Chinese Version
2022-11-03，Thursday，Sunny
I had a short visit to Boston at the end of October. On Thursday November 3rd, I flew back to San Jose, the flight from Boston to San Francisco at 6:00 PM was full. During the six hour flight, the cabin was dim, it seemed like many passengers were resting. The middle-aged man sitting next to me said, “I will transfer from San Francisco to Reno for the weekend tonight.” I replied, “It sounds exciting!” During the flight, he was sleeping, probably conserving energy for the weekend.
Having nothing to do in the dim cabin, I watched the film “Nomadland” by Chloé Zhao, the Oscar winning director in 2021, with anticipation but a sleepy mind.
“”Nomadland” tells a story about Fern，a woman in her sixties, who after losing everything in the Great Recession in 2008, embarks on a journey through the American West in search of seasonal work, living as a van-dwelling modern-day nomad.
The scenes that the movie showed me about Amazon made me realize the job opportunities and hopes that Amazon provided for Fern and her friends with the seasonal work offered in Amazon’s warehouse. After watching this movie, I felt that Amazon is “a farmland for a nomadland”. Like the farmers in the past hoped for the harvest of the crops from the land in the next year, Fern hoped for Amazon’s seasonal work income in the future. This hope was the only chance she had of repaying her sister the money she borrowed to repair her van.
From my working experience in the early days of eBay’s I remember that around 2001, everyone was enthusiastic about eBay becoming a service company that collects monthly fees, just like collecting electricity and water utilities; no one was thinking that eBay would continuously create simple and necessary job opportunities for the general population.
As a previous software engineer, I feel like “eBay made online shopping from scratch. While, Amazon made online shopping close to people’s daily life”. Chloé Zhao’s “Nomadland” shows the seasonal and ecological nature of Amazon warehouse jobs, similar to the seasonal and ecological nature of crop harvest. The former provides urban laborers with opportunities and hopes of earning money, a new concept; while the latter provides rural laborers with opportunities and hopes of earning money, since ancient times.
After watching “Nomadland”, I can feel the convenience of life created by high-tech online shopping also created many job opportunities for ordinary people. From this I can feel that science and technology can certainly produce many new job opportunities that only require simple skills.