OF YOU, I WAS DISMAYED WHEN THE RUUTUUTUU PROTESTS ESSENTIALLY shut down the global tourism industry shortly after the annus horribilis that was 2020. As the owner of a company specializing in curating and creating unique experiences for tourists from all over the world interested in sampling Xhong culture, my life’s work would be destroyed by the movement to abolish global tourism.

  The protesters’ immediate concerns were to prevent COVID-19 from flaring up again, or, even worse, the emergence of another pandemic, but over time, their mission evolved to saving the planet from our relentless drive to consume experiences without regard to the future.

  I found myself in a hard place. Having devoted much of my career to the intersection of economic development and sustainability, I understood the math behind their protest signs better than most.

  The people who bought my tour packages came from Europe, the United States, Japan, Australia, the biggest cities in China and South America. They were the kind of individuals who recycled, drove electric vehicles or even biked, tried to be good to Mother Earth. They thought of themselves as good people, with expensive educations, the right opinions, virtuous intentions. That was why they wanted to spend a week living in a Xhong village and attempt to understand a way of life different from their own.

  But all their efforts at conservation were wiped out and more the moment they decided to get on that plane. A jet flight to carry a family and all the luggage needed to sustain their Western comforts across an ocean or a continent is among the most wasteful activities ever invented by the human race. And that’s without even accounting for the environmental cost of transporting them from the airport over new highways, across new bridges, through mountain tunnels and flattened forests until they reached their vacation destination.

  The mountainous regions of Southeast Asia, where the Xhong people live, contain some of the most vulnerable ecosystems in the world. Droughts, storms, mudslides, and other consequences of climate change have already wrought havoc with their lives. Each new airport, road, bridge, tunnel, and tourist meant more cement—perhaps the most destructive, poisonous, and unsustainable construction material ever invented by humans—more fossil fuels, more wrecking of forest, soil, aquifers. It meant another step closer toward the day when the area would become uninhabitable by the very people the tourists came to visit.

  Moreover, I was acutely aware that my tours were perpetuating a colonialist legacy of violence and exploitation. Though I tried to design my tours with input from Xhong elders and artists and strove to make the villages who hosted my guests equal partners in the business, activists had for years argued that my cultural-immersion tours differed only in degree, not kind, from the exploitative vacation resorts and “cultural showcases” operated by mega corporations and centralized governments, which had little interest in preserving Xhong culture. My customers were of course not overtly exploitative, unlike those who went on sex tours or hunted for exotic animals in Southeast Asia. But they wanted to play at living another culture, to consume a way of life, to find “spiritual meaning” by reducing the traditions and practices of the Xhong into processed trinkets and pseudo-New Age pap that reaffirmed their own choices and sense of superiority. The very notion of tourism in the modern sense is an act of voyeuristic pleasure experienced by the Western (and would-be Western) colonizer subject gazing upon indigenous populations, an act of vicarious subjugation; the global tourism industry is rotten at its foundation.

  And yet. And yet.

  Without airplanes bringing tourists from across the globe, how was I supposed to keep paying my tour guides and drivers? Without the dollars and euros and WeChat balances, how would the Xhong families who had planned their entire lives around housing and feeding tourists make a living? Without their cameras and phones and excited chatter, who was going to buy all the handicrafts made specifically for them? The Xhong had become dependent on tourism, even as it further eroded their world. Entire villages, which had already suffered enormously through the tourism drought of the pandemic, would now tip over into ruin. While many villagers remained terrified of tourists bearing another wave of infections, many more clamored for the economic life raft they represented. I had no room to think about the planet’s future or the ramifications of colonialist structural inequality when I needed to figure out an immediate way to save the families who were my employees and partners.

  Many independent tour providers, including myself, tried to band together to push back against the Ruutuutuu Protests. But like many movements of the era, the Ruutuutuu protesters were a loose coalition with divergent, even contradictory demands. Some were concern
ed about the cultural and environmental externalities of global tourism, which I sympathized with. But others were motivated by less noble concerns. Some were convinced that tourists from Asia had caused the pandemic in Europe and the United States. Some were isolationists who wanted to seize the opportunity and reverse globalization. Still others believed in conspiracy theories that argued cruise ships and jumbo jets were UN-sanctioned experimental vehicles for Chinese and North Korean spies working under the direction of Russian scientists funded by Bill Gates. Our advertisements and calls for a dialogue made little impact.

  There was a cultural shift. Celebrities posting photos of getaways to faraway tropical paradises were now shamed as though they had posted pictures of hunting trophies. People looked at those who flew around in jets the way we used to look at smokers.

  Dire warnings were issued about the collapse of tourism-driven developing economies and the hollowing out of indigenous communities. Many of us experienced a sense of helpless rage at the protesters who seemed too blinded by their own zeal to have compassion for those who depended on the cruise ships and jumbo jets. But gradually, as the protests raged on and global tourism numbers remained depressed, we learned to adapt.

  The first to try something new were the giant cruise lines and resort owners. As their ships remained docked and their hotels empty, they started to sell “remote tours,” which tapped into VR and telepresence, two technologies that saw unprecedented adoption during the long pause forcefully imposed on much of the world by COVID-19. Many of these packages relied on gimmicks that allowed teletourists to do things they couldn’t have done even in person. Governments, desperate for tourism revenue, readily relaxed various restrictions for these teletourists.