Pen and Ink - China Chronicles

There is a real China Crisis going on and it’s unfolding in Sichuan. As of this writing the death toll in the recent Wenchuan Earthquake has risen to almost 29,000 and yesterday’s aftershocks have added to those who perished. It’s really horrible, but I guess it can happen to anyone and any country. We can only hope against hope that this is all going to pass.

I’ve been looking at footages on TV and how China is handling the disaster. While the whole country from the leaders to the rescuers to the commoners is joined together in concerted effort to save lives, the media reportage has been exceptionally transparent, as opposed to the news blackout on the Lhasa riots a month or so ago which proved disastrous to foreign relations. Also, China has accepted help from the outside world in the form of donations in cash (which has now amounted to billions) and in kind, including help from foreign rescue personnel from Russia and Japan (its most hated neighbor).

The experience must have rearranged the insides of the Chinese for they are normally a proud unfeeling lot; they put too much emphasis on composure in front of anyone. To show any weakness is to lose face. And face is everything. This reversal of attitude is new and unprecedented and may have opened up new doors in China’s future. Already it is reaping the rewards of friendship from unexpected places.

I have always been a skeptic of the Chinese psyche, an entity evolving around material wealth bordering on obsession, while the spirit is relegated to the grinding of the state’s Great Machine. An objective attitude towards life may have propelled China in the last few decades to acquire so much wealth by opening its doors to foreign investment but I have been here long enough to understand that China’s rise is somewhat superficial, it looks impressive from afar but when you move closer you see all sorts of defects.

But looking at what just transpired in the last few days I can’t help but wonder if we are witnessing a different China. Has the Middle Kingdom finally began a search for its own soul? Maybe sitting on too much wealth has made it realize that money isn’t everything. Is human spirit starting to dawn on a land where the individual is non-existent and the state is everything? Will the outside world be finally invited in for a hot cup of tea? Or am I just wishful thinking?…

It is said that poetry is a “collection of words in their best order”. For a myriad reasons, I took these words to heart and ended up being too cautious, more often unwittingly looking for ways to shorten my words in lieu of technically correct imagery, like turning on the faucet and inserting a finger in the spigot to lessen the flow of water. Once I started being less conscious about stance I felt less inhibited, allowing my true feelings to show in its own unique liquid form. Poetry should come like bleeding without a tourniquet, a release, just letting go of all inhibitions and all impurities until it drains. Here’s one that bled me dry once upon a time…

RETURN TO BUTTERFLY LEAF PARK

Memory bleeds
behind the heart rings
of this familiar park tree
aching to soar, to explode
into butterfly leaves.
The whirlpooling grass
under these great green wings
imitate a theater
of laughter-soaked limbs
restive in the wind.
Story patches
around the pebble benches
drown in imaginings:
monster myths
heroics, make believe
made believable
by the cacophony of dreams
while the browning grasshoppers
hop freely
and the dragonflies kiss
the youngest buds.

I wait for the sun
to ease back
in the direction of sleep
my melancholy colliding
with the music of birds
melting in the wounds
of a bearded oak.
The blood in my pen
is the color of the road
painting a hardness
around scars, mangled
by the business of cars
pumping life
dead square into walls.

Blue prints
in the yellowing sky
succumb to the impulse of time
punching in and out
of the shadows
as giant fireflies
start breathing
fire into the street.

I gaze my last
at the grand capitol nearby
gray cancer bloating
on its side, new steel
jutting out into the night.
It suddenly feels like
watching Grandfather die.

-San-ag Literary Journal 2,
Nov 2002, Iloilo City

I was back on that day here in Chengdu from holiday in Iloilo when the earthquake happened. I just arrived from the airport around lunchtime at my apartment which is on the 16th level of a 30-storey building. I was getting ready to report for work at around 2:15pm when I felt giddy, like my knees were buckling. I thought at first I was just too jet-lagged from three flights (Iloilo to Manila to Shanghai to Chengdu). But then the shaking didn’t stop and I felt the walls sway and the furniture move. I heard screams from the streets outside, the whole intersection in front of my apartment was clogged with people and cars trying to avoid the buildings. The building shook hard for about a minute and carried on shaking steadily but more gently for about another minute. Thank goodness it didn’t collapse, as with most buildings in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan. My apartment just sustained some cosmetic damage, but there’s one big crack in my spare room wall from the floor to the ceiling. It must have been the big cracking sound I heard earlier.

There has been a state of alarm in the whole province of Sichuan since the quake. Chengdu is not significantly damaged. If you don’t know yet, Chengdu is a modern city with skyscrapers and 12 million residents; Sichuan Province has a total of 90 million people (bigger population than the whole of Philippines, and it’s just one province in China). Most of the buildings here are designed to withstand seismic movements so the damage here was mostly sustained by older low-rise structures built before the 90’s. But the hardest part for its residents was when basic facilities started to fail. The phone lines went dead, you couldn’t call or text anyone. Luckily I had 2 phones with me, one was for my SMART roaming sim which surprisingly got my sms through to my wife Ems in Iloilo. There was no electricity, running water and gas. And for those like me who lived in a 30-storey apartment, we weren’t allowed to go up to our units by the authorities until early morning next day. So many had to sleep half-naked or in their pyjamas without blankets in the streets that night.

Outside of Chengdu, in the mountain villages and countrysides, there is serious devastation. I’m sure you ‘ve all seen that on TV by now. About 15,000+ dead and more are still buried in rubble and landslides. I heard whole chunks of mountainsides collapsed with either a whole village on top of  it or onto a village below. Hardest hit are the cities of Wenchuan, Dujiangyan, Mianyang and a few other small towns high up in the mountains (all in Sichuan Province). I heard also the Three Gorges Dam sustained some cracks. The number of casualties could still double in the next few days or weeks. The rains have come to make matters worse. There is also a question whether China is really giving us real numbers given its tendency to roil facts. However one can see the whole country is mobilized right now, racing against time to locate survivors. It’s not going to be easy, their response systems are not as advanced as western countries. So let’s just hope those survivors can hold on a little longer.

Everything here is starting to get back to normal. Phones are working, and water and electricity in my apartment is back, although we still don’t have gas. No work yet until our office building is declared safe to occupy. I really can’t complain.

This whole experience is probably nature’s way of giving us humans a jolt, a reminder that we’re already running the earth to the ground…