Absurdity, Allegory and China

Sunday, 6:30 AM: the security guys at the Tianjin Olympic Stadium are running sound checks to the background music of Kenny G’s My Heart Will Go On, a double-shot of Chinese-pop horror. It’s like 1998 all over again, only with more cars and hundreds of thousands fewer bikes. Nothing pegs the last decade’s low point of cross-cultural absorption more than Celine Dion covered by a mushy soprano sax and the abandonment of sensible inner-city transport. It’s like waking to a hangover with your head, literally, squeezed in a vice. Luckily I don’t have a hangover. I remind myself that it is still only June. Breathe in. Then out. Slowly.

6:58 AM: the first ballsy chorus of “Yi, Er, San, Si!”

7:06 AM: the first extended and imperiously over-amped speech. Celine and Kenny are sitting this one out. From the window I can make out a line of mobile water cannons through the early morning humid soup. It’s nearly time to close the windows and switch on the swamp cooler, 27 degrees C.

7:25 AM: the voice from the speakers ratchets up a full octave and the soundboard guy cranks up the volume. Apparently there is someone somewhere having a hard time hearing, perhaps out on the outer ring road, 10 clicks to the south.

7:29 AM: a large-group screaming, rhythmic chant, very male. I can see the tense muscled necks in full-blown strain, even though I’m not looking out the window. I’ve seen this one before. In what seems like someone else’s life, I was once a part of a shrieking male, close-order crowd bringing peace to the world. Some things are not worth recalling, though on some mornings you just can’t seem to dodge it.

8 :00 AM: the clang of metal-on-metal as construction workers dismantle scaffolding somewhere amid the canyons. The voice in the speaker continues with the exhortations, and a glance out the window reveals that the morning mist is thicker than it was an hour ago.

8:40 AM: the first mock explosion and subsequent commanding shrieks. It’s almost like a movie, only it’s not. It’s a drill of life and terror, and it’s only June. What rough beast, indeed.

I recall a James Wright autumnal poem from the early sixties, even though it’s only the first full day of summer.

Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio
In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.