危机: Part 1

There is a mistaken notion that the Chinese word for Crisis is a combination of the symbols for the words “change” and “opportunity.” This is not true. It just means crisis. 

I was on my way to the Rainforest offices in downtown Seattle when I heard the news the king of Mars had been arrested. Folks were calling him the king of Mars since he started calling himself that on his platform. The fight between the king and the POTUS started about six months ago. It was completely obvious that it would come to this. The king of Mars had bankrolled POTUS’s campaign but there was only enough room on this planet for one ego that size. The fallout came when the king made the fatal error of criticizing POTUS for a series of trade sanctions that were driving up the prices of everything from microchips to chocolate chips. The fact that a bar of meh, average chocolate now cost upwards of $20 had cost POTUS dearly in the midterms and the king decided not to run a propaganda campaign to overturn the results of eleven seats in the senate and an even more eye-popping 59 seats in the house. There was a filibuster proof majority and POTUS was facing the very real possibility that this time the impeachment would make it all the way to the Sergeant and Arms. Everyone in Seattle was glued to their phones trying to get what few details were leaking out via extremely unofficial sources. Officially the king of Mars was still in his West Wing DOGE Pound as his crew of steroid abusers and meth-heads were calling their offices in the Whitehouse. I guess there was a good deal of schadenfreude amongst those who hadn’t supported POTUS. I had not voted for him but it was because I knew he would do exactly this: destroy from within. And if I, a humble data analyst at Rainforst, can see the obvious likelihood of things not ending well between a power-mad octogenarian with daddy issues and a power-hungry baby-man who causes daddy issues, how come the so-called smartest people on the planet can’t?

At work I ran into Belizabeth, yes, that’s her name. She’s from Scratch, WA and has a non-ironic collection of Hummel Figurines in her office. She was wanting me to join her prayer group for POTUS that evening. “People never give the man a chance. They’re just all out to get him, it’s like they want this nation to fail.” She knew I was born in China and assumed I’d been raised communist. In fact I’d spent most of my life in Tacoma and only had a passing knowledge of Marx from when I took a History of the Cold War class as an undergraduate. I was strictly unpolitical in my youth. That would change, of course, but at the time of the arrest, I kind of figured, “this doesn’t change my life.” I declined Belizabeth’s invite. Believe whatever you want, but I’m a hard data guy and so far the evidence on God was slim at best.  I didn’t say any of that to Belizabeth. There’s no point in stirring up conflict. And really even if I was a believer or even a supporter of POTUS, I had a date that night and I didn’t want to miss it.

Wei Ning was waiting for me at the restaurant. I recognized her right away from her pulled back hair and black turtleneck. Her circular eyewear was slightly oversized and slightly Avant-Garde. Her look, bookish, smart, a bit serious was perhaps intimidating? The reality is up to this point I’d only ever dated white women. My adoptive parents were not pushy in the way that my birth parents might have been – had I known them. Wei Ning and I met on the apps. Does that even need to be said anymore? She was from Beijing and was stationed at the consulate in Seattle. We spent most of the evening talking about her previous job at a visa office in Missoula Montana. “It was breathtakingly beautiful but sometimes I’d go weeks without actually speaking to another person. And the closest thing to Chinese food was a PF Changs at the mall. I love America, but that is a cultural war crime. At least in Seattle there are other Asians.” Wei Ning had a way of unintentionally making me painfully aware of how un-Asian and un-Chinese I was. My name is Kevin. Yes, I have a Chinese name but I don’t know if I’ve ever actually pronounced it correctly. Is this why I was already in love with her? I can’t imagine we’re as simple as that. But I look at patterns in data. I kind of know that we are, indeed, as simple as that. Like the way Rainforest knows from your purchasing patters six months before you do if you’re going to get a divorce or become pregnant. Everyone thinks we’re listening in on you and that’s why if you talk about going to Spain for a vacation, suddenly SPAIN starts showing up in your feeds. The truth is so much worse – we’re not listening to you, it’s just that you (and all of us) are very, very predictable. Maybe the PRC’s algorithm knew that I was on the wrong side of thirty, single and starting to feel adrift. Wei Ning was my vacation to Spain. And here she was, showing up in the feed of my actual life. I’m still in love with her even now, twenty years after we met at that Tapas place that’s no longer there and now that I know she wasn’t just some interesting woman who worked processing visas for people taking business trips to Shanghai or Shenzhen. She was, she is, my handler – something I’m only now becoming aware of.

It was probably six months before we would start taking the increasing nuclear blast drills at Rainforest seriously. Nuclear war felt positively retro at the time. It was like Max Headroom, Alf and nuclear war. This had to be more of POTUS’s razzle dazzle. The impeachment hearings were underway and the headlines were pretty crazy. The stuff going on in DC was getting hard to hide. Even Belizabeth took down her commemorative framed portrait and stopped wearing her gold sneakers to the office. All the drugs and the prostitutes his cabinet were involved with. It was like every other day another one of them was crying on camera with a spiritual advisor at their side, admitting how they’d been tempted and fallen. Ironically they never took the blame, fully. Instead they’d pass it off as some kind of taint they’d picked up just from being in the same building as liberals. The fact was that the king of Mars, even from behind bars, had his minions spilling the tea about POTUS’s cabinet. Not a brilliant move to invite a media guy into your cabinet – someone who had a back door to every computer and phone in DC. Of course the king thought he was buying a POTUS but  POTUS was someon to whom SCOTUS had given a license to kill. It’s that whole thing about leopards eating faces, you know. When the king of Mars turned up dead in his jail cell, no one was really all that shocked. Suicide by hanging – and darn the luck, the cameras were offline that day. Reporters and unfriendly lawyers had started “accidentally falling” out of high story windows that year. War it seemed, might get the price of gas below $10 a gallon. A lot of people were certain we could win. Yeah, if it had just been a military battle we would have won. But somehow the smartest guys in the room forgot something that everyone from San Jose to Vancouver knew: the PRC could flip a switch and anything with a chip would either turn off or turn on its user. When it arrived, the war would be over in less than a couple of weeks.