during today’s chinese class, 2:30pmish:

me - teacher, can we stop a bit? i’m feeling dizzy.
heidi - me too, strange.

a little silence followed, while we realized that the whole apartment on 31st floor was gently swaying back and forth.

heidi - is it an earthquake?
me - hum, you’re probably right.

scary mixed feelings: the urgency of getting cover and feeling safe ground, the panic of being too high to reach safe ground quickly, the fear of the building just collapsing on us (i don’t think many of the buildings in shanghai would resist a serious earthquake).

so after a bit of hesitation, we got our shoes on, ran downstairs and rested a bit in the park until we felt calmer… and eavesdropped on passerby’s who seemed to have either felt it too and seen the buildings moving - or not felt it at all.

i ended up canceling the rest of the class because afterwards i didn’t feel too safe up there and took a taxi towards a coffeeshop on nanjing. the driver had heard about the earthquake on the radio, but didn’t feel anything and proceeded to reassure me that in shanghai, earthquakes were very rare.

good.

“…those concerns about China’s human rights are legitimate and justified, but this is not the right time to over blow it into serious confrontation. …… to highlight these problems in the run up to the Olympics is inappropriate. It’s like on your daughter’s graduation ceremony, one of your friends tries to point out the fact that she is actually three months pregnant and doesn’t know who is the baby’s father.”

Great analogy! Unfortunately though, there are a whole bunch of people who are absolutely determined to use this moment to bring their concerns about Tibet, Darfur, human rights etc etc to the attention of the world. They see this as their only opportunity to exert pressure on Beijing and not only will laugh and point and catcall at your daughter, they’ll claim to have impregnated her themselves if it gets people to take notice.

again, from the time: blog.

Hmmmm……. I think for once, I’ll leave it to the Xinhua to say it for me. Here’s part of a recent editorial from China’s official news service:

“We are on our way to becoming a powerful country, and we should also learn to think like citizens of a big country. A strong country not only has a strong economy, but also a mature mentality. This includes the ability to take pressure in stride, and face difficulties in a rational way.”

seen on the Time: China blog. go ahead and read the whole post, for some insight on the “high emotions” running in china these days.

we’re fine, i’m calmer, so don’t worry. after some reasoning, i believe people in shanghai are more well informed than in other more rural places, not to mention simply too busy to be making any riots. and my window view of the beach themed carrefour assures me it is still in the same place.
i’ve read that the government has finally taken some action by enforcing restrictions to stop the access to sites that instigate riots and boycotts, as well as blocking sms that have sensible content.

finally.
how naive of them to let this anti-western sentiment spread this far on the eve of the olympic games (when thousands of foreigners are expected in china) and especially knowing that they went through a very similar situation with anti-japanese protests not so long ago.

shanghaiist published today the story of an american volunteer teacher that was attacked last sunday, when exiting carrefour on zhuzhou (hunan). below is the letter sent by one of his colleagues to the media:

Last night [Editor’s note: Sunday, Apr 20] around 7pm my friend was attacked by a mob of about 150 people outside the Carrefour in Zhuzhou, Hunan (near his placement site). When leaving Carrefour some of the crowd started shouting at him and he tried to say he didn’t have anything to do with the Olympics, but 3 men started to push him and then he was hit in the back of the head at least 3 times.
He started to run, and the mob chased him. He jumped into a cab, but the mob surrounded the car and started shaking and rocking it. The cab driver was shouting at him to get out. Then they started hitting the car. The crowd was shouting “kill him! kill the Frenchman.” He called the Field Director while in the back of the car. The cab driver abandon the car when he saw police coming.
Two police made there way though the mob and managed to drive the cab away. The Field Director alerted the Director Shu of the Hunan Department of Education. The police got him another cab and he took it from Zhuzhou to the field director’s home in Changsha. He spending the night here in Changsha and is likely leaving China as soon as possible.

[My colleague] is only 22, an American (not French), and a volunteer teacher. He graduated from Boston Collage less than 10 months ago. If he can be attacked anyone can be. The situation in central china is becoming much worse very quickly. James has been cut up pretty badly by the glass and the people trying to grab him.

I didn’t think the situation and protests were anything to worry about before now, but if the mob had gotten him outside of the cab he could have easily been killed.

Foreigners need to be more aware that this is a real danger and MUCH more careful around the protests here in central china.

Im also sending this letter to the embassy.
People need to be more much careful.

me too, i also hadn’t given these boycotts and protests much thought. now? honestly, as a caucasian-big-eyed-easy-to-spot foreigner, i feel threatened.

i find myself mentally rewinding stupid sentences in mandarin, such as “i’m not french, i’m portuguese, portugal gave macau to china, so we’re friends!”. as if i could tame the stupidity of a mob with my impressive mandarin skills. both sad and pathetic. *sigh*

here’s hoping the olympics come and go quickly. 125 days left.

1 year in china and a lot of mixed feelings. hard to measure how much we fit here, with so many dramatic ups and downs, like cosine waves or bipolar periods.

yesterday, for instance. a bulldozer on a construction site accidentally hit a small brick wall by the sidewalk. p. was passing by on his bike when it happened and got caught under it. he’s cool, just scratches, bruises, a smashed bike and a dirty coat. nothing some ligaments and a lot of love won’t cure. could have been so much worse…

it makes you think, right? more than a year in china, today we’re celebrating each other and taking it easy. that’s it.

last time i went to portugal, my parents proudly showed me the progress of their “tiny clementina’s tree”. it’s a cute little tree that they purchased way before i came to china, but to which i never paid much attention. and it turns out that it wasn’t clementines that tree was growing - it was kumquats!! lots of them! i was in shock, and incredibly happy to be putting my new asian knowledge to work! :)

but this, i think, is something we don’t see in portugal (or europe) so often. they’re called pomelo, or youzi (柚子) in mandarin.

in china they’re on display on every supermarket (both fresh and candied) or street fruit stand and they look like green-yellowish oversized lemons (hence their latin name, citrus maxima). inside, there’s a really thick rind that you need to remove completely to reach the juicy pulp.

they taste not as tart as lemon, and not as sweet as an orange, but with hints of both… it’s probably closer to grapefruit, now that i think about it, only sweeter. and oh-so-adictive!!
give it a try if you find it around!

on the next episode of china fruit series, the mini-mango! stay tuned! :P