Absurdity, Allegory and China

Someone’s blowing things up close to my home, 3:45 on a Thursday afternoon, an odd time of both the day and the week, even in Tianjin. Not sure why, though I am not curious enough to go find out the reason. But for a moment I just flashed on 2003 when SARS founds its way to town. The place where we were living then, off Diantai Dao not far from Tianjin University, set off fireworks every evening at the gate to keep everything in order. Our place was not the only one to make a lot of noise, and in the canyons of Chinese housing it was deafening after the sun went down until finally the ‘all clear’ decree was announced.

There were great superstitions that ran through the Tianjin streets during the time of SARS, all set in motion by the supposed discovery at a construction site of the remains of a very large and very dead snake that was declared to be shewang, the snake king. Then things got really fun as remedies for the disaster, portended by the discovery of mighty legless lizard, took off. There were two folk remedies that readily come to mind, though I am sure that there were more that I am forgetting. The first had to do with buying 6 eggs , though you could only buy one egg per vendor, and the sixth egg had to be from a seller named Liu. If you really wanted to gather creds you could go for eight, the eighth egg, as you might expect, having to be purchased from Eggman Ba.

The other magic bullet was in the form of canned peaches, to protect small children from the disease. Jeremiah at the Granite Studio has the explanation here, a remedy he discovered from his mother-in-law who lives in Tianjin, and which he wrote about last year after the Sichuan earthquake and the Olympic Torch debacle had everyone on edge. In the spring of 2003 there was not a can of peaches to be found in Tianjin after shewang showed up.

So, when I heard the fireworks a few minutes ago I flashed on the latest disaster that China is fending off: the swine flu – and I wondered if this was a dispersal of the memo. Once canned peaches start to disappear I’ll know that the cloud has settled in. I guess I could go check the local shops to see how their stock is holding up – which may be a better indicator of the buzz on the street than I could get by watching CCTV or reading the People’s Daily – but it looks like rain, and I think I’ll wait until tomorrow.