Ten Years: Weaponization of the spoken word

We live in the post-future. One might ask how is that even possible. Afterall, isn't the future permanent, a series of events yet to manifest in the context of the present? Yes, but by "future," I don't mean tomorrow, or next year, or even the next decade. I mean yesterday. I was born in 2000, a year that was the future for some. The year of the new millennium. The year where computers will crash, where tech will reign supreme, and where history would supposedly end. We got that future, but somehow it was even darker than what we anticipated.

September 11th, the War on Terror, the 2008 Recession, the rise of populism, climate change, and the sixth mass extinction. That is the future I grew up in.

Ten Years, a 2015 Hong Kong anthology film, depicts a dystopian Hong Kong in the year 2025. Despite being set in the future, I am hesitant to call this a science fiction film, at least in the traditional sense. Even other science fiction films that steer away from the fantastical and relish in realism, such as anthology series Black Mirror, wouldn't fall into the same category as Ten Years. That's because the 2025 setting is a storytelling device for speculation, just not the wondrous type. Ten Years' focus is on the people of Hong Kong as they face a near-future possibility that is edging closer to reality. Five stories, each with their own director, depict what life may be like in an authoritarian Hong Kong, where no one is safe from the rule of the CCP.

The stories are diverse in their subject matter, ranging from assassination plots to allusions of the 2014 Umbrella Movement. Yet, one story in particular stood out to me— Dialect. It's the third story in the anthology and arguably the most mundane, which makes it the most sinister. Dialect follows the story of a Cantonese-speaking taxi driver whose life is made difficult when a law is passed limiting the use of Cantonese in Hong Kong. The driver can no longer understand his Mandarin-programmed GPS, customers ridicule him for only knowing Cantonese, and his son struggles to keep up in his Mandarin-instructed school.

Ostracization is the hidden symptom of authoritarianism and a direct weapon of fascism. We are constantly saturated with images of protests and uprisings; images of rebellions against state control as the world around us becomes less free. Somehow, we forget the unseen consequences of the loss freedom on people's everyday lives. We don't think enough about the ways authoritarianism doesn't just weaponize the state, but weaponizes the self. Language is integral to the self and, is too, a weapon. Language formed the laws that weaponized the taxi driver's native tongue against him. Language is what provides his Mandarin-speaking passengers a higher status in society. Language is what prevents his son from excelling in school. Language is what leads to violence.

I think about how this story didn't need the backdrop of a near-future Hong Kong to seem realistic. Rather, the story of the taxi driver is one that plays out in thousands of small interactions everyday around the world. I think of instances I've witnessed in Los Angeles of someone being ridiculed for not having the best of English. How my parents had to perfect their English to somehow be seen as "better" immigrants. How a drop of another language was never spoken to me at home so my English would one day be perfect too.

What makes Dialect so cruel as a story is how there is no clear villain. With the exception of the law that sets up the story, no one character in the story is directly to blame for the taxi driver's predicament. It's not his fault for not knowing Mandarin same way its not his passenger's fault for not knowing Cantonese. Yet, even though the passengers are not the reason for the current state of Hong Kong in the film, they benefit from its hierarchy, a status they relish in the way they treat the taxi driver.

I'm reminded slightly by Bong Joon-ho's 2019 chef-d'oeuvre, Parasite. There's parallels between the poor Kim family of the film and the story of the taxi driver. Like the taxi driver, the Kims find themselves at the bottom of South Korean society where their labor is exploited by the wealthy Park family. The Park's attitude toward those less fortunate than themselves is also ridiculing, just like the taxi driver's Mandarin-speaking passengers. Still, the Park family are not the story's antagonists. If anything, the Park's were too clueless (or maybe just too rich to care) to cause any direct violence toward the Kim family. Yet their relationship is inherently violent because is is based off an exploitative system that relishes in violence. The taxi driver and the Kims are invisible in that same system of exploitation, where the state is merely the tool for which violence is dispersed to maintain the economic status quo.

I am a current student of Mandarin. As someone studying international relations and East Asian studies, I took Mandarin under the assumption that it is a necessary tool for my professional life. In doing so, I can't help but feel I too contribute to the same system that causes the taxi driver such difficulty. Afterall, it's Mandarin that is desirable for jobs. It's Mandarin that is offered in schools. It's Mandarin that is the language of the only country capable of truly challenging the United States on the world stage.

Dialect, like the rest of Ten Years, is not science fiction, but it also isn't speculative. It is a lived reality that is playing out in this exact moment, one where we all play a role in no matter how indirect. Yet, even if the future might have been yesterday, it will always be tomorrow as well. Ten Years is a story of what is to come through the lense of now. But unlike now, what has yet to come has not happened yet, and only we are able to make sure it never does.