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| Buzz Lightyear pilots a spaceship, with Sox the cat, Izzy, and 2 other space rangers. Image source. |
[content note: spoilers for the movie "Lightyear"]
I recently watched the new Pixar movie "Lightyear" and I loved it. This is, in the Toy Story universe, the movie the fictional character Buzz Lightyear came from, and therefore the inspiration for the toy Buzz Lightyear in the Toy Story movies.
In the movie, Buzz's spaceship is stuck on a mysterious planet, and Buzz blames himself because he was overconfident and refused to accept help from others, and therefore crashed the ship. Buzz is determined to find the correct fuel mixture and do a hyperspeed test run, so that they can then use that fuel to power their spaceship and get everyone off the planet. Every time Buzz does a test run, about 4 minutes pass for Buzz, but on the planet, 4 years pass because of time dilation.
Meanwhile, the hundreds of people on the spaceship settle down on the planet. They build a society and make a life for themselves there. Buzz's best friend, a space ranger named Alisha, gets married, has a son, eventually has a granddaughter, grows old, and eventually dies there, with Buzz popping in to see her every 4 years between his test runs. (Alisha marries a woman- very cool to see this LGBTQ representation!)
Eventually, Buzz meets Alisha's granddaughter, Izzy, and they work together to fight enemy robots and such. There is one scene where Buzz tells Izzy that he regrets that he was never able to finish his mission and get everyone off the planet, and that he failed Alisha and she lost everything because of him. Izzy is shocked that Buzz would say that about Alisha; Izzy says Alisha had a good life. She had family and friends. We shouldn't talk about Alisha like she was a failure, just because she never got off the planet again.
Later Buzz comes to accept this too. There's a scene at the end when Buzz is fighting the villain, Zurg (who is actually a time-traveling version of himself, from the future), and Buzz destroys the hyperspeed fuel, to stop old-Buzz-from-the-future from getting it. Without the fuel, Buzz loses his hope of completing the mission and getting everyone off the planet. But old-Buzz-from-the-future wanted to use the fuel to go back in time and fix his mistake, so that they were never stuck on the planet in the first place, and Buzz no longer wants that. He realizes that the people stuck on the planet made the best of it and had lives that were meaningful, and it would be wrong to undo all that just to get rid of his own guilt over his mistake.
Anyway, that's the summary, and it makes me think about how the covid-19 pandemic has screwed up my life plans. Well, all over the world, the pandemic has screwed up people's life plans. It's likely that you, reader, also had plans that were totally ruined by the pandemic.
Anyone remember in 2019, when I wrote a blog series called "6 Years Later" about the things I've learned about privilege and culture, as a white American living in China as an immigrant, and how I'm basically ready to be done living in China now? And now look, it's 2022 and I am still in China. I am stuck in China. I've been living in China for 9 years now, and during the pandemic I haven't even left China at all, not even for vacations or anything. (In the Before Times, I went back to the US twice a year.)
(Let me clarify, when I say I'm "stuck in China"- it is definitely possible to leave. I know people who have left China recently. It's just a much more daunting thing when the world has changed so much because of covid, and because it's so difficult to get back into China.)
But during the pandemic, China has been a better place to be than the US. At least during the first 2 years of the pandemic- when we got to March 2022 and the Shanghai lockdown started, Shanghai was very much NOT a good place to be. But before that, from 2020 to early 2022, we were fine. Nobody had covid. We had to wear masks everywhere, and there were some tedious rules about testing or quarantine if you want to travel, but we didn't have to worry that we would actually *get* covid. It was much better than in the US, where something like 1 million people have died of covid.
I wrote in 2019 that I chose to come to China to get out of my comfort zone or whatever, and I gave up a lot of privilege- the privilege of being in the majority culture, being a citizen, a native speaker- but "my life in the US is still there, still available, I can go back any time." Because of the pandemic, that was no longer true in 2020. I had never imagined it wouldn't be true. But yes, in 2020 and 2021, China was a better place to be than the US.
And I've just kind of been, like... waiting it out. I have life goals that I can't make progress on if I'm in China, but I'm not sure if it's too risky to be in the US because of covid, especially because I have a little son.
And now it's been 2 and a half years of this, and this isn't how I wanted my life to go. The planned timeline for my life is now impossible because of this delay.
But just like Alisha and the other residents of the new planet, we just have to accept that this is the world we live in, and do the best we can. We used to live on a planet without covid, and now that world is gone, and that's just... the way it is. Buzz refused to live on the new planet; the only thing he could think about was getting back home- back to normal. And so he missed out.
It's not the life you wanted to have, which is tragic, but after you accept that, you can still have a good life. You just do your best, care about people, love your family, make the world better.
And these 2 and a half years that we've been "stuck in China", I don't think of it as wasted time. We've had a good life here. Our baby has grown into a little boy, and he's doing great. And I feel lucky that our situation during the pandemic hasn't been as bad as a lot of other people's.
We really are working on moving to the US. It's not like in the "Lightyear" movie, where they were stuck on the planet for about 100 years, omg, no I am not going to be stuck in China for that long. It's going to happen soon, really. But these 2 and a half years mean my life plans are already messed up- but we just have to make the best life we can in this world.
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Related:
Culture, Objectivity, God, and the Real Reason I Moved to China
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