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.