Glancing through the blogs by my classmates, it appears it’s a truth universally accepted that this term is just flying by. In my case, I guess it’s no different. But there has still been time for some quirky surprises.

In Service to a Higher Power

A project I thought was in a coma may be reawakening. Some years ago, I stumbled across the realization that Changzhou’s No. 1 Hospital and the Changzhou Church, and several other institutions that still exist in town were founded by American missionaries. This was back when I was still running a bilingual magazine about Changzhou, and this kind of thing made for an off-beat alternative history story. But the problem, I soon learned, was that a lot of the records about what happened (at least in Changzhou) were apparently destroyed or lost. The hospital managed to either hold on to some or piece some together, but the Church’s records were an abyss. So this led me on a chase for documents and information across a couple of continents, and I got my hands on some neat things and met the descendants of several of the missionaries involved in these projects.

And then COVID hit and I was pretty limited in what I could do while stuck in China, so I stored my work on a hard drive, packed my missionary books away, and focused on other things.

Until this past couple of weeks. Suddenly out of the blue, the new director of the Church got in touch with me (through a strangely wayward route) because there was a rumor that I might have a copy of a book written by the daughter of the founder of the Church. It’s true that I have this book, but I also thought the Church had a copy because I’d originally managed to secure two copies of the book and gave one to the Church way back when so that they could have a piece of their history. However, the new director and the old director apparently don’t have the kind of relationship where the new director can say to the old director, “Hey, this American woman says she gave you a copy of this book, do you know what happened to it?” The easier route was to ask a cancer doctor at the hospital to ask the granddaughter of the founder of the hospital who lives across an ocean if she could connect him to the grandchildren of the founder of the Church (I’d actually connected both of these families to each other) and over the conversations that ensued someone pointed out that, “Hey, actually there’s a woman in Changzhou who maybe has all this stuff you’re interested in.”

So my books and I spent a Saturday at Church trying to answer questions for the church director and the cancer doctor. Some were possible to answer, and for other, I pointed out, “Well, there are at least two sets of archives over in the US that have a lot of documents about your church.”

Discussions ensued. I mentioned that I had wanted to make it to the Methodist archives in the US because I had been trying to hunt down information on a Jewish Austrian doctor who had been working with the Changzhou missionaries from 1939 until the Communists took over in 1949 when the American missionaries got him into the US (from which he almost immediately decided he wanted to leave and return to Changzhou, so to try to make that possible he converted from Judaism to Methodism so that he could become a missionary stationed in Asia in hopes that when China opened back up to foreigners he could make it back in; he landed in Korea right before the Korean war broke out, was taken prisoner, marched around in some pretty unpleasant circumstances for a year and then died shortly before a treaty was made and prisoners were released).

So veeeerrry long story not very short. It’s looking a lot like I’m going to be hitting some archives on my big summer trip. It’ll be exciting to see what exactly hasn’t been digitized (A lot of the reason I know as much as I do about these people is because of documents and magazines and newspapers that were digitized in addition to book catalogs).

Not in Service

Another thing that has stirred up much drama over this period was a new credit card I applied and was accepted for. It’s an American card, so I had it shipped to my mom’s house and she sent me scans of it and the information I (supposedly) needed to authorize it. In theory, these days this can all be done online, and in fact, I thought I was successful. The credit card’s app accepted me, and I started adding it to online accounts. The problem didn’t appear until I tried to use the card for the first time, and it was declined. I went to the card company’s app chatbot, and it told me to call their security line where the human told me there was a problem with my phone number (the same phone number I was using to call this human about the card).

“We can’t verify it,” he said, “Do you have another one?”

To bank online in the US from China, I pay a few dollars a month for a virtual phone number that looks like a normal US phone number, acts like a normal US phone number, but increasingly freaks out banks and some tech companies like Google because people who use virtual phone numbers “can’t be verified.”

Now, there are all kinds of really good reasons why a person might want to have a phone number that can’t be physically linked to them and is also easy to discard. Perhaps one of the most important of these is for safety (someone who is trying to flee an abusive relationship or a stalker may not want companies with a history of selling information to have access to information about a phone number linkable to that person’s physical location). But the agent at the security office at the credit card company didn’t seem very persuaded by this argument. “We use an outside processor to verify the number, and they say this one can’t be verified,” was all he could offer me as the reasoning for why it was legitimate to ban a person approved to make purchases with a credit card from actually making purchases with the credit card (you have one job, credit card company…). Even he didn’t seem to completely understand why this outside company was rejecting me, although, I’m pretty sure it must have something to do with the number being virtual as I offered him a second at his request and that was rejected as well, as was my Chinese mobile number.

I’m now in some kind of two-week wait where the company carries out “the next level” after which they will let me know “the next steps,” and the whole thing is so opaque, I find it silly. But it also does highlight this weird “no place” I end up in sometimes just because I decide I want to use a service in a way or from a location that flies in the face of how the entity running the service wants me to use (or even not use) the service. For example, in this case, the company would really rather have me physically in the US and using a US mobile phone number that is traceable with their processing service, and since that isn’t in the cards, we’re now all on hold while they decide what on earth to do about this troublesome customer.

Back to the Grind

I am so excited about classes this term, though. For Inclusive Society, I’m working on a Data Activism project. For Representing Data, I’m figuring out how to turn book information into data that can be used to make a quilt, for Data Ethics the readings continue to hit all my favorite topics, and for Data Science for Society, I have no clue what we’re going to be doing but after plowing through all the pre-intensive notebooks I’m just thrilled to have an excuse to spend two days digging through some datasets.

If only I could figure out how to string all these interests together into one little cohesive final project. I know I still have the luxury of time at the moment, but that’s shrinking by the week.

For Dessert

As I was wrapping up this blog, my son arrived home and made me watch this video. It’s hilarious and I think you all will enjoy it, too, as it touches on some familiar topics.

In God and Algorithms – Week 3-4 / Knowledge Integration and Project Planning: Data, Inequality and Society (2022-2023) by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0