On Perfection

The first of many blog posts to make up for my lack of content on OSAF.

"Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence." ~Vince Lombardi

The pursuit of perfection or, at the very least, the pursuit of improvement is what drives human advancement (along with biological stuff like natural selection @Terrence). OSAF, however, explores the darker side of the pursuit of perfection. What happens when we get too close to perfection?

The Charter villages describe such an environment, simultaneously both a utopia in its near-perfection and a dystopia in the fierce academic/extracurricular competition among youth and cutthroat system that forces adults to acquire wealth to avoid demotion to the counties, like Quig. It's true that striving for perfection is important, if not imperative toward human development, but get too close to perfection, and suddenly societal advancement stagnates and utopia flips to dystopia.

Interestingly enough, the facilities also suffer from stagnation. As the Charter villages obsessively move toward perfection, the gap in ability between them and the facilities increases, especially given that the top talent from the facilities migrates to the Charter villages. Once the facilities lose their pipeline to the Charter villages, what happens? The same thing: remove the end goal, and chaos ensues.

Finally, I find it fitting that perfection is unachievable in OSAF. Even as the Charters fine tune their calculations, adding more and more decimal points of precision, they still cannot avoid C-disease, and by extension, the ultimate fate of death. Because if humans could solve everything, what would separate them from gods? And I don't quite think humans are too good at handling power.

On Asian Stereotyping

Hi readers,

It's been 10 days. Oops, I'm missing deadlines.

Today I'll be writing a bit on conformity within On Such a Full Sea and its relation to the Asian "model minority" stereotype.

Chang-Rae Lee, as many Asian-American authors do, writes his book centered around Asian (in this case Chinese) characters. We discussed in class that "Chinese" is an essentially meaningless description; given how little we know of the history of OSAF, "China" could very well be Europe renamed. Knowing that readers, myself included, tend to associate the word "Chinese" with its definition in our own world, I still suspect that Chang-Rae Lee is referring to a very similar, if not the same, group of people that we think of as Chinese.

The role of the Chinese in this novel is as the colonizers, a role reversal in which Asians take over major cities in the United States such as Baltimore (B-Mor). The very nature of this role seems to antagonize the reader toward the Chinese, a seemingly counterintuitive action considering that most Asian-American authors seek to improve readers' opinions of Asians.

In addition, examine the role of conformity in the novel. In B-Mor, citizens live in strict order, where every (Chinese) citizen acts to benefit the community. Compare this to the "model minority" stereotype, where Asian-Americans are expected to be docile and obedient workers. In an even more obvious comparison, perhaps Chang-Rae Lee is again painting the Chinese in Red/Yellow Peril terms (communism and conformity, get the hint?).

In these two examples, Asian-Americans seem to be viewed in a negative light, alluding to historically relevant Asian stereotypes that describe them as a dangerous hive-mind that could potentially invade and conquer the United States. I'm out of words, so I end with this: Why does Chang-Rae Lee, an Asian-American author, describe Asian-Americans in such a manner in OSAF?

On Such a Full Sea - First Impressions

The assumption when opening a book is that it takes place in a realistic setting. Thus, the moment you see something out of the ordinary, something that indicates a departure from normality, all of your assumptions get thrown out the window. In Chang-Rae Lee's On Such a Full Sea, I didn't have that sudden realization that the novel was science-fiction. Sure, when B-Mor was mentioned, I thought to myself that the setting was not in our own world. However, foreign names don't necessarily imply an unrealistic setting. The mention of unfamiliar vocabulary like Charter villages also tipped me off, but again, nomenclature is not very telling. It wasn't until the description of Fan and her job involving diving in tanks and nurturing the "valuable fish" that I was certain that this world was unlike our own.

I'm still not quite sure what I think of the novel. While highly descriptive, I feel that the pacing of the plot is too slow for me to truly enjoy. On the other hand, I do enjoy the cryptic nature of the introduction. There's something oddly enticing about descriptions that leave the reader with more questions than answers. I suppose only time will tell whether or not I enjoy this book.

Toodles.

On "Division by Zero"

In Ted Chiang's "Division by Zero", Renee proves the inconsistency of arithmetic, which causes her to go insane given that the entirety of mathematics is now also inconsistent and therefore meaningless.

Now on one hand, this would suck a lot. Most people wouldn't really care, as our current understanding of mathematics is entirely accurate in describing and modeling the world we live in (a mathematical proof of 1 = 2 does not change the fact that if Lauren gives me 1 apple and Terrence gives me 1 apple, then I now have 2 apples). What would suck is the destruction of all theoretical and abstract mathematics, which cannot function without their arithmetic bases. A lot of beautiful work, like the prime number theorem or Riemann zeta function described in the other reading, "Infinities". would technically become meaningless. In a less arcane example, Euler's identity, that e^(pi * i) + 1 = 0 (sorry, don't know how to stylize this in Blogger), would be meaningless (come on, even if you hate math you had to think that this identity was pretty cool the first time you saw it). At least I would be sad.

However, upon further research, it seems that the mathematical community would probably not react in the same way that Renee did in the story. Based on a discussion in Math Overflow, which has quite a few legitimate mathematicians commenting, mathematicians would likely scale back their fundamental theorems down to a less rigorous, but consistent basis. Sparing the details, there are systems of mathematics that are even more fundamental than basic arithmetic. After a short period of readjustment, researchers could simply relearn new axioms/toss out the invalid old ones and continue on with their work.

I'm hitting my word limit, so I'll stop rambling. Thoughts?

On "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere"

In John Chu's "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere, water falls from the sky whenever a person "lies". This mechanic, in fact the only aspect of science fiction in the entire short story, is interesting because it is never made clear what it means to lie. Terrence suggested in class that the world references a sort of "universal truth" before deciding whether or not to drop water on its unfortunate victim. On first glance, this seems entirely possible, but I believe that intention plays a larger role in the water than the objective truthfulness of the statement.

For example, when Matt and his sister are discussing Gus while chopping vegetables, Matt remarks that he doesn't understand what his sister means, while thinking, "there's a good chance that she'll miss the sarcasm...the water gets it though and I stay dry". In this passage, Matt admits that he is using sarcasm, implying that he does understand what his sister is saying, making his actual statement an objective lie. However, the water is able to pick up on his sarcasm, detecting his intentions before deciding not to fall on him.

This idea changes what we discussed near the end of class on whether or not Matt and Gus will be able to maintain a healthy relationship. I brought up that water falling on Matt's sister when she claims that Gus will eventually "cheat on you or dump you", meant that her statement was a universal falsehood under Terrence's definition. Under a framework where the water reads intentions and not objective truths, water falling merely indicates that Matt's sister did not truly believe what she was saying, which is entirely possible given the context of the story. Regardless, the water drenching Matt's sister only tell us about her and nothing about Gus in this case.

Thoughts?