Friday, July 13, 2007

bunnie’s blog » Blog Archive » Made in China: Dedication:

Here’s another interesting story. On our way out of the factory floor one day, Xiao Li asked me what does a chumby do? Well, I don’t speak chinese very well, and she doesn’t speak english very well either, so I decided to start with a few basic questions.

I asked her if she knew what the world wide web was. She said no.

I asked her if she knew what the internet was. She said no.

I was stunned. Here is a girl who is an expert in building and testing computers–I mean, on some projects she has probably built PCs and booted Windows XP a hundred thousand times over and over again (god knows I heard that darn startup sound a zillion times that night on the factory floor, as right next to me was a bank of final test stations for ASUS motherboards)–yet she didn’t know what the internet was. I had taken it for granted that if you touched a computer today, you were also blessed by the bounties of the internet. I felt like a bit of a spoiled snob and a pig all at once for forgetting that she probably couldn’t afford a computer, much less broadband internet access. If she were given the opportunity, she was certainly smart enough to learn it all, but she’s busy making money that she’s probably sending back to her family at home.

How do you describe the color blue to the blind? In the end, the best I could do was to tell her it was a device for playing games.

10:05 AM