Quakes and terror

Just what is terror?

For JiaYue, it was waking up on Saturday morning to something strange in her room: her bed. It was moving.

Xiaodan, too. She was in her dorm, and the floor was moving.

Throughout Beibei, some who felt the tremors, like JiaYue, harbored memories all too vivid of the devastating 2008 earthquake. It had destroyed JiaYue's aunt's
entire village and, by some counts, had left almost 70,000 dead and another 15 or 20,000 missing.  Her grandparents in Dujiangyan, along with their pigeons, survived with their place intact, but scores of apartments around them completely cracked.  And now, come to find out, the epicenter of this new earthquake was not that far from JiaYue’s parent’s home—and not that far from the beautiful Emei Shan where we had hiked last February. However faraway Beibei might be from Ya’an, many like JiaYue were panicking.

Not me. I was off, puffing my way ‘round one side of the mountain, quaking on a totally different count. I was petrified that I’d forget the lines to Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech, the one I’d promised to perform at Sunday’s Chongqing Shakespeare Festival. I had no earthly idea that anything was amiss and was saying “And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs” for the twentieth time out loud when I rounded the corner into a new thoroughfare under construction. Four or five cranes were visible, swinging loads atop the twenty and twenty-five story buildings under construction. Peddlers with pushcarts and stick brooms as well as a few ladies on motorcycles were sneaking around the barricades, taking the still-unpaved road to the other side of Beibei. The sidewalks were already lined with bricks, with square holes every fifteen feet awaiting their trees.  Halfway down the unpaved road I was on to “Which once untangled much misfortune bodes.” It was much better to practice my lines out loud than just say them in my head.

I’d already figured out that the stares I received on that part of my run had nothing to do with my muttering lines out loud.  What was strange was being a big foreign lady running, not that I was muttering out loud things about elflocks.   

I’d been walking to and fro school for ten days by then, ever since I’d been collared into participating in this festival, muttering my lines out loud over and over as I walked past the vegetable vendor, past the lady with the sewing machine, past the guard who stood outside the Bank of Chongqing. Nobody thought anything of it. What could be more common than listening to a stranger passing by, committing some passage to memory? For sure, once on campus, in my building, I would pass classrooms that hummed like forests of cicadas, with students all reciting in soft voices their upcoming lessons. Now THAT was normal.  The Chinese know how to memorize.

But, normal as it might be to walk down the street reciting Shakespeare out loud, I was terrorized that I’d forget my lines. The “foreign expert” (who just so happens to speak the language and only that) would get up there and botch her lines, when before her and after her all sorts of Chinese students would roll Othello’s and Desdemona’s and Lear’s lines off their tongues as if they were born speaking Elizabethan English. I was scared. This wasn’t my idea.

But once back to my apartment, I discovered an email from JiaYue who was panicking because she had received no response when she had phoned me earlier and no response when she had then run up to my apartment to see me in person. Ohhh! Until I read that email, I had no idea about the earthquake, and then thought it a bit strange that I hadn’t received the news first from Peace Corps. They are positively vigilant about safety issues. I set about writing sons and sibs, to assure them that I was fine. Ah, but when I looked on several American news sites, a majority of the stories were about the Boston terrorists and said little about this earthquake.

Wait a minute. Terrorists? Now I don’t want to make light of the lost lives in Boston or of the fear that paralyzed the city for days on end. Or of some of the damage that might have been inflicted had all the pressure cookers and home-made bombs gone off as the troubled young men had planned, especially in a densely populated place like New York City. But why should that news eclipse news of hundreds of other scary things throughout the world? I thought about all the fear shaping the lives of millions of people in scores of countries day to day, some of it totally off the American radar.

What again is terrorism?  On this Saturday, gripped by so much terror and quaking, I decided to look it up. According the FBI, “There is no single, universally accepted, definition of terrorism. Terrorism is defined in the Code of Federal Regulations as ‘the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives’ (28 C.F.R. Section 0.85).”

That's a pretty broad definition--just what criminal activity does it exclude? And unlawful by whose standards—the standards of international law?  I might lose my right to blog if I start citing instances of the US and its allies snubbing at convenience some international laws in the name of “terrorism,” just as I’ll get in trouble if I point my finger at any kind of intimidation perpetrated by Asian or other parties. But I can invite you to imagine with me just a few people, pick your place around the world, who might this very minute be living in considerable fear about the “unlawful use of force and violence” all around them for political and social objectives. 

Well, even if  news of various threats, both natural and human, tends to be too parochial, I admit it was just a snap of the finger before the Chinese earthquake did register on most US news sites, long before sunlight hit that side of the planet. 

And, in the meantime, I found myself preoccupied with my own little worries--getting my Queen Mab lines down and my cell service back on.  I had finally realized that Peace Corps hadn't contacted me only because none of my phones worked. Neither my cell nor my landline.  At the little office of Chinese Mobile on Tiangsheng Road, I discovered that phones all over Beibei, cell and landlines, were out.  For some people, computers weren’t working, either. In my increasingly technology-dependent world, all this was a sobering realization. 

Queen Mab athwart men's noses

My own most petty fear of forgetting my lines was finally put to rest when Sunday rolled around and all those words just fell out of my mouth. Memorizing, the Chinese way, seemed to pay off. By Monday, I was witnessing students actively collecting disaster relief items for western Sichuan, and I was hoping that Boston and New York were starting to return to some degree of normalcy. Who knows what terrible things, both natural and manmade, were simply off my radar.

* * * * *

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.drgeorgepc.com/quake2008ChinaSichuanPh2a.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.drgeorgepc.com/Earthquake2008ChinaSichuan.html&h=577&w=736&sz=229&tbnid=kv9isO-j1AnK5M:&tbnh=103&tbnw=132&zoom=1&usg=__W9CZ8Dp2sJ1f5Q5XXyx4pWEnanM=&docid=edYOKdvy0zt-NM&sa=X&ei=VmJ6UbiPKrDg2wXW0IDIDQ&ved=0CEwQ9QEwBA&dur=534

https://www.google.com/search?site=&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1203&bih=616&q=earthquake+china+2013+wa%27an&oq=earthquake+china+2013+wa%27an&gs_l=img.12...1722.11863.0.13383.29.14.1.13.14.1.564.4060.3j2j1j4j3j1.14.0...0.0...1ac.1.11.img.OnX5sYuqoKs#imgrc=EN6DI81eeIAnIM%3A%3Bm4ldDAiJSGmHZM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fimages.nationalgeographic.com%252Fwpf%252Fmedia-live%252Fphotos%252F000%252F665%252Fcache%252Fchina-earthquake-sichuan-2013-rescuers-rubble_66521_600x450.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fnews.nationalgeographic.com%252Fnews%252F2013%252F04%252Fpictures%252F130420-earthquake-strikes-china-sichuan-province%252F%3B600%3B400

http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/terrorism-2002-2005

https://www.google.com/search?site=&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1203&bih=616&q=earthquake+china+2013+wa%27an&oq=earthquake+china+2013+wa%27an&gs_l=img.12...1722.11863.0.13383.29.14.1.13.14.1.564.4060.3j2j1j4j3j1.14.0...0.0...1ac.1.11.img.OnX5sYuqoKs#tbm=isch&sa=1&q=violence+in+eastern+congo&oq=violence+in+eastern+congo&gs_l=img.3..0i24.150530.155591.2.156072.25.19.0.6.6.2.377.2640.6j9j1j3.19.0...0.0...1c.1.11.img.EEetosRFoKE&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.45645796,d.b2I&fp=7d02b93177a0abd&biw=1203&bih=616&imgrc=QevbOcYnGO1FGM%3A%3Bm7M8AliPQXm_RM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fgdb.voanews.com%252FFCECEAE4-0C11-4D65-AD54-B44D81C2FF47_w640_r1_s_cx0_cy5_cw0.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Feditorials.voa.gov%252Fcontent%252Fending-the-violence-in-eastern-drc-166829806%252F1493292.html%3B640%3B360

45,000

45,000. That's the number of deaths that one Harvard study links to patients who lack medical insurance in the US. Could that number be hacked way down? I have my own hunches, but before getting into that dicey discussion--the cost of hospitalizations and single payer insurance and so on--I have some simple Chinese-inspired thoughts about health.

Just think how much money we might save if we just focused on food and feet.

What if we focused less on medical care and more on public health--especially what we eat and how much we walk? I look around me in western China, a less prosperous part of the country, and see people with gleaming white teeth, people who probably make very few visits to the dentist.  They don't pay a lot for dental care, but they eat good food and eat very little sugar. I see nimble-bodied people who carry all kinds of loads, who walk at all kinds of speeds, and accomplish amazing things at all ages. People are active. Don't get me wrong--I'm sure lots of people are left outside the medical system who do need care, but I also see a culture where lifestyle (and preventative practices) trumps medical care (and reactive practices).

Isn't that a sane way to save lives and money?

What if the US took the car keys from everyone and made us walk a little more a couple days a week? What if we radically shifted our healthcare discussions from reactive policies (after we're sick and in need of medical care) to preventive policies (to keep us from getting sick). We need a shift in personal lifestyle as dramatic as the shift we had when the EPA put curbs on some frightening environmental practices a generation ago. We desperately need a Rachel Carsons for personal health--someone to shake us into eating right and walking a little more.

It's not so convenient to walk? True--but what if convenience is killing us?

China, of course, doesn't have all the answers. China does support a culture with active people who tend to have vegetable rich, low-fat diets, but it also has a huge problem with air pollution and other things. China needs the equivalent of the EPA--it desperately needs regulations on air quality and on the burning of fossil fuels. But the US could pay attention to the life style of most Chinese residents--and the huge implications of that lifestyle for medical costs.

Wouldn't eating better and walking more save millions, maybe billions of dollars in the healthcare system?

But back to 45,000. Our best intentions don't necessarily keep us from getting sick. We come with whatever genes we've got, and some environmental issues are beyond our control. Stuff happens. We all get sick. I for one, would like to think I live pretty lightly on this earth, but damn! Every organ in my body has a medical story. There's that bizarre little teratoma, straight out of science fiction. Nobody knows where my giant cavernous hemangioma came from, one that almost shut down my liver. I could go on. And what about the head trauma with that bike wreck? If it weren't for medical insurance, I'd probably be hanging out in a homeless shelter somewhere.

I do believe in single-payer insurance, and think it's a basic right. I'd like to see us blast into that 45,000 number, and I think decent insurance for every human being would be a step in doing so. I don't believe in unlimited insurance for every possible procedure at every stage of life, especially near-end-of-life procedures, but I suspect that some basic, very basic, universal care is sane. I realize it won't be cheap.

So what can we do to offset the expense? If you ask me, we can pick up the other end of the stick and take seriously how much we walk and how much fat we consume.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/09/17/us-usa-healthcare-deaths-idUSTRE58G6W520090917

Morning run: two sides of this Beibei mountain

My running shoes are not yet laced up, but it's early enough that I can run anywhere without self-consciousness. I am, you know, a conspicuous runner in these parts, and although I’m used to being stared at, I don’t necessarily like it, especially if staring keeps people too preoccupied to step out of the way.

When I step down my four flights of concrete stairs, and up the path from my building, I can go one of two ways. Going up the hill eventually winds back behind this cluster of apartments to a mountain path that goes back about three quarters of a mile, overlooking a tributary of the Jialing River far below. The path used to push back farther along the mountainside, but now an avalanche of dirt and rubble from higher up the mountain has closed it off.

When I used to run beyond the part that's now closed, I never came upon more dwellings. And yet the very existence of the path--worn enough that somebody was walking on it, keeping the ever hungry vegetation in those parts from overtaking it-- made me suspect there must be dwellings ahead. And now, with all this rubble virtually cutting it off, I  wonder whose life has just been cut off. As it is, some of the peasants who live close to the cut off carry water to their dwellings in buckets on either end of bamboo poles over their shoulders.

This mountain path was my running route of choice if I wanted to avoid the crowd on campus or the public that's thick along Tiangsheng Road. But just yesterday I discovered an alternative route. 

If I go down my four flights of concrete stairs, and then head down the hill from my building, I find myself on a busy city street with the gates to the university on the other side. If I turn away from the university, toward the vegetable vendors, and then loop back up the other side of my mountain, I see a completely different world, one where caterpillars and bob cats are methodically dismantling it. Instead of one kind of crane swooping gracefully through the sky, rigid industrial cranes swing from atop one skyscraper after another. Sometimes ten or so can be seen at once.

Looking up from the foot of this still unpaved city street, unfinished skyscrapers loom in the distance. I still see laborers, but not ones balancing vegetable baskets or water buckets on bamboo poles. Instead, they're laying bricks and sweeping the dust of this strange new world. This young worker, clad in high heels, looks like many a college student cruising the Yonghui market area not far away.

So my dwelling is literally at this East/West crossroads:  If I go one way for just five minutes, it feel like I've set the time machine dial for 1500; if I go to the other way, for no more than five minutes, it indeed feels like we fast forwarded almost half a millennium.

From China to the Dominican Republic

The wedding was simple, all except for getting there. Barefoot and flip-flop simple. Pant-legs billowed and Ana’s dress swirled—with the small gathering of Brazilians and US-Americans squinting against blowing sand, straining to hear the thoughtfully chosen words of the marrying-man, Nick.  A groom’s forgotten line here, a bride’s wink there, a happy tear down the groom’s cheek. This was a joyous occasion. Brazilian nieces let the wind empty their baskets when they’d forgotten to drop more than a petal or two. Good food, good dancing (well, I admittedly don’t qualify as a judge, but we were all out there), good mingling of people, most from somewhere in the Americas. Here comes the sun. (Yep, Chris chose the Beatles over Mendelssohn.)

 Words fail to describe my joy reuniting with Chris, Ben, Nick and those few family members who could make this special occasion, knowing it was impossible for most to even consider it. (And, in my book, all who were there were family.) Chris, Ben, and Nick—I won’t see them again until late 2014. I wouldn’t have missed this wedding for anything, even if it wasn’t exactly simple getting there from China. 

March 30, 2013

 Getting there from China meant watching an orange moon rise in an Arctic night sky, meant experiencing the New York skyline zoom in closer and closer until it turned into an asphalt runway, and meant standing on one foot and then the other in immigration lines under the spacious thatched roof pavilions in the Punta Cana airport in the Dominican Republic.

That, of course, was the easy part. Getting there from China also meant following rules, ranging from the incredibly important to the marginally so. Absolutely supportive as my Peace Corps and university colleagues were, the paperwork for permissions started almost a year ago and dwarfed my Peace Corps medical form (something that took my doctor 63 pages and half a year to complete). Then, thanks to the brilliant idea of a school secretary, my spring schedule was altered to accommodate the wedding—with classes compressed after my return so I technically would not violate any school rules by leaving the country.

Rules. Interesting what rules are on a trip that required waiting in so many lines with so many rubber stamps pounding paper--I counted over 300 people ahead of me in a customs line at JFK; rules where, over the Pacific, a very concerned pilot reported that someone had been caught smoking in the bathroom; rules on an aircraft where, just before touching down in Chongqing, half the passengers started rummaging through the overhead bins and had to be re-seated.

Most of these rules, including the Peace Corps and university ones, concern basic safety and must be taken seriously. However, I was given occasion to have my doubts about some rules, twice in Punta Cana, first when I was seated by Gate 8 reading Dreaming in Chinese. As I read on, a name that sounded vaguely familiar occasionally punctuated my consciousness. It certainly was not my name, but after the hundredth time I heard it, I thought I’d better make sure. Oh, were the officials relieved! They indeed thought they were calling my name and they were sorry to report that there was a problem in my suitcase. One TSA in a crisp white blouse marched me past a dozen thatched-roof buildings to a shed at the far end of the runway. She was sweating and said it was hot, even by Dominican Republic standards, which is all I understood because my Spanish is worse than my Chinese, which I kept absent-mindedly using. I was seated in a folding metal chair before a metal table, a single overhead light bulb, and two other uniformed people. My suitcase was crammed full because dear ones had brought me items from the US—Ann brought next year’s winter uniform (a coat I intend to move into in about November and move out of sometime in early March), various CDs my sister-in-law brought, many bars of chocolate that Nick surprised me with, and so on. I barely got it zipped close in the first place, and I had no idea how I, usually a light traveler, was going to do so again. They rummaged and rummaged with all the non-clothes items spilling onto the floor. Ah! In a mailing package on the bottom was the mysterious object that had flummoxed the security personnel. Index cards! A friend who met me at JFK brought something I can use in my TEFL classes—index cards. Ten or so minutes later, the TSA had escorted me back to Gate 8 and we were told to march out onto the runway, where scores of us proceeded to stand waiting for another twenty minutes under the high sun while the TSA looked for something else.

But the rules the TSA dreams up are nothing compared to those that airlines insist upon when they have to reschedule flights they really don’t want to reschedule.  Bad weather in Hong Kong led to hundreds of flights needing to be rescheduled, and I was just one of thousands of stranded passengers on Easter weekend. Personnel for Cathay Pacific and China Air played badminton with me in Hong Kong, while personnel for Cathay Pacific and JetBlue continued the game in New York City. All were constrained by various rules—and “problems” their databases had logging in this and that new flight information. Right?

I discovered, though, that stranded passengers help each other (sharing ways to recharge tech toys, extending bits of chocolate, going out of their way to show what can’t be translated); I discovered that it’s possible to endure drills grinding through airport walls all night here and loudspeakers blaring taxi information all night there; and I discovered that some “rules” that impede rescheduling can be dealt with. Among my airport heroes are the Air China woman in Hong Kong who suddenly appeared out of the shadows at 5:00 in the morning next to me when I got in line at Cathay Pacific and Coral, the Spaniard at JFK who got off work and then spent another two hours haggling with Dominique at Jet Blue. Okay, these two may have just been doing their jobs, but they seemed to be getting me to the wedding. They summarily ended squabbles about “because of this I can’t do that. . . .” Fifty-eight hours after Xiao Kairong picked me up at Ban Zhu Cun in Beibei, I saw the palm trees giving Punta Cana its name and sighted a member of the wedding.

Punta Cana, Dominican Republic

Having nothing to do with rules, there were other delights, including the handsome young Chinese couple seated next to me on the return flight to China. They listened and giggled each time one of three nearby babies burst out crying again—the man lifting his finger, seemingly orchestrating what would evolve from solo to duet to trio. He laughed each time he took it upon himself to conduct some more.  That’s the spirit—a spirit I sorely lacked at certain moments coming and going.

Like many adventures, getting to the wedding from China was part of the story, but the very best part without a doubt was being with Chris, Ana, Ben, and Nick on March 30^th and 31^st.

Students wanted Chris and Ana to have this traditional Chinese wedding image -
the phoenix and the dragon