These Magic Mirrors

On sharing words with strangers over the internet

On the road between Urumqi and Korla

Twenty years ago this winter, at the end of a long and convoluted journey, I arrived in a city that lay between the mountains and the desert. Korla was growing fast, a Chinese city surrounded by Uyghur villages, the endless dragon’s teeth mountains of the Tien Shan to the north and the vast Taklamakan to the south, where they were drilling beneath the sand for oil and gas.

I had come to teach English and because I didn’t know what else to do. A year earlier, I’d walked out on what looked like the beginnings of a successful career at the BBC. With the help of the books I read in the months that followed, I started to find some questions that were mine to carry, and I thought those questions would take me back to university, because I thought that was where you went to read and think and ask big questions. But I was too late to apply for the Masters programmes starting that autumn, and instead I found a small advertisement at the university careers service that read so differently from all the slick corporate sales pitches surrounding it that I was drawn in, as though a little door had opened in the wall.

The school was tiny and it turned out I was the first teacher they had hired who wasn’t already a friend of the founder, an Australian guy who was younger than I was. On weekends we taught private classes for younger children. During the week we were hired out to the top high school in the city to hold English conversation lessons with fifty kids to a class.

Before I left England, a friend told me going to China was the closest you could come to visiting another planet. Here in Xinjiang, the strangeness was doubled, the newly dominant Chinese way of life planted on top of the older Silk Road culture of the Uyghurs, the eastern reach of the patchwork of Turkic cultures that stretch across Central Asia. As the months went by, the everyday realities of this became harder to ignore. I remember a remarkable young man who I met on a trip to a small town further west. He had taught himself English by listening to cassette tapes. “For you,” he said, “it is a curious fact that one-in-six of the people in the world are Chinese. For us Uyghurs, it feels like God’s judgement.” The sheer hopelessness of a people who saw their culture sentenced to disappearance by a demographic and economic superpower was painful to witness, and what has gone on in the twenty years since is hard to think about.¹

Yet in the early months, there was so much else on my mind, as my senses were blown by wave after wave of new experiences. The night markets, the oasis villages, the open air pool halls under the desert sky. There were dozens of new cuisines, none of which my experience of Chinese restaurants in England had prepared me for, and all involving nose-to-tail eating. I got used to chewing on strips of pig’s ear, but at the restaurant with the spicy chicken stew, you had to watch out for the beak. My colleagues had their favourite dishes, but exploring further on the menu was always a gamble, where you might end up with a steaming bowl of blood soup. Foreigners were rare enough that we were sometimes invited to banquets for our curiosity value and here the food on offer could test our unschooled palettes to the limit. One time, I remember helping myself to what looked to be strips of pasta, served hanging from a wooden frame, but my mouth soon told me otherwise. Later I learned that I’d been eating duck intestines.

Then there was the language. For the first two months, I had to carry a card with my address written on it, as I was unable to make those few syllables come out of my mouth in a form recognisable to a taxi driver. I started taking Mandarin lessons with a man who called himself Alibaba and by the end of half a year, I could cope for a few minutes, so long as the conversation stayed on the track of the standard questions people asked you as a foreigner. Any deviation and I soon got lost, though, like the time when my colleague Rupert and I got into a taxi, both sporting fuzzy beards, and the driver took one look at us and declared, “So, you guys are Afghan!”

In the afternoons, I would often sit in the Circle English office, using the school computer as a window to a world that spoke my language. In the early weeks, I sent out round-robin emails to friends and family. Then I found a site where I could write and publish a journal, rather than assume that everyone wanted my words in their inbox. A while later, I noticed that I was starting to get comments on my posts from people I didn’t know.

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It is hard to remember – and harder to explain to anyone who wasn’t there – that twenty years ago, it was not yet obvious that one of the defining features of these networked technologies would be their ability to bring us into connection with strangers, some of whom we would end up meeting in the flesh, many of whom we would feel ourselves getting to know entirely within the limits (and liberations) of those parts of ourselves that can pass through keyboards, screens and cameras.

In the early months of 2004, a long way from home, excited and sometimes exhausted by the strangeness of my surroundings, I sought relief in writing about these experiences for people who had known me during earlier chapters of my life. In the process, more or less by accident, I fell through the looking glass into the world of blogging and the widening web of correspondence and connection over distance that has shaped a good deal of my life and work from then to now.

I was brought back to these beginnings by a comment from

Leanne Hunt

on one of my recent posts. She wrote about the role that

Substack

has played for her as a context in which to find a voice. There is something about this platform and the ways we are using it that leans towards collegiality and conviviality, even a touch of what Brian Eno calls ‘scenius’, the collective genius of scenes.

At its best, this makes it the kind of setting in which people learn how to make their lives and their words into a gift. On a good day, it can match the best of what I’ve experienced over twenty years of weaving my life and words and work through the tangle of these technologies.

And alongside this, there comes another thought. Because when I opened that window on the computer in the Circle English office, a window into a world of online correspondence and connection, I was also retreating from the challenges of being where I found myself, the bodily reality of my situation. Sometimes we need that kind of retreat, just to stay sane. Yet I wonder how much deeper I might have journeyed into that part of the world, how much more I might have learned, if I hadn’t found that window to escape through on those afternoons in Xinjiang. How much further would I have gone in learning Mandarin – or Uyghur, for that matter – if I hadn’t had my English-speaking friends, old and new, a click of a mouse away?

I don’t ask these questions because I need to settle them, but simply to notice that they are there, and that they point towards a tension which many of us experience in the ways we have been living in the early 21st century. And if

Substack

is one of the parts of the internet that I have a clear desire to remain a part of, then this is partly because many of the readers and writers I encounter here are thinking about exactly these tensions.

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The season of Lent begins today, one of those traces of earlier ways of being that still seems to prove helpful to people who have no active relationship to Christianity, offering a shared frame on which to hang our individual choices about changes we want to make – or try making – in our lives. We need these frames, one way or another. Within the older understanding of this season, there is something that could take us deeper: the suggestion that, on its threshold, we make a reckoning of the parts of our lives that we’re not proud of, the places where we fall short of being the people we want to be.

Yesterday afternoon, with immaculate timing, an advance copy of

Elizabeth Oldfield

’s Fully Alive landed in our letterbox. Early in the book, she expresses a concern that in the post-Christian West, there are parts of our culture that have retained a sense of sin – that to be human is to be flawed and fallible, to fall short of our aims – only without an accompanying sense of forgiveness – that we are more than our flaws, that we don’t need to get trapped in shame and regret, that we are capable of change. Elizabeth would be the first to acknowledge that Christianity has often fallen short of embodying this sense of forgiveness, and sometimes terribly short. Yet it is a description that resonates with something I’ve felt in recent years, especially when faced with the fiercely judgemental character of much online discourse, and the lack of kindness towards others or ourselves which this seems to reflect.

On the way into Lent this year, for a combination of reasons, I found myself drawn into a reckoning with the parts of myself that I’m least proud of – and an acknowledgement of how far these are bound up with my relationship to the networked technologies with which my life has been entangled, these magic mirrors through which it is so easy to escape my bodily situation, or to fill any spare moment with a flow of words and images. What makes this challenging is that an honest reckoning also includes gratitude for the gifts these networks bring into my life. So what is called for is nothing so simple as abstinence – and even rhythms of periodic abstinence are little help, in my experience. I turn off my phone on a Friday night and keep it off until sometime on Sunday, but when it goes back on, you can bet I do some making up for lost time. What’s needed is not so much an exercise of willpower as a change of habits, a deliberate setting of boundaries so as to sidestep the default patterns that our devices are set up to seduce us into.

I have friends who seem to have a very different constitution, when it comes to their ability to inhabit this double life of physical and virtual existence, but for me, I know too well those days when a message from a stranger or an online friend can colour my mood and spill out onto those closest to me. I know how easily my attention is drawn away from where I am and how much energy drains from me on days when my eyes barely leave the screen. And, having begun to make changes a few days ago, I’m reminded already of how quickly peace returns and what a relief it brings.

One other element is worth noting in the reflections that brought me here. A couple of days ago,

Caroline Ross

wrote about a conversation in which she landed on the image of trees and meadows: there can be seasons of life in which you are growing an oak tree, a single large project that stands at the centre of your work, and other seasons in which you are tending a meadow, a patch of smaller activities with little obvious to show until the flowers come into bloom. What I caught sight of in recent weeks is that it’s the meadow seasons when I need to guard my attention with greatest care. When there’s an oak tree to focus on, like writing a book, I don’t find it too hard to put the distractions aside, but it’s in the fallow times that all those tendrils seeking my attention close in.

So last night, we sat around the kitchen table and read through the advice that

Ruth Gaskovski

and

Peco

shared with readers at

School of the Unconformed

in their invitation to join them in a “communal digital fast” this Lent. We came up with some agreements which I wrote down and stuck on the kitchen cupboard.

And clearly, as you’re reading this, the boundaries we decided on leave room for me to go on writing this Substack. But they also mean that I wrote this post longhand in a notebook before it got anywhere near a screen.

What works for me won’t fit the shape of your life. We can learn from each other, but there’s no shortcut around the reckoning with what each of us knows about the places in our lives where we fall short of who we want to be, and there’s a lot to be said for talking these things out with those who know us best.

DH

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1. One of my colleagues at Circle English, David O’Brien, went on to become a scholar of East Asian Politics who does important work bringing attention to the situation of the Uyghurs.