Noise

I might not live through another night of this noise, and now I'm given to understand that there will be two more long days and nights of it.

True, this noise isn't the very loudest noise I've heard since being in China. The loudest noise happened to erupt at Sichuan Shifan Daxue during language class one day last summer, when suddenly my Chinese teacher stopped talking about measure words for "piao" and "ke" and the four of us seated in a U-shape around him were frozen by a piercing scream. The single scream escalated and more voices joined in. We just couldn't imagine who or what was being dismembered next door. Nothing on a maternity award or a psych ward or any such place could match this screaming as far as I knew, and it kept escalating. We, of course, shot into the hall to investigate, only to bump into a dozen other anxious Peace Corps volunteers and the three screamers, who just happened to be the other three teachers.

These three teachers are exceedingly intelligent women, kind, too, but they apparently don't like little things that move and there apparently was just such a little thing moving under one of their desks. In the hall, they held hands, as is common for Chinese women of any age to do, and started backing toward the stairs.

Ever curious, several of us got down on our hands and knees, eager to get a glimpse of the wayward mouse or beetle or whatever it was. We spotted the suspect under a table leg, and I finally cupped it in my hand and stepped outside, only to trigger another round of screams from the women who had not yet reached the stairs. The cute but anticlimactic answer to the day's mystery was just a tiny green gecko.

But no gecko could account for the explosion I heard yesterday morning. I was talking to Christopher, who heard it from his couch in St. Louis, and thought it sounded like a truck dumping a load of gravel on my balcony. I thought it sounded like an explosion of guns. Unlikely though it would be, could it be something to do with the thousands of freshmen donned in brown shirts, red ties and military caps, flanked in formations across the soccer fields for a month of compulsory military training? No, they wouldn't have guns, and this noise was close, on this side of the big city avenue. Fireworks? But on a Saturday morning? National Day (think Fourth of July) isn't until October! But then, Missouri has firework stands going up two weeks before the Fourth--maybe the firework sales were underway?

Every ten or fifteen minutes, I'd hear another round of earsplitting racket. So, I trotted up the hill to find my landlady Mrs. Niu to make enquiries but found only a note on her door with a telephone number. Not long after, though, when I was headed to market, she stepped out from behind a sewing machine at the tailor's to shout out a greeting. I stopped, glad to see her. My Chinese served me well enough to ask her what the loud racket was but didn't serve me well enough to understand her impassioned answer. That it had nothing to do with the university students I did understand, but nothing else.

For the rest of the day I tried to ignore the periodic bursts of sound, but by nightfall irritated cats and babies were joining the ruckus and, spliced in between what could only be fireworks, were other unhallowed noises and unmusical instruments, some screeching and eerie, all loud and persistent.

Way below the road to the foreign teachers' apartments is the park where ladies do Tai Chi most nights, and there I saw a huge white tent with tables under the bamboo. Again, maybe they were selling fireworks early before National Day, but why blast off the goods all day and night? Thousands of kuai must have gone up in smoke already. Why all night? Why so much?

At three on Sunday afternoon my beloved tutor showed up, one of the ex-screamers from summer training (who happens to be a grad student in linguistics here at Xi Nan Daxue during the school year and who happens to still be my tutor). And, finally, from her, Xiaodan, I learned all about Chinese funerals, which typically last three days and are as elaborate and often as expensive as Chinese weddings. (If you have a noisy child, you might consider a future for him or her as a professional noisemaker to be hired out at Chinese funerals.) Between dialogues focused on tones, we talked about the history of Chinese funerals, some of which have the spirit of an Irish wake.

I got little sleep last night and am unlikely to get much tonight or tomorrow, but the noise irritates me much less now that I know what it's for. I can imagine how the constant ripping off of firecrackers and other noisemakers for days could be comforting to the bereaved. It's a madness that makes sense to me, an intensity and drama that must be cathartic. So I probably won't rest well tonight, but I will wonder about the one who just died, and I will wonder about the mourners under the tent who are trying to get a grip on life without their newly lost one.