Creepy Enough Yet?

在生命中的每一年，在一年的每个日子， 在一天的每个小时，在一小时的每一分钟， 在一分钟的每秒钟，我都在想你，念你，恋你，等你。
Zai sheng ming zhong de mei yi nian, zai yi nian de mei ge ri zi, zai yi tian de mei ge xiao shi, zai yi xiao shi de mei yi fen zhong, zai yi fen zhong de mei miao zhong, wo dou zai xiang ni, nian ni, lian ni, deng ni.

More and more I'm getting messages like the one above, now at the rate of one per day, mostly from one woman I met about four or five weeks ago. I'd played a game of Chinese chess with some of her co-workers at a restaurant, and we'd talked for a brief bit in a mix of Chinese and English.

The next week, I got a message on my phone: "Tonight look for you. You no come same place?"

Not taking much time to think my response through, I sent back "I was there earlier. I must have just missed you."

Minutes later, the reply came back: "Miss you too!" (Look up "miss" in a Chinese dictionary and you get 想--xiang--and it doesn't really have the meaning of "fail to meet due to timing.")

So now I'm getting regular messages like the one at top, the sort of sappy fodder that bounces around on instant messengers back home and on cell phones here in China--canned romantic sayings: "In a lifetime, every year; in every year, every day; every day, every hour; every hour, every minute; every minute, every second, I miss you, [love]*, [love]* you, wait for you." And this from a woman I talked to for about ten minutes. 很可怕的！(Hen ke pa de, really frightening!)

On the bright side, such messages make for great Chinese practice, as they're generally written for the nearly illiterate--a category I fit into pretty safely here.

*Both 念 and 恋 give me a bit of trouble for translating; both can mean "love," but the dictionary shows a whole slew of other meanings, ranging from "understand" to "feel drawn to."

On Shaky Ground

Following on the heels of the Sichuan earthquake* that struck last week come the aftershocks of suspicion, superstition, and blind nationalism. For the most part, my students have been in somber moods, having gone into mourning in their own personal ways, and of course the whole nation officially went into mourning earlier this week, with Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday being national days of mourning including work halts and observed moments of silence. (Interestingly, the Chinese way of observing three minutes of silence while en route apparently requires drivers to blare their horns, making for the loudest minutes of silence I've ever heard--deafening silence made real.)

For these people--and this is the vast majority--the Sichuan earthquake is to them what 9-11 was to most Americans. I've had students cry in class and talk about how helpless they feel; the whole nation seems glued to television sets, watching the news coverage of the crisis, so that the streets near my apartment are more than usually crowded with pedestrians clustered around the little television kiosks.

For some, though, this is a chance to show their true colors as conspiracy theorists, isolationists, racial supremacists, or worse. The rumors that have cropped up around the event range from the superstitious--clouds foretelling the earthquake or unlucky numbers or unlucky 福娃 (fuwa) like JingJing and YingYing causing disasters in China this year--to the usual beleaguered Han laments: the earthquake was caused by Xinjiang separatists, by the Dalai Lama, by Taiwan; [insert your country's name here] isn't doing enough to help because they hate Chinese; 2,000 years ago, Han Chinese invented an earthquake-prediction machine** which would have saved everyone in Sichuan had cultural imperialists not imposed Western seismographs on their country.

A few people, both Chinese and 外国的, have told me the earthquake was surely caused by the Three Gorges Dam. Who knows what category of confusion about geology to put that in?

Probably the nastiest little bone of contention I've heard debated endlessly by a few people in the last week is the size of Yao Ming's donation. In classes, a few students--usually rich, usually unwilling to talk about how much they donated--have gone out of their way to heap scorn on Ming, calling him a 香蕉 (xiangjiao, banana) and race traitor. Such loudmouths have gone out of their way to pester me about how much I've donated and, when I've refused to answer, verbally abused me for being an American capitalist who came to China to steal their money and women. Granted, I'm 一个人 (yi ge ren, single) and will make less money in five years than one of these men recently lost playing the stock market, but to such small-minded bigots, I'm American and, therefore, rich--rich and greedy.

So it's been a mixed week, showing me once again some of the best parts of living in China, and some of the worst parts of living in China. Now when people ask me how I feel in the aftermath of the earthquakes, I can usually only reply that my feelings are muddled.

*And, yes, suddenly I can access Wikipedia without using a proxy--and read "Tiananmen Square self-immolation incident"; maybe the earthquake took out the PRC's central censorship bureau. Oops, nope, the blocks are still in place for the 1989 riots.

**In reality, a Chinese inventor, Chang Heng, did invent the above 候风地动仪 (houfeng didong yi), which just showed what direction tremors came from after an earthquake had already happened.

The Olympic Torch Delay Hits Shenzhen

The Olympic flame came to Shenzhen today, more or less as had been planned. The intended route seemed a relatively convenient one for me, though not convenient enough for me to view it from my balcony.

The running route for the torch was set to go to the 海王 (hai wang, or Sea King) building which is just a few minutes walk from my place, and it was supposed to do so relatively early in the morning. Just before I went to look at the crowd and see whether I might be able to squeeze in close enough to see, I ran across the announcement that the relay would be starting a bit late, so I waited until around one o'clock to head there.

By the time I arrived there, the crowds were massive: probably fifteeen to twenty thousand people packed into a single block and swarming onto the streets. For some reason, rather than adding to the permanent fences built alongside the road to stop pedestrians, the powers that be had decided to use little movable barriers to control the crowds. Little to no police presence attended the event and people were pretty much left to do whatever they wanted: mostly clambering onto the roofs of bus stations, scaling light posts or trees in order to get a better view; a number of banners had been ripped down by these climbing attempts, and branches were ripped off trees in a few places. Most of the rest of the crowd's energy was devoted to trying to push through to find a better place, pounding drums, and chanting: "加油，中国，高兴" and what sounded like "一三" ("jia you, zhongguo, gaoxing" "yi san"--"Add gas (Go!), China, Happy" "One, three"); it seemed anytime someone decided to yell out a two-syllable phrase, the crowd just picked it up and screamed it for a few minutes.

Early on, I got caught up in one group's decision to push through the crowd, and I wound up opposite Children's World--a store about halfway between the 海王 building and the Haiya Baihuo overpass. I managed to get near the permanent fencing on the side of the road and, thus, stay out of the pushing contests.

Around three-thirty, there was a bit of a louder roar well off in the distance: people got excited for a few minutes, but then the cheering and chattering faded back away. Twenty minutes or so later the torch finally arrived ... sort of. Since the crowds had pushed the movable barriers on both sides of the streets to nearly touching, the officials apparently deemed it unsafe for the runner to continue. So instead of watching the torch run past, I got to watch a bus and a van pass, preceded by a handful of men in uniforms marching. Ahead of the bus ran a bunch of people shouting at the onlookers and shoving back the barriers. I did get to see, presumably, the runner, sitting and looking tired and discouraged in the van as it drove past, and then the whole thing was over, the crowds pushing and shoving to get home.