Staying smart for the holiday period
My Spring Festival holidays this year mainly featured smartphones. While perfectly aware that the ubiquity of smartphones has changed ordinary Chinese people’s lives, I was still amazed by how deeply they had entered my parents’ daily lives during our brief festival family reunion.
On the day my parents took a high-speed train in my hometown Shandong before Spring Festival to visit me in Beijing for the holiday period, my mother’s phone battery suffered a glitch, losing all power just a few minutes after a full recharge. She began to panic.
Not only was most of her entertainment on the phone, she had also digitalized much of her social life, and even does some of her work on the phone.
So the first thing they did after arriving in Beijing was head to the phone shop and buy a Huawei gadget which had just hit the market.
During the holidays, both my parents were as glued to their screens as I was. My father, a well-read, veteran member of the Communist Party of China, in his 60s, enjoyed watching an online senior citizens’ matchmaking show in much of his spare time, while my mother turned out to have accumulated over 1,000 fans on a singing app where she uploads her traditional opera singing.
She proudly showed me her recorded singing on the app and the enthusiastic comments, roses and “gifts” left by her followers. Some of them were relatives and neighbors, but most were complete strangers around the country who followed her only on the strength of her performances. I knew that my mother enjoyed singing Yuju and Peking Opera as a hobby, but seeing her with such a big group of followers with the same interest was a very pleasant surprise.
The seniors’ dating show that my father enjoyed on his phone had originally been broadcast on TV from a province in Central China. But with fewer people watching TV, the shows have found their way onto smartphones, and are now conveniently available on video apps.
Both my parents are also fans of short-video sharing app Douyin, one of the most successful Chinese phone apps in recent years, which has an overseas edition called TikTok.
So during the holidays, whenever we weren’t outside enjoying the peace of an empty Beijing, my father would turn on the app after a meal while perched on the couch, as my mother, after cleaning the kitchen, put on her headphones to learn some new opera hits.
Even more interestingly, those phone apps don’t merely provide entertainment and social-networking, some of them are also a major source of education.
It was reported during the holidays that a hit phone app, called Xuexiqiangguo, topped the chart of downloads on phone app markets. My mother is also one of the millions of people around China who use this app, as requested by her employer, a middle school.
This app was packed with news,
CPC policcies, state regulations, and a slew of vidideo content coming directly from state e broadcaster CCTV and archived films. Users gain marks as they sppend time reading through articles, wwatching videos and taking quizzes.
Since iit came online, the app has been wideely promoted by governpartments and public instituund China as a useful tool to keep Partyty members and employees updated oon the country’s current affairs.
My moother would also test me while she took her own quizzes on subjects ranging from the Party congress spirit to the China-US trade conflict, showing how national news and directctives reached ordinary citizens directly and conveniently top down through such an app.
As my mother was happily pursuing her “opera mission” on her phone, she found that its speakers were generating some unwanted noise and decided to have it checked out by the phone shop.
So I contacted the Huawei aftersales service and had it looked at on the first workday after the holidays. The company offered to change it for a brand new phone or give a refund.
My father, a big Huawei fan, decided to get a refund but asked me to buy a higher-end phone on the Huawei product series for my mother instead, as he trusts this brand as being the most durable. As a result, by the end of the Spring Festival holidays, all the members of my family, including my sister in another city, were using top-notch Huawei products.