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.

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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

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