{"id":99058,"date":"2016-06-09T14:46:57","date_gmt":"2016-06-09T18:46:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=99058"},"modified":"2016-06-09T15:07:38","modified_gmt":"2016-06-09T19:07:38","slug":"live-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/09\/live-online\/","title":{"rendered":"Live Online"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tending\u00a0my Internet archive.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"J.<\/a>

J. M. W. Turner, Sunrise with Sea Monsters<\/i>, 1844, oil on canvas.<\/p><\/div>\n

This summer we\u2019re introducing a series of new columnists. Today, meet Wei Tchou.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

My parents visited me a few weeks ago, when I was feeling blue for the normal New York reasons: another breakup, a looming eviction, the smell of dead rats wafting up from the basement of my building. (The exterminator hadn\u2019t been by in a while.) My father brought along a few things to cheer me up. The two-and-a-half pound tin of \u201cEuropean Formula\u201d Ovaltine turned out to be something of a ruse; he\u2019s diabetic, so my mother doesn\u2019t normally allow him that sort of indulgence. But he also brought three beautiful, hard-to-find bottles of baijiu<\/a>, a high-proof Chinese liquor, along with a memory.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was reading through my date book from this time in 1983,\u201d he told me. \u201cThirty-three years ago, I was receiving a notice every week to arrive in Philadelphia to be deported.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Dad said that by that time he\u2019d been living in the United States as an undocumented Chinese immigrant for four years; he\u2019d recently passed the entrance exam to attend a medical residency despite his shaky English. During that year of weekly deportation notices, he applied to around a hundred schools and was rejected by all of them.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut this week in 1983, I received my last and only letter, accepting me to Emory. They ask for your citizenship status on the form,\u201d he said. Lost for an answer, he wrote down the code that had appeared on his deportation notices, which identified him as an illegal alien. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t until I\u2019d matriculated and been offered an assistant professorship that anyone knew I hadn\u2019t been a naturalized American citizen.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s difficult to complain about, well, anything when your parents are immigrants who lived through the Cultural Revolution\u2014of course nothing in my life will likely ever be as traumatic or as heartbreaking as my parents\u2019 pre-American history. But they didn\u2019t bring up the trials of their past to be emotionally daunting. Instead, they wanted to help me rearrange my perspective, as though to say that everything, no matter how terrible, will one day become just a memory.<\/p>\n

Dad has kept a date book diligently for most of his life, and it\u2019s become a shared family responsibility to find him a new one each Christmas. Brooks Brothers used to issue a beautiful and small leather edition, but after they discontinued the product a few years ago, the rest of us have competed to find a book that he\u2019ll deem worthy. I inherited his graphomanic impulse\u2014accumulation of any kind comforts me\u2014but not his affection for pen and paper. (I\u2019m only really diligent about keeping journals in the turbulent months after a breakup.) Instead, I\u2019ve scattered the written coordinates of my life to disparate pockets of the Internet.<\/p>\n

\"Tumblr-404\"<\/a><\/p>\n

My father\u2019s date book came to mind recently when I learned that many of my friends were erasing their old tweets and using services like tumblrpurge, Instant Cleaner, and DLLTR to regularly delete their personal Internet archives. A Fusion article from last year<\/a> found that neither fear nor shame was driving Twitter users to look to these services, which often leave only posts from the most recent three or six months. The motivation, rather, was a desire \u201cto reflect their present states of mind and interests.\u201d A past version of myself might have very much preferred this digital short-term memory loss to the impulsive deletion of an entire LiveJournal, two WordPress blogs, a few Tumblrs, and who knows how many Instagram photos. (Deleting, for me, isn\u2019t only an electronic endeavor: In a breakup journal from 2006, I used Post-It notes and packaging tape to cover five pages I wrote about cheating on my high-school boyfriend. On top of that, I\u2019d scribbled the words \u201cit doesn\u2019t matter.\u201d)<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never been tempted, however, to prune my Twitter account, which I started in 2009, my senior year of college. Reading through the early years of my account, I see that at first my feed was somewhat lopsided, alternating between the coolly sullen and the peppily earnest.<\/p>\n

Here I am soliciting advice on buying a DSLR camera, because I was artsy but also practical.<\/p>\n

\n

Thinking about getting a digital SLR – any suggestions?<\/p>\n

\u2014 Wei Tchou (@weitchou) March 1, 2009<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n