The Earthquake Personified

At 8:02AM on Saturday, April 20^th, the students at Sichuan University’s Jiang’an Campus were awoken by their dormitories shaking back and forth. The students from the relatively tremor-free provinces outside Sichuan – Shandong, Hainan, Guangxi, Hebei, etc – were “scared to death.” They jumped from their bunks and fled the buildings.

All Saturday and Sunday, aftershocks originating in the Longmenshan faultline shook the province.

I teach English Reading and Writing to about 150 of those students.

The class I’d prepared for the Monday after the earthquake was about personification as a literary device.

After having introduced the students to the personification technique, I asked them to discuss the bits of life that upset them, anger them, stress them out. They talked about exams and homework, of course. But top of their lists was the earthquake.

Imagine the earthquake as a character, I said, as a person with thoughts and feelings, and write a rap around that.

Here’s some of what they wrote:

“It’s not the first time I appeared,

And I just wanna disappear.

All the people are afraid of me,

This is not what I wanna be…”

“I read the newspaper,

And I knew I’d made a disaster,

There were so many people suffering,

I was sad and crying,

Why do I always make people die?

I don’t wanna be a bad guy…”

And as I walked around the class, reading what the students had written, and thinking about the flattened villages, the dead, the injured, the whole thing seemed even more sad, more tragic. Here was an earthquake that never intended to cause damage or pain but could not help it.

In one of the raps, a tale of unrequited love, the earthquake was a woman who had fallen in love with the earth but was rejected, jilted:

“I cried,

Because I didn’t become the earth’s bride.

I felt angry, I shook.

Maybe there was a better choice,

But I just wanted to make some noise.

I know I was wrong,

But the hurt felt so strong…

Sorry to scare your life,

I just wanna be a good wife…”

Raise a glass to the people of Lushan county.

http://sichuan-quake-relief.org/

Scaring the Monsters Away

When I first moved to China, the trumpeting of carhorns was nonstop obvious. Hot summer days I’d sit in the office thirteen floors above the city streets and, through the open windows, an incessant yawling of horns – of taxis, cars, motorcycles, buses – would ascend and invade.

I’d talk about how loud it was and how it never ended, how back home, in Ireland, it wasn’t like that.

Two years later, however, and I’ve gotten used to it. The traffic-noise outside my apartment in Jade City. The jackhammers breaking stone on the Second Ring Road. The bulldozers. The music streaming at earsplitting decibels from clothes shops. At least consciously none of that bothers me anymore.

I think I’ve figured out why.

One morning, waiting outside the train-station, an American friend began to complain about the traffic noise. “Why don’t they just stop!” she yelled.

Whispering to me, another friend said, “The locals don’t seem bothered by it.”

I nodded.

I began to pay more attention to China’s various sounds, plus the local people’s involvement in and reaction to those sounds. In Jiuzhaigou National Park, a valley of tranquil multicoloured lakes and ancient trees, the tourists roar at the top of their lungs and are happy. In hole in the wall noodle joints, the customers slurp without restraint their noodles and soup and are satisfied. On the streets some children scream and shout and nobody tells them to keep it down. Restaurants are an exuberant cacophony of chopsticks and fuwuyuan! and little clinked glasses of baijiu.

Compared to where I’m from, noise is tolerated – celebrated, even – in China.

And uncontested number one on the noise charts is Spring Festival when, on New Year’s Eve, in every city and every village, millions of firecrackers are lit, exploding across this big country like thunderclaps, like the sounds of war.

I’ve thought about this, about the firecrackers, and in particular about the origins of Spring Festival and how within its mythical origins is a tentative reason for China’s tolerance of noise. According to legend, and once upon a time, a mythical beast called Nian would come on the first day of the New Year to eat livestock, crops and even villagers, especially children. Among other things, people used firecrackers to frighten away Nian.

Is this myth a possible explanation for the tolerance of noise in China?

Perhaps, because of the Spring Festival legend, buried way deep in the collective unconscious of Chinese people is a synthesis of noise and positive outcome. Down here, in the collective unconscious, where symbols are king, noise is explained as a symbol of safety from danger, something to be celebrated. Perhaps this is why most people at least seem not to mind the raging blaring noises of the city.

Scaring the monsters away, is why it’s tolerated.

What you begin to understand about cultural differences is that they are rooted in symbols and their interpretation. An object, an act, an event, a quality, a relation – all of these can in our brains become a symbol. And here’s the thing: using the received culture patterns I was brought up with in Ireland to understand the abundance and tolerance of noise in China results in little but confusion, intolerance and frustration.

Last week I wrote an email to a friend. I told him, “I never before thought I’d excited by the sound of bulldozers and jackhammers.”

Perhaps, over the course of two years in China, associations between noise and happiness have been created along my neural pathways. Perhaps my brain is changing.