作者 / David Yang，在場•非虛構翻譯獎學金得獎者
Youyou Zhou's piece on Estonia's e-Residency program brings to mind a famous Chinese joke from about fifteen years ago: “我也是有身份證的人” (I'm someone with an ID card myself). Popularized by the comedian Xiaoshenyang, the joke's humor lies in the slippage between the traditional meaning of 身份 (or 身分), referring to one's social status, and the more common context with which the word has become associated: as part of the term 身份證 (ID card). Whereas the phrase “有身份的人” rAcknowledgmentsefers to someone of high social standing, whom we might call “a person of status” in English, “有身份證的人” gestures toward the very opposite: a 身份證 cannot be farther away from a status symbol since every Chinese adult supposedly has one. The joke's popularity, I suspect, reflects China's cultural zeitgeist in the early 2000s, when equality before the law (everyone had a 身份證) became increasingly belied by the reality of growing social inequality (not everyone could have 身份).
The slippage between the physical and the abstract is reminiscent of the logic of metonymy ubiquitous in immigration lingo, where physical documents function as stand-ins for legal status: “green card” in English; “papeles,” in Spanish (referring to legal residency papers); “綠卡” (green card) and “楓葉卡” (maple card, or the Canadian permanent resident card) in Chinese. This brings us to another meaning of 身份, which combines the two aforementioned meanings in fascinating ways. For example, “海外身份” is now commonly used to denote overseas resident status, and immigration consultancies now emphasize the importance of “身份配置” (residency allocation) for those with the means to do so, treating citizenships and residencies as a portfolio of assets to be strategically diversified for risk and reward. This particular connotation of 身份 seems to have become prominent quite recently, coinciding with the rise of 潤學 (runxue), a Chinese internet slang for the study of ways to emigrate that plays on the English word run (as in run away). In this context, 身份 appears to denote not only legal but also social status, positioning Chinese nationality as potentially limiting compared to other residencies and citizenships. Estonia's e-Residency program, however, disturbs the metonymic logic of immigration discourse. While each e-Estonian is issued a physical ID, this card does not confer the right of traveling to the country or living there: a 身份證 without the corresponding 身份.
The evocative ambiguity of 身份 dovetails perfectly with Zhou's exploration of the contradictions of Estonia's e-Residency. And yet, it should be clear by now that there exists no readymade English equivalent for 身份, a term that appears more than 40 times in Zhou's text. While it is customarily rendered as “identity,” and I have adopted this translation in the title and a few other places, the notion of identity commonly found in contemporary English, associated with concepts like belonging, community, and personal history, plays a rather limited role here. Indeed, only Kirill Soloviev, the Russian entrepreneur who naturalized as an Estonian citizen, uses the word in this way, whereas most of the Chinese e-Estonians Zhou features are less concerned about matters of belonging as they are about the practicalities of running their crypto businesses. It would have been impossible to convey the paradoxical richness of 身份 I have been exploring without resorting to some idiosyncratic coinage like “IDentity.”
The e-Residency program's vision of a world unbound by geography and nationality seems quaint and quixotic today. The forces of globalization that gave rise to it have since gone into reverse, physical borders have been forcefully reinscribed, and national identities have become entrenched. In this sense, the piece can be read as an elegy for a stillborn future, and perhaps this is why Zhou lingers on the material remnants of the past that have remained despite Estonia's “feet-first” plunge into the 21st century: the medieval building in Tallinn's old town that houses the libertarian study group; the factory repurposed as the e-Residency program's headquarters; the Soviet-era apartment buildings that punctuate the city's skyline. In its own way, then, the Digital Identity Card bookending the piece is itself a monument and ruin in miniature, continuing to promise a future yet to come.
Acknowledgements: I would like to express my gratitude to Youyou Zhou and Carlos Rojas for their generous help and support during the translation process; to Yan Chen, Dominic Wong, and Hongyu Jasmine Zhu for camaraderie; and to Frontline Fellowship for this wonderful opportunity.