It's Monday, and Aidan comes to our bed at 6:30am and tells me he wants to watch cartoons. I'm somewhere still lost in a dream about something most definitely not a cartoon but still manage to find the remote and tune into channel 42 -- Kaku -- the cartoon channel. I see a news broadcast, in Chinese of course since we are in China after all. The strange thing is the Kaku channel logo is visible so it must be the right channel. Aidan repeats his request for Cartoons so I flip through each channel one by one more so because I want sleep than I want him to have cartoons. They are all showing the same news broadcast. All 60 or so cable channels we have.
This was a bit unsettling and at first I wondered if I had indeed exited my dream world. At some point I found out that China was entering a three day mourning period and apparently mourning requires the absence of all entertainment, hence the lack of cartoons or movies or sitcoms on TV. Our satellite entertainment channels (HBO, Cinemax, ESPN, ...) opted to show no programming at all. For some reason I associated this three day "thou shall have no fun" edict as a more severe version of good friday.
When the earthquake struck, I was in my office having a meeting. We did not feel a thing. Shortly after Yang called me and asked if there was an earthquake because while driving through a downtown section, she noticed many high rises in Beijing had been evacuated. I was in my work rush mode and didn't pay much attention. However, within minutes there was a buzz in the office and with news of a large earthquake in Sichuan and rumors of a strong earthquake predicted in Beijing. The rumor was quite precise -- sometime between 10pm and midnight a 6+ point quake would hit. The rumor was also quite false even through reported as a real prediction by a major news portal. Apparently it was started by bloggers intent on whatever bloggers are intent on.
The death counts started to roll in, quickly rising to 3,000 people and since most areas were inaccessible it wasn't hard to imagine 50,000 as a more realistic number. As I write this, the estimate is now 80,000.
Yang was 10 years old and living in Beijing when a 7.8 (some say 8.2) quake struck Tangshan. Tangshan is not so close to Beijing but also not so far -- 93 miles -- so she felt it pretty good and people had fears a another quake would strike so they lived outside for a few weeks. First on the ground, then under shanties, then under rudimentary tents, then under what seems live five star tents. Yang describes the time as a lot of fun and exciting, maybe in a that strange way that a shared event can pull people together. Maybe it was something else. Certainly, being a 10 year old Beijing girl in 1976 isn't part of our shared experience. China was a poor and closed country in 1976. Today China is neither poor nor closed, but it is also far from rich and far from open. While in Tangshan 300,000 people died (some say the true count was double that) without China really even acknowledging the event, today their leaders are very visible on national tv, pulling everyone together, and accepting foreign aid.
The epicenter of this quake was so far from Beijing, maybe 1000 miles, and we do not know anyone directly impacted. It hasn't impacted our day to day lives much -- save for Aidan's cartoons. We think it is a chance for people to see past the small dramas of our daily lives and see the bigger picture -- as cliched as that sounds. We start with ourselves.