Kaifeng Hotels
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The earthquake
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I'm used to bizarre things happening in my daily life in China. Things like Whitney Houston songs blaring throughout campus during lunch time, Old Man Tank Top fashioning his garden plants into the shape of the Olympic rings and elderly people flocking to a stand to receive frying pans all seem normal and logical to me now. Sort of. So when my apartment started to shake last week, I didn't think anything of it at first.
I was in my living room getting ready for my brother and sister's visit when my living room door started to bang back and forth. When I felt the couch begin to sway, I looked outside to see if maybe the University was doing some type of construction work on the apartment below me. And then I started to feel really, really drunk.
Erin, Alex and myself ran outside. Standing in our courtyard, watching the trees sway when there was no wind was disconcerting and surreal. It's a scary thing when your feet are firmly placed on the ground and you can do nothing to make it stop moving. We watched Max's clothesline bang against his patio windows as we adjusted to the world-is-a-carnival-funhouse feeling and began to feel nauseous. And then it stopped. Luckily, Kaifeng is far enough from the epicentre so no damage was incurred.
Watching things develop in this country after the earthquake has been an equally strange experience as the actual tremor. Throughout Tuesday afternoon the only reports we found were news stories stating that only four had died and hundreds were injured. There was no indication that the death toll was going to spike up from 4 to 9,000 in the matter of hours and has been increasing ever since.
2008 has not been a good year for China and for Chinese people, this earthquake may only portend of more bad things to come. In Chinese superstition, earthquakes are the beginning of awful, destabilizing events. Over the past few days, my students have grown increasingly anxious and nervous about the state of China and more importantly for them, the state of the Olympic Games.
In 1976 there was an earthquake in northern China that killed a quarter of a million people. Later that year, both Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai died and there was a peasant uprising. This year there were several smaller earthquakes along the Tibetan plateau. In March the protests began. There's an article on the New Yorker's website by Peter Hessler that briefly touches upon this. You can check it out here.
But China is doing a great job of mobilizing people to help out with the relief work. Students are filling up classrooms with donated goods they will send to Sichuan as well as collecting money and running blood banks to help. It's reassuring to see all of my students rallying behind a cause that will have positive effects, instead of rallying around ardent, almost-scary nationalism.
Some of you have emailed me asking what you can do to help. My answer - help Myanmar. China is doing a great job of taking care of itself, but has completely ignored the devastation in Myanmar - even before the earthquake. Most Chinese people don't even know what Myanmar is. This is frustrating because the Chinese government is one of the few governments in the world that could pressure the Junta into opening the country for relief. So please, if you want to do something, help the Burmese.
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