Absurdity, Allegory and China

It’s been a bad week here. The Sichuan earthquake is, of course, dominating the news and finally kicking the torch relay out of the spots. In fact, there has been much Chinese criticism of the relay now that it has returned to home territory, with calls for it to be suspended and the money saved from all the over-the-top planned hoopla donated to the earthquake relief fund. There have also been calls for an itinerary change to avoid Sichuan province, but BOCOG (Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games) has rejected that suggestion and will rally-on since the Sichuan leg doesn’t pass through the earthquake zone. One man suggested a suspension of the relay with its immediate deliverance to the earthquake zone to be ran around and held high as a symbol of hope to warn off the spirit of death and devastation. Some ideas are obviously worse than others.

Sichuan, the ethnic mash-up: Han, Yi, Miao, Hui, Qiang, and Tibetan. Large and sprawling, from the subtropical to the deeply-wrinkled, winter-frozen Tibetan highlands. There are few places on earth so geographically varied. And I’m not even going to get into the food. (They call restaurants ‘renjia’ – the people, the family, the home. You can burn yourself in a ‘renjia’ and love every minute of the Fire.)

One of the issues I have not yet seen addressed is how the Sichuan migrants, a large, wandering bunch found throughout all of China, are coping with the grinds and groans of terrible unknowing. Or knowing. Many of the construction workers in Beijing and Tianjin are Sichuanren, known for their construction skills and industriousness, which, as best as I can tell, means that they are hard to overwork to death. When I have the opportunity I always ask construction workers where their hometown is, and invariably it is either Sichuan or Henan, the two most populous provinces in China. Before Chongqing was sliced off and tagged by the Centrals as its own special zone – a municipality like Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin – the population of Sichuan was close to 100 million. Now, down a municipality, the population is still more than 87 million.

The people of Sichuan travel to work, and they don’t often get to go home. But when they get a chance they take it, and nothing in the world will stop them. Or almost nothing. But this past spring festival, their time to return home, was severely altered by the winter weather that destroyed or damaged over 1 million homes, cut electricity to large parts of central China, and one city, Fuzhou, was powerless for three weeks. It also cut off the travel zone, the large frozen center which they had to pass through in their attempts to get home. Train service was disrupted at this busiest travel period of the year. Imagine trying to control a tightly packed group of a half-million people desperate to get home, as they are being told they can’t get there anytime soon. Guangzhou train station in southern China in the Pearl River Delta must have been packed with Sichuanese, many of whom did, in fact, not make it home. And for how many of them are there no homes left? No families left? A child still buried in the rubble? In Sichuan. This thing is a countrywide affair.

I have been spending a good deal of my Beijing time around construction sites – not hard to do even when you’re not trying. But I’ve been trying, since I am still maniacally focused on the CCTV Headquarters tower and what it does, both literally and metaphorically, with Light. I wander the buzzing Central Business District with my camera. Mealtimes in the CBD puts thousands of men on the streets and it’s a tough bunch doing a tough business. Hard nuggets of men who work close, live close and travel closely together home once a year. These guys don’t drop their stare, don’t look away when your eyes meet passing. They always see the camera, and I’m careful about what and who I shoot. Two tried to sell me their services as subjects of one of my photos, the smaller of the pair letting me know that the last tourist gave them 200 RMB (nearly thirty bucks). I smiled and wished them luck, didn’t tell them I wasn’t a tourist, because they know that someone who’s not like them has got to be a tourist, at some level or other. Though most of them don’t talk, some of them do smile, but only after I smile first. Sichuan all over ‘em.

The most disturbing, though nightmarishly unsurprising horror of all of this has been the collapse of so many schools, an issue that the government will have to aggressively confront since so many people have lost their children. And in many cases, their only child. One-third of the reported deaths so far have been from the collapse of schools. The official state media is reporting the destruction of over 6,900 classrooms, an odd measure of quantifying devastation, which obviously means they know how many schools, though I can only guess they feel that that number must be too much of a twist. (“Why tell them and make us look bad? Let them do the math on their own.”) I imagine that at least several hundred schools were destroyed just as the afternoon classes were getting going. (The Age is reporting that the number of schools destroyed was 7,000. Perhaps the number of classrooms was a bad translation. -May 18.) In one school most of the kids got out of the building only to be consumed by a landslide that swept the schoolyard. “Mei banfa.” What are you going to do, as in, there’s abso-fuckin-lutely nothing to be done. An act of God. But whose god this? Though I don’t lean in the direction of the divine or its retribution, I can hope for a special hell for all those who skimped and skimmed in constructing the schools and sent so many children to their deaths. If they managed to live through the earthquake I would like to think that there are a lot of adults, and overwhelmingly male, who are already on the run.

But it’s a countrywide thing, and Sichuan is everywhere. That’s what Deng Xiaoping, a Sichuanren, did when he let them know that getting rich was glorious. And so they traveled and became a fine-meshed net, small enough to catch the ‘biggest’ fish fleeing the tiniest of ponds, those people who were entrusted to keep safe the children. There’s ‘Special Hell’ writ all over this one.