Task 1: What‘s in your bag

My name is Yi. Eleven years ago, I moved from China to Canada with my parents and finished my high school in Burnaby BC, then undergraduate studies of Mathematics and Business Administration from the University of Waterloo. On a trip back to my hometown shortly after graduation, I was amazed by a truly wide range of technology novelties for education in China. Therefore, I decided to dedicate my career to this rapidly growing industry and joined an investment company that has a focus on educational technology ventures. Currently, I have asked my company for a temporary leave to dive deeper and become a better domain expert with further education. 

For the first category, I have a laptop, separate notebooks for three courses, a pencil case, various chargers, one pair of wired earbuds, and wireless headsets.

For the second category, I have a planner, a cosmetic bag, sanitizer, an after-bite gel bar, a book, and my purse. 

For the last category, I find a few things I haven’t cleared out after my recent trip: a foreign receipt, a sim card installation package and a no-longer-working train ticket. But I can tell you a story for each of the miscellaneous items.

1. This 17-months-planner that starts from this August is a “congratulation” present from my father as I received the offer from UBC. 
2. The cosmetic bag and the polar-bear-shaped sanitizer were purchased from a recently opened Japanese chain store called Miniso. Given these products’ high quality and fashionable design, I think that they are worth every penny I paid for. Shortly after they opened the first store in Vancouver downtown, 13 more locations were opened in BC in the past year, and it became very popular among Canadian teenagers and young adults.
3. The after-bite gel bar is also a product from Japan. It was a present from my best friend after she saw me had multiple mosquito bites all over my legs this summer. She ordered it directly from a Japanese online pharmacy store with a low delivery fee. That’s why the text on it is entirely Japanese.
4. The novel is Twilight, which I bought 11 years ago when I had first landed in Canada. Two days ago, I picked it out from the old shelf in my study. The only reason I would like to reread it is: I haven’t done any writing in English for almost three years, hence I desperately hope that this book can help me get more comfortable with English literature.
5. The foreign receipt was from a souvenir store in Bali, Indonesia. The store name is Handicraft & Painting OLEH, and the receipt shows “the cashier Johan” helped me at “05-08-2019 18：01″. It was a delightful shopping experience. The payment method at the bottom says “Alipay”.
6. The sim card installation package shows the card number”0812 4605 9634″, the price “Rp.50,000”, a few Indonesian words, a bar code, and 2 QR codes. One QR code is for detailed information, and another QR is for activation of the card.
7. A high-speed rail ticket has a lot of information about that train departure from Shanghai to Nanjing, China (my hometown). It also has a QR code that linked to the full train schedule.

photos in Bali ↓ ↓

Text Technologies:

Traces of digital technologies are all over the items presented in the backpack picture. First of all, there are multiple cards in my purse, including membership cards, chipped identity cards, chipped bank cards with Interac functions, and interactive access cards. All these cards have a separate database for storing customer data from the service providers. Secondly, most of the goods still have a barcode on the backside for product information. Barcodes represent limited data in a machine-readable form, but it dramatically reduces the wait time for both cashiers and self-checkout counters. Moreover, the QR code is another specific printed text that is linked to the digital information/website. The activation page, the product information from my sim card in Bali, and the train schedule for each stop and the real-time train status from my railway ticket in China are both good examples of it.  Even for the receipt from the souvenir store, the printed transaction codes allow me to trace back to both my e-payment company “Alipay” and the store’s databases.

10000 years from now, I can imagine some archeologists that would see me as a world traveler, but that is not true! The trip to Bali is the only leisure trip I had in the last three years, my friend ordered overseas gift via e-stores, I bought USA-made planner, Germany-made pen and Japan-made sanitizer just in Vancouver. Maybe they would also portray me as an adolescent girl because I read Twilight to write with more confidence…

I would say this backpack might not be applicable after 15 years, because kids in the future might not even understand what a “notebook” is for.