Guangzhou Dispatches

I got a text message from a friend I thought lost forever to the missed connections of people you meet traveling, the impermanence of relationships forged in transit. “Brother Kong,” it read, using my Chinese name, “Where I live has been shaken by an earthquake; it’s frightening. Tonight it is shaking again, I will soon collapse.”

I was asleep when he sent it and when I woke up in the early morning and saw it he had long since gone to bed, and now I’m sitting here waiting for him to respond. The truth is I’m not even certain who it is - the number was never entered into my phonebook and all I can go on is a feeling that a cell phone number ending in three 5’s seems vaguely familiar. It is, I think, the grandson of the woman whose funeral I attended when I traveled to Sichuan in February. The one who brought me into their time of celebratory mourning (“she is over 80, a full life” one told me then) and placed the dragon head over my own so I could dance. I think, as I wait for a response, how there will be no funerals like that in Sichuan now, how its not possible when rescuers pulling out so many bodies and worried about heat and decomposition cannot defer to custom but must rush bodies to the crematorium. How many of those bodies far from what could be justified as a full life. I wonder who will administer the rites when entire families, nearly entire villages, have disappeared. I hope he, if it is him, writes back soon.

I should have known when I heard the number what was to come. 7.8. Now revised up to 8.0. Funny how it sounds so unimpressive. My own life nearly ended 14 years ago in a 6.6 in Los Angeles, a mere aftershock by comparison, when my bookcase came somersaulting across the room and slammed into my bed, missing by inches (who thinks to bolt the damn things to the walls?). But this, this was something else. This was a seismic growl to end worlds.

And can you imagine? Images of places just sealed from the outside world and the weather too bad to send in the troops by parachute (parachute in because of the mudslides that obliterated roads!) so the entire advance rescue team just walked up the damn mountains on foot, rain slicked muddy mountains that contained within them death on a scale to set a nation reeling and just a small hope of some, injured but still alive, being pulled from rubble.

Some friends of mine meet every Wednesday at a bar to discuss the main political matter of the day. We’ve discussed Tibet and the Olympics, nationalism and free speech. Last week, though, we met to discuss the earthquake because, as one person said right at the outset, because we have to do something. Because just giving money couldn’t possibly express the depth of the horror and the sympathy they felt. There was talk of concerts and actions, big things for big results. The meeting devolved into something like group therapy. People just didn’t know what to do.

Yesterday I found myself walking along in the rain, headed towards the library. In the center of campus, behind the large bronze statue of Sun Yat-sen, the man who helped bring about the end of centuries of imperial Chinese rule, the flags had already been lowered to half mast. There were two flags, the white and green of the university banner fluttering next to the familiar deep red with its five golden stars. News had come not long ago from Beijing. Flags were to be lowered, moments of silence observed. After initially insisting that a robust torch relay would be the best way to bolster Chinese resolve in the face of the un-fixable, the authorities had relented. The torch, symbol of everything going on right now, would be halted for three days.

The disaster, the land convulsions that eradicated entire towns had humbled us all. News reports still swelled with isolated glimpses of joy: a girl wrenched free of the rubble on her birthday (and serenaded by workers as she was lifted to the ambulance), a man excavated from his concrete coffin after 127 hours beneath the rubble, stories that reflected how impossible it is, for everyone’s sake, to dwell forever on death. As I walked along the road I saw clumps of students standing at the grass’ edge, looking quietly at the flags. It’s coming towards the end of the semester. Papers and exams loom, and the weather has turned hot, and on most days what few midday loiterers there used have been forced inside to work. Yet there they were, quiet under the canopy of umbrellas. Two columns of police in black rain coats stood behind the pole, looking forward. At first, everyone lined the sides of the grass field that surrounded the flags, until a skinny man in a white dress shirt scooped his arms and ushered everyone onto the grass.

It was hard to see through the umbrellas. One man, about forty and in a large red collared shirt, clearly a worker, was being led by his friend into the center of the crowd for a better look. The man grew visibly embarrassed and shook his friend off. “Where you stand makes no difference,” he said, and spun around to face the flag.

The night before I was sitting at an airport, waiting for my late night flight back to Guangzhou. Some people, including the other foreigners waiting to board, had checked into the first class waiting lounge and relaxed on huge white leather couches. Everyone else was a few feet away in the mostly empty terminal, staring at the TV. It was a gala on CCTV One, the state’s flagship station. It was, like just about everything on TV this last week, about the earthquake. Stars were there, young and old, icons from the last three decades of forgettable Chinese pop. Some were in their military uniforms, hair shellacked to their skulls. The young ones, the ones on every magazine, were dressed mostly like they just walked in from the street, trendy, casual duds striking against the grand formality of the concert. They sang for the victims, sang for the tens of thousands dead and trapped and praying for rescue. Everyone in the terminal was transfixed.

The reason for the concert soon became clear. As beautiful women placed a tall box on stage, a steady stream of balding men and serious-looking women walked towards it. They each carried a gray envelope containing, one assumed, a large sum of cash for the recovery effort. The donors approached the box one by one, stopping alone in front of the box and the camera center stage before dropping the envelope in and walking away. My fellow passengers soon noticed something strange. Though money contributions are typically delivered in small, uniform-sized envelopes, some top party brass had felt the need to upgrade to full on letter sized envelopes. They were just as blandly gray as the small envelopes but the visual implication was clear: I am contributing more than others. Every time a donor walked to the center of the stage with a larger-than-normal envelope, the passengers cheered and laughed. I wasn’t sure whether the mirth was ironic or not until the guy behind me spoke up, addressing the others. “Oh come on! Let’s see how much money you’re giving. How about it?” The others spun their heads around to look at the source of the mockery and rocked with laughter. They agreed on two accounts. First, they thought it was ridiculous. But second, they really did want to know just how much this party guy could afford to give away. For all the faith the Chinese have been said to have lately for the government response to the disaster, it was clear that the government still didn’t quite get it.

And it was that feeling that stood in such contrast to my soggy day in the grass before the flags. The man in charge tried to organize us into straight lines before the cameras, but there were too many people and others showed up late so he gave up. We stood, roughly organized, a line of taut faces looking down. A word went out and, quickly, a few hundred umbrellas imploded and disappeared. Another word, and a few hundred cell phones emerged, twinkling with light and sound before they faded to black and made no other noise. The rain had strengthened and fat drops fell on the heads of people too solemn to try to block them away.

Across the city, across the country at 2:28, a week after the earthquake everything came to a halt for three minutes. Out on the grass, a loud, high siren sounded. Boats and trains and siren recordings touched off in unison swallowing everything with jarring sound. Some cried. The sirens were supposed to sound, I think, like crying, but it felt more otherworldly than anything else. As though people needed some baseline on which to attach their grief. People’s heads bent and some closed their eyes. Three minutes is a long time, enough time to drift completely from where you are and enter a world totally of your own thoughts. And then, slowly, the wails of the sirens faded and the group descended into total silence. It was then that I felt it – the raw power and emotion of an entire country brought to its knees in grief. Things are never quiet in China, and never in the cities where people live in such numbers that it remains impossible to actually comprehend. But suddenly there was only rain and nobody moved. An entire country, the one that is shaking the world, brought to silence, and it was impossible not to feel part of something enormous – the silence, something like grace.

People probably would have stayed there indefinitely. But then the man, in a voice he knew he didn’t need to raise too loud, said thank you and people snapped back to life. For thirty seconds no one said anything, but the patter of rain was eclipsed by the hundreds of clicks from umbrellas snapping out and expanding. Shields up, people started chatting again, and streamed back to wherever they had come from.

People have been talking about portents and history. The last earthquake, the one that killed a quarter of a million people, happened the year that Mao died and this year, with the Olympics, there have been snowstorms and riots, train disasters and, now, the sudden death of tens of thousands crushed beneath concrete. One wonders about a lot of things, about how so many schools could collapse, about how incredibly fast rescuers attacked the devastation to save lives. One wonders about openness and image, about whether China can use this tragedy to begin genuine healing, to step off from rhetoric and the saving of face to salvage the lives of those devastated. One wonders about the fate of the Olympics, stopped in its tracks by a force more powerful than the emergence of a proud nation onto the world scene. And then one wonders about the stories one hears. About how in my tutor’s hometown an elementary school was secretly filmed by a student with a cell phone camera holding an earthquake donation ceremony, then dumping all the money out and repeating the ceremony after the TV station called saying they wanted to film. About how in my friend’s school in rural Anhui administrators have posted lists of everyone in the school and how much they’ve given, ranked from most to least. One wonders about the CCTV gala, where entrepreneurs and party members (an irony so incredible that it almost hurts physically) brag to the world about just how much they’ve given. One wonders about stories of how popular stars, like Yao Ming and Jay Chou and Andy Lau, big, big deals here, haven’t given enough and should be ashamed. One wonders about emails like the one I just got from my student, saying, “I am from Gansu, where Longnan has been tremendous affected. Fortunately, my family in Lanzhou is all OK. Now they had done what they can to help those in need, not only in Gansu, but in Sichuan. What I can do is to donate money. I have transferred some money to the Red Cross Association on May 13, and sent some to it with a note asking to help Gansu later. I was so selfish, for I am afraid that Gansu would be forgotten” where selfishness would be the very last word to come to my mind.

But mostly, right now, I’m wondering when my friend will write me back.