Stories

I’ve been telling bedtime stories to the Aidan and Lydia and I enjoy it pretty much. I stand in between their beds, lights off, and walk back and forth talking away. Sometimes I aim for a moral, sometimes just try to be funny, sometimes just to get them to sleep. Lydia allows no scary stories. A couple of days ago…on the last day of the Chinese New Year celebration Beijing’s sky lit up with fireworks. It felt and it sounded like people where emptying out the inventory. We drove to a nearby Santana Row-ish mall and walked around with the kids. I was a bit tired and wanted to sleep but the kids wanted to light fireworks so we headed off to a fireworks stand and bought some. Aidan and Lydia enjoyed it quite a bit but the overwhelming sense from the people around us are that Chinese people are a bunch of pyros. They just have this look that I imagine an arsonist who enjoys his work has. Speaking of which, on the way home we saw fire trucks heading towards the business section of Beijing. Don’t hardly see fire trucks here, even more rare to see them with lights on rushing somewhere. But hey, it was national shoot flames night. And when I got home, I found out that is exactly what happened. One of my facebook friends who lives near the new CCTV complex reported a huge fire. Luckily the building was still under construction and vacant although sadly one firefighter died. Some pictures: Big story, right? I flip through all the CCTV channels. Nothing. Beijing TV channels, nothing. No local news coverage until much later and when it did arrive it was more focused on the govt response (including a politburo member and the mayor directing firefighting efforts) than any details about the fire. Chinese web sites started to fill the gap but then based on instructions from the govt, only the official xinhua news version of the story could be published. Pictures of the fire and speculation on the cause suddenly vanished into thin air. The early speculation was that the building – housing a luxury hotel was having difficulty getting an operating permit and someone used the firework’s cover to burn it. As it turned out, the next day CCTV admitted starting the fire accidently by using illegal Class A fireworks. And then story takes a familiar turn. Bad guys will be identified, put in jail or worse, and it will quickly fade to the background. Expats who have been here a while find this collaborative lack of reporting totally expected and at times amusing. To others it feels like a cold splash of water to the face – a wake up call maybe – but then the water dries. I finish telling my story to Aidan and Lydia. This one was about a city boy who met an island boy on vacation and how the island boy could swim with dolphins. How much the city boy wanted to swim with dolphins too but he wasn’t a strong enough swimmer. And then how the boy turned into a man and returned to the island, wanting to meet his old long lost friend. How he wanted to meet him and swim together with the dolphins. How he did meet him, working at a resort on the island. But the island boy turned man could no longer swim with dolphins leaving the city man to swim for the both of them. When the story was over, I asked Lydia how it was. She said “good, but not very good”. I know how she feels.