Absurdity, Allegory and China

In the beginning
There were rocks.
And on those rocks with harder rocks
We learned to make a million bruises.
–Robert Ashley, Perfect Lives

Being here in China seems to get odder all the time, which I see as a combination of several things: that China is, in fact, getting odder; that I am, in fact, getting older – which is a major factor in what’s determined to be odd and odder; and that I don’t believe there is any hope for recovering the health of the planet, despite world governments agreeing that it needs to happen and the Nobel Prize being awarded to Wooden Al and the IPCCs. What this means is that I see this show as in a slow, though steepening, slide: carrying capacity, ignorance, greed, and weird smokes all coming together in an equation that I can only conclude is adding up to less than zero. But at least for now, I don’t see this as a hopeless position, though for the life of me I can’t figure out why. I still get up every morning, happy to be Here, glad to know that the heart is still pumping, and that the Chinese are still firing off fireworks and not guns as the remedy for keeping evil on the move, from not settling in, not in this backyard, at least not for this very moment. Nice thought, but in the end it’s just part of the smoke. But Noise always has a lesson, and one of the lessons I have learned is that I am comfortable with random explosions at all times of the day and night. It’s like war without shrapnel, without the bloody casualties, and all the collateral damage – though plenty of folks get wounded doing fascinatingly stupid things using cheap lighters with spark-shooting flints and paper-wrapped parcels of gunpowder. I see it more as effective aural practice for the return of the real thing. And I feel quite certain that it will happen again. And again, until the final one. I would not be surprised to find myself in another war before this life officially winds down. Not a happy thought, but not, anymore, an unhappy one either. It’s just a thought, like going to the store to buy onions, which I happen to be about to do. No onions, arbitrary explosions, a dying planet, the recipe for disorder in close-up, all of which have gotten me accustomed to the unexpected arrival of chaos. As I mentioned above, I’m getting older. This sort of thing happens. Life happening despite the ubiquity of its opposite.

To live in China now is to live at a human pace that I can only classify as fearfully frenetic, as if a random blink, a momentary disconnection, could precipitate a hopeless slip beneath the ever-roiled surface, lost forever to the primal qi. What Chinese of a certain age and level of admission know is that the past has an uncanny way of always happening again. Their history tells them so. (All histories tell us so, though those with the power over textbooks and education do their best to keep that out of print.) The Chinese common folks, the laobaixing, have learned much in the self-consumptive confusion of their 5,000 years of history, but what they know more acutely than anything else is that no one in the history of China has done worse things to the Chinese than the Chinese have done to themselves. This, at some deeper and uncomfortable level, they understand. It’s written all over their faces. And at a deeper, more potent level, they also know a lot more about surviving in the bad times than do the western pundits who predict great fortune and glory for this, “the century of China.” It is best to interpret these predictions as the first signs of dementia, since there is obviously some deep forgetting backing up their words.

If you would have told a moderately educated, middle-class man on a New York street in 1901 that two world wars were coming, along with thousands of local ones funded with his tax dollars, several holocausts and the development of unimaginably powerful weapons that would proliferate at such a staggering rate as to have the potential to destroy the earth a hundred …, no a thousand times over in the course of the upcoming century and that millions of people – more millions than he and his entire neighborhood have fingers – would suffer at the hands of tyrants, dictators, messianic tribal leaders and neocons, getting off with a “You’re friggin’ nuts,” would have been a blessing. But if you were to have presented a man in 1901 Beijing with the same unfolding scenario, only with a few added particulars – Chiang Kai Shek (Jiang Jie Shi), aka Peanut, in 1938 will blow the levees on the Yellow River to slow the advancing Japanese army and as a result nearly a million people will die; a Great Leap Forward where your future family will have to smelt all the metal objects they own in their own backyard furnace for the collective glory of the state; a man-made famine that will kill 30 million, and a ‘revolution’ where the kids will take over and torture and kill their teachers and anyone else they don’t like (and in Guangxi 1968 some of them will cook their enemies in hot pots and wash them down with piss-warm tea) – he wouldn’t have even blinked. Reality is always more unimaginable than fiction, though here the unimaginable never wanders too far afield. This is what the Chinese know.

The best indicator of how the times are perceived by the folks on the street comes on the twenty-third day of the twelfth lunar month, seven days prior to the passing of the year. Xiao Nian is the day the Kitchen God reports to the Jade Emperor in Heaven on the state of things around the hearth, a “who’s been naughty and who’s been nice” assessment of the household. It is the initial salvo for the holiday season, the first night when the people roll out the firecrackers to keep the Kitchen God from being heard when he spills the beans to the Boss. It usually begins at sunset and builds to a crescendo about 9-9:30 PM, tapering off, with a few ripping through the cold night until midnight or 1 AM.

In this week, the lead-up to the Spring Festival, there seems to be a sense of restraint among the people, despite the incessant cheering from the Propaganda Ministry about the brilliance of the upcoming Olympics, the uncommon Chinese resolve in the face of the wintry weather disasters, and the glorious future unfolding at everyone’s feet. Though the new spring moon and the kickoff to the festival will not officially begin until midnight, February 6th, this past Wednesday night was Xiao Nian. We went to a restaurant to celebrate the evening with friends. On the way we passed a strip of classier restaurants in the higher dollar real estate market not far from the east entrance to the Water Park ,where the big black cars – not the Xialis and Santanas – were lined up in long shiny rows. In a vacant lot across the street several people (restaurant employees?) were setting off cannon-like boomers. When we arrived at our destination in a Chinese neighborhood of more modest flats, there was noise, but it was mostly the higher pitched long strips of lower ‘caliber’ common red crackers. When we left the restaurant at 8:30 we walked through the evening near the TV Tower and were surprised by the relative quiet. I had wondered how the folks would turn out to welcome this season, and if this was any indication of how they feel, I would say that they are keeping things close. Firecrackers tell it better than any pundit can, and this year’s Xiao Nian was not a good sign.

The Pigs are pushing back their chairs prepping to leave the feast, making way for next ones to sit at the table.

Here come the Rats.