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May 19, 2008
China
The rubble, the ruins, the bloody victims and screaming mothers are not what keeps drawing me back to photographs and videos out of Sichuan Province, where people are desperately digging out this week of an earthquake that killed 50,000. I'm looking at the sunglasses, braided belts with creased khaki pants, cell phones, cars, flared jeans. They look just like us.
I lived in Guangzhou, China, briefly in 1990 and 1991, during most of my seventh grade year. My memories are of smoking, spitting, gray Mao collars, commuter armies on bikes and buses and not a lot of cars. There was color, too. Bright red envelopes and fire crackers at the new year, dragon boats, jade jewelry, a rainbow of colors on plates at bustling restaurants. And there was wealth for those with access to foreigners' currency, fancy hotels, the right people.
This was before free trade had reached beyond special economic zones, before Britain returned Hong Kong to its mother country, before Pizza Hut and McDonalds breached the Middle Kingdom, before China and the U.S. reached whatever agreement it was that would turn the American consulate in Guanghou to a foreign adoption hub, before ordinary people traded in their bikes for cars.
I've read about China's transformation, but I'm still having a hard time reconciling these images. These people look like they belong in Hong Kong or Taiwan or the U.S.A., not the middle of a country that still pretends to be communist.
Even the rubble and death don't look foreign to me. I see collapsed buildings, I see Sept. 11, 2001. I see rescue workers rushing to do to little too late, I see Hurricane Katrina.
Many, many more people have died in China than have died in any American tragedy of my lifetime. But in the collapsed bricks of a Chengdu schoolhouse I see an American literary parallel, "All the Kings Men," in which a smaller collapse leads to government reform and a battle against corruption. I wonder what reforms, what lessons, the Chinese will take from this week.
I can't wrap my head around the progress that has already taken place. Yes, there's still poverty. The safety net has frayed. Millions have been left behind. But millions upon millions of others are becoming prosperous modern capitalists in the space of a generation. And they all, more than a billion of them, stopped what they were doing for three minutes today to mourn quietly together. Then they got back to work.
I need to go back there someday.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at May 19, 2008 09:38 PM
Comments
That was wonderful. I'll tell you what it's like these days starting in under two weeks.
Ross
Posted by: Ross at May 20, 2008 09:28 AM
Please do!
Posted by: Courtney at May 20, 2008 10:23 AM