I got some … expected but disappointing news today. It would have been awesome if it had worked out, but it didn’t, and I’m just a teeny bit disappointed. I’m not sure if it’s that, or that I’ve been having extended conversations about the earthquake in China with my Chinese acquaintances today, but I’m feeling particularly melancholy today.
One lady in particular showed me some pictures she had come across. “I cry every time I see pictures of it”, she said apologetically. She showed me this one after I told her that I thought her government handled the disaster much better than my government (and yes, it made me cringe to say that – I’ve never felt like the government was something I had any say in) handled Katrina – a disaster of much smaller proportions.
A day or so ago, I spoke with a Chinese friend about her life growing up. She is an older woman who was “sent to the country” during the Cultural Revolution. (Her parents were intellectuals who also ended up in the camps, however she was young enough to be ‘trained’ in the ways of Mao so she was treated a little better than her parents.) She told me of working in the rice fields during that time, and of the 1976 Tangshan Earthquake. A dam was weakening upstream of the village where she was staying, so she was evacuated to higher ground while soldiers worked through the night with sandbags. “There were so many people,” she said, “so many that there was no room to sit down, so we stood all through the night alongside the mountain”. “I wasn’t scared – it was exciting! They told us if we heard three BOOMS that the dam had broke. We heard one BOOM, then a little later another BOOM. But the third boom never came.”
She thinks the US is the best country in the world. “In China, we had bread. Here, you have bread, bread, bread, bread, so many types of bread!”.
These conversations put that very small disappointment I had today into perspective.
