You come from a good family: your parents used to vote for the Communist Party; they taught you to make time for the soup kitchen on Sunday mornings, to spend late winter afternoons at nursing homes, at senior citizens’ dancing groups. But your progressivism was unanchored from theory, estranged from the Marxism you never even knew you had outgrown. What was once open-mindedness became pure exoticism: culture was for collecting. You’re only good for hailing cabs and booking flights that expand your carbon footprint. You refresh ryanair.com while—far from your eyes and farther from your heart—exhausted old ladies crouch on their knees in an industrial Chinese suburb, pulling obsolete cell phones from heaps of waste, from the sewage of techno-capitalism. You watched the Edward Burtynsky documentary that night at the Kino club, the one with the uranium mines and the nickel residue piercing the dark Ontario earth like lava, and those old Chinese ladies, hunched over piles of electric circuits…