VR Soap One day here in Beijing, I suddenly found myself drawn into a kind of virtual soap opera. Since I never saw any of the characters live, the events seemed as unreal as the shows I watch on TV; perhaps even more unreal, because I never saw or heard anything happen. I had to try to reconstruct the story from stray e-mails, which for all I know may have been faked. But I still choose to believe that the mail messages describe something which really has happened in consensus reality. Why not? After all, "fact" is stranger than "fiction", right? The story goes something like this. I have an e-mail account at the only Internet cafe here in Beijing, which is called "Sparkice". It is set up with Western capital (Canadian, I think), but run by Chinese people, supposedly according to the "Chinese way", whatever that might mean concretely. When I had just started using my account, I noticed that I sometimes got other people's mails along with my own. I found this somewhat annoying, because sometimes there would be quite a lot of them, and I had to sift through them all to get to read my own ones. After a while, I lost patience and asked the staff about the problem, but they couldn't help me. (Since then, I've discovered that they know next to nothing about the computers. I wonder who does, since they have a working, well kept Web page and everything; there must be some dark, mysterious figure hacking away in some back room of the cafe.) So I directed my rage towards the person who clogged my mailbox the most, that is, the one who got the most e-mail. This particular day, he (for it was a he, which I would soon discover) had about five or six messages in the box. Following a vengeful, voyeuristic urge, I opened up the first of them and started to read ... The first thing that I noticed, before I actually opened the first letter, was that the adressees' name, as well as those of all the senders, looked South-East Asian; it became clear from the first letter that they were all Vietnamese who lived in the USA. The addressee was apparently a fairly young, Vietnamese American male, who had come to Beijing to study. He and his friends seemed to form a fairly close-knit network, and there are indeed no mentions of any persons not of Vietnamese origin in any of the letters. The mails came from about ten different people in total, which means a group of roughly the same size order as the groups of main characters in TV soaps like Beverly Hills or Melrose Place. Although I couldn't tell from the names which senders were female and which were male, some of the letters provided clues, and I can fairly confidently say that there were about the same amount of females & males. Now, it soon became apparent that the addressee had both a wife and a girlfriend back home. He sent just one letter to his wife & received an answer, and they both were very short and cliched; I got the impression that the marriage was arranged or something. His wife wrote that she loved him, but she didn't seem to mind that the mail he sent her apparently was the first time he had contacted her since he came to China (which would have been about two or three weeks ago). In that letter, he also complained about how boring it was here, and she wrote in her answer that she was sorry, and tried to cheer him up in a bland, without doubt utterly ineffective way. In contrast, the numerous letters that our hero exchanged with his girlfriend were a different story altogether. Passion shines through every line of text. The girl writes that she can't eat or sleep, because she misses him so much. He writes that she loves her too, and then that he has sent a big package with presents to her, which she, after a while, confirms having received. Undoubtedly, I thought, this girl was more important to our hero (let's call him "V" from now on) than his wife. I had even begun to suspect that the wife was some kind of fake, she was never mentioned in the other letters, and, as I said, the letter she wrote was very dull. Almost the only thing in it which suggested that she indeed was his wife was that she concluded it with something along the lines of "your compassionate, understanding, beautiful ... etc etc ... wife". She also mentioned another person, who might or might not be her and V:s child, this was not clear from the context. I can't think of any reason why the "wife letter" would be faked, but what do I know? Anyway, I started to concentrate on the guy's and the girlfriend's relationship instead. Like a vampire, I assimilated the joys & sorrows of their lives into my own. I soon discovered another level to the story. While the girlfriend was certainly important to V, there was somebody who seemed to be even more important; a male friend of his, let's call him R. I suspect this, because almost all of the other friends of V point out that, for instance, "it must be difficult to live in China, and you probably miss R a lot", while nobody mentions his wife, though there is some stray reference to the girlfriend. V and R exchange loads of letters, and here V really seems to spill it all out; he tells all about his wild adventures and how much fun he is having in Beijing. This is in sharp contrast with the letter to his wife, where he seems depressed, and to his girlfriend, in which he mainly says he misses her all the time. We can certainly forgive him for adjusting the tone of the letters according to which person he writes to, don't we all do that? R replies in the same vein, that is, friendly but somewhat macho "male buddy"-style. What did make me a bit disappointed was this. The letters that V received from his male friends began to contain references of different sexual exploits of his in this Northern Capital of China. Notably, there was one time when he apparently had had a "threesome" with some of the other students. Fair enough; it's just that I had begun to have high hopes for V and his girlfriend back home. I thought he might maybe get a divorce and move in with her instead. As soon as he could get a job, of course; they actually discussed this in their correspondence; they were worried about not having enough money because they were both still going to college. When I heard (I mean "read", you know it's difficult to get rid of old metaphors!) about the threesome and all that stuff, I wondered if the love birds maybe had some kind of pact of mutual understanding or something, but he never mentioned anything to her, and from what the correspondence between V and R says, I don't think he was supposed to act like he did. This plot was quite complex, as you can see, and I sometimes made the mistake of treating the involved parties like TV show characters, with fairly clear-cut motivations and behavior patterns. These were real people, however, (or at least I think so!) and they often confused and surprised me with what they did and said. It was fascinating to be able to observe the dynamics of a group of people this closely. Well, what can I say, I continued reading V:s e-mail. Not because I was still annoyed, because that had already passed on that very first day, but because I had to. I had been drawn into another person's life, and I became addicted to this life which I merely "supervised", as it were. I observed, followed, and considered every twist and turn in the plot. Of course, I sometimes entertained the notion of sending my Vietnamese brother a short mail with comments or pieces of advice, or maybe just a little catchy poem or something ... But I never did. One day, after a couple of weeks I guess, I arrived the cafe after the customary, 30-minute bus ride standing up in a 1.55 m tall mini bus, my brain hungry for some trash candy, only to find that the mail bug had been fixed. (By the Black Back Room Programmer?) Naturally, I could not complain about this. But I did feel deprived; deprived of my soap fix, of my little voyeuristic pleasure. The Virtual MTV Real World; a unique window into real, breathing people's lives, or just an empty facade with nothing behind it, except for a cold grinning transistor smile? by Mikael Huss copyright (c) 1997