In the 1980s, when I was working on two Chinese computer research projects at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies / 倫敦大學亞非學院), a Japanese lecturer there asked me if I could teach him how to use the computer (for generating his teaching material, which he’d been writing out by hand).
He couldn’t grasp: log in, create/open folder, create/open file, etc.
I had to say, “Log in is like having the key to unlock the door to enter the room. Create a folder is like setting aside a drawer in the filing cabinet for files of the same subject matter.” Only then could he visualise the concepts.
Another day, I saw a bookshop owner friend outside SOAS. He asked how my day had been. I said, “Terrible. My computer kept crashing and crashing.” He gave a gasp, then said, “What, fell to the floor?!?”, miming the toppling over of a computer onto the floor.
I’ve been feeling like that the last few days trying to get a digital token for my bank account for making a digital payment. Took my nephew one second to pay on my behalf. Days on and even fewer hair left on my head, I’m still no closer to sorting out the digital token.
Various tech savvy friends have been pitching in, suggesting things like, “Try logging into ... in the web browser,” and I’d go back to them and ask, “What does web browser mean?”
I said to them, “I need a PhD to understand all this. Maybe this is how my students feel about my Chinese grammar explanations…”
(London, 2023)
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