Absurdity, Allegory and China

On January 3, 2008 the China Daily carried the story China players make million-dollar World Cup pledge. The pledge itself was a bit scary in light of the China’s men’s team past record and their unlucky draw in the qualifying rounds. The line that caught my interest the most was, “We swear by death to kill along the bloody road of defending the honor of the motherland and realize our youthful dreams.”

Last night they lost to Iraq and last week they fell to Qatar and are now out of the 2010 World Cup race. As I returned home from supper last night and threaded my way through the staggeringly large security detail on Binshui Dao at the north entrance to the stadium, the mood among the men in black, blue and brown was anything but joyful. I wasn’t sure if it was the nature of the job or a reflection of what was happening on the field. I still don’t know, though when the crowd let out they weren’t a happy bunch. There were, of course, firecrackers popping off in the neighborhood, but they were unrelated to the game. It’s been a bad year and as Jeremiah over at Jottings from the Granite Studio earlier this week noted:

Report out of Tianjin, the city by the sea, only 80 miles east and 20 years behind Beijing…residents are doing what they can to alleviate the bad luck of China’s annus horribilis by, what else, setting off firecrackers to blow away the bad luck.

When the men’s team made public their pledge in that long-ago and more innocent January, I dropped my head and shook it in disbelief. I wrote, “… swearing an oath and going public with it supports my assertion that resolution and suicide fall under the same umbrella.”

The offer of eight million RMB if they qualified, plus 500,000 more for each win wasn’t enough. Money never is. This morning I am worried about these guys. All that “swearing by death” has me wondering whether the entire team is on a mass suicide watch. Or whether anyone cares.

I expect that here in Tianjin there will be even more firecrackers tonight.