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Generally speaking, there aren’t many easily spotted similarities between my chance encounter with a college freshman and a short story about a utopia thriving on the misery of a child. In fact, when trying to relate the two, my experience actually addresses certain holes of the story. Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” showcases a contact zone between a tormented kid and those who flourish on it. My zone, instead, was comprised of high school and college students. Neither my overnight host, nor I, though, had much of a power differential to make it a “true” contact zone. Nonetheless, there was always only one person taking charge of the situation, and one following.

There is an idea of the “mindset of the oppressed.” This notion explains why peoples who have been oppressed have become “comfortable” submitting to a greater force or group and the duties that accompany that capitulation. Persecutors weaken, marginalize, dehumanize, and devalue groups of people in order to instill the oppressive mindset onto a society to the point where it becomes lodged into the prevailing cultural outlook and therefore in people’s minds. This is particularly relevant when their persecutors change or a culture becomes autonomous.

Last fall, during the time I spent in Bolivia, I took a tour of Potosí’s silver mine. Since 1545, the Spanish forced Bolivians into the mines, to mainly extract silver from the mountains above the city of Potosí.

Muddy Prints

While reading Mary Louise Pratt’s Art of a Contact Zone, she explored different types of contact zone for the reader’s entertainment. She immediately places the reader into a contact zone to grab the attention of the reader into something that can be very difficult to understand. I found the approach very interesting because it actually worked. It was a very simple setting of her son and his best-friend, Willie, talking about baseball, baseball cards and trading. After her short detailed story, she goes right into explaining that in fact her own son, aged seven, has already been exposed to a contact zone. 

When I was previously asked to write about an encounter I’d had with another “organism,” I’ll be honest, the first thing that crossed my mind wasn’t my dog.  But as that seemed to be the logical progression from Anne’s post, I rolled with it, and spoke about how my dog Max and I communicate our feelings to each other without the use of words (because, obviously, he’s a dog, and doesn’t speak English very well).

“Humans are the superior animals in this universe, we create a strong contact zone to other species in this world. This contact zone is what makes the world as it is now, balanced and harmonious. Sometimes, people will think of the idea of someone trying to break the zone. In Butler’s short story of “Blood child”[1], humans(Terrans) are dominated by worms(       Tlic). The superior species and humans create a contact zone where they need humans to carry their young, and at the same time humans need their eggs to get longer lives. Even though it is a society that has a huge hierarchy, there is still a balance in it: worms give humans their eggs to eat, the humans incubate their offspring.

The last post that I made, I told a story about a guy, a drug addict to be more precise, in a raging fit about God knows what. He was looked at, recorded, made fun of, ignored, pitied, yet never helped by the on-lookers. And being that I was one of the on-lookers, yet I did nothing, really made me think back to the short story, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, by Ursula Le Guin.

On 29^th of May, 2014, I finally graduated from high school and finished the arduous 12 years of Chinese education. Seen off my hardworking and busy three-year-life in high school, I found out that I would never have this kind of restrained life any more, but what would my future be. It seemed that I have never imagined my future with inspiring reverie. I’ve even never thought deeply about my inner enthusiasm, my dream. The only thing I’ve done so far was moving along with the hustle and bustle crowd. Though my brain has been stuffed with knowledge, I can feel that my heart is empty. So I embarked on the plane to Lijiang, Yunnan, starting off a trip to meet with different cultures and integrate myself.

When I encountered Hank Green randomly in the airport, he was to me, a celebrity. His vast fanbase combined with his achievements made it clear that my position in the online community we shared was greatly unbalanced. He is the one who talks, I am one of the many who listen. He has a certain amount of power over his viewers, in that his words can influence their actions. With such a large viewership, his ideas and thoughts and goals can spread to a wide variety of people. To an extent, the fans play a role in the community, saying what they like and dislike, adding ideas of their own and stating what they disagree with. However, at the end of the day, he is the leader. If he says something, people tend to believe it. Hank tends to use his power for good.

      In my last post, I described the connection that I believed that I shared with a man on the streets of my hometown. Because I have never spoken to him,  I  feel uncomfortable when contemplating the fact that I know that we somehow live vastly different lives. I do not even understand how I have come to that conclusion, as we only  “meet” each other for a fleeting moment. His life experiences, origins, thoughts, feelings, ideas remain a mystery to me. However, I know that we both experienced something unexplainable when we gazed into each others eyes. Or maybe that was only me. Maybe he was not even thinking of that present time. Maybe he was contemplating where he would get his next fix. Maybe he didn’t even see me when he starred in my direction.