Lucky dog

Whenever you are having a really bad day and it seems there is no way out (or off, as the case may be) remember...

...someone's always got it worse than you.

Rain

Gentle spring rains are upon us. It makes for lovely sleeping weather.

Boy hit girl. Convention center. Come.

The couple, in their 20s, violently beat and kick each other on the sidewalk lining the bike lane. Bike traffic slows to a crawl and onlookers silently exhibit their concern. Not surprisingly, no one tries to intervene. The life that appears most in danger is that of the woman. What are we going to do, just sit on our bikes and watch her die?

One biker has read the story of the Good Samaritan. That would be me. I can’t stand by and do nothing. I have too many regrets from previous incidents where I followed the culture and did nothing.

I get close enough, set all inhibitions aside, and yell at the top of my lungs, in English. “HEY! STOP IT! JUST STOP IT!” I repeat this several times to the horror of the crowd.

I quickly assess my threat level and determine it to be low. They have no weapons. I am on a motorbike and can make a quick getaway. I am a foreigner (I’m not at all sure my actions would have been successful if I was Chinese). I am old enough to be the mother of the guy and girl. And I am wearing a funny hat. The man hitting the woman stands in shocked amusement when he realizes who is yelling at him.

I tell him to stop or I will call the police. (I don’t really know how to call the police or what to say. “Boy hit girl. Convention center. Come.” The police would not come if that’s all I can say. I need to learn more “police report” vocabulary.)

The boy stops hitting the girl and runs away with her purse.

She wants her purse back. She walks down the street towards him. He walks back and starts beating her again. They push each other’s heads against walls and rocks, ready to smash each other against anything hurtful in their paths. He drags her by her hair. She tells me the numbers to dial for the police.

I yell again, with a voice of authority that comes from knowing this fight is not God’s will. He stops hitting her again. She has her purse back now. I have given her a chance to make a clean get-away, to run the other direction and never set eyes on that “boyfriend” of hers again.

By now, the local onlookers are more concerned about me than the couple. I have a certain look in my eyes and they know I am not going away. A middle-age man tells me, “It’s their private affair. Go on and leave them alone.” Then he yells at them to cut it out, not because Chinese usually say anything at all in these situations, but because he feels he needs to take the burden of stopping this fight off of the shoulders of the foreign lady with the funny hat.

The fighting couple turns down a side street and get away from the main street and the onlookers. She sits on a curb and he walks away. For a minute I think it is over.

But a few minutes later he comes back towards her. He starts kicking and slugging her again. Though I am far off, I turn my e-bike down the side street and go to where they are. I yell at the guy for a third time.

They don’t appear perturbed to see me. They seem a little surprised that I care, maybe even a little glad that I won’t allow things to go too far. They are polite to me.

I don’t really want to say this to him, but for lack of something better to say, I hear myself saying to the guy in Chinese: “What kind of person are you?”

He says, “You know nothing about what our situation is.”

I calmly agree that I know nothing. But I tell him they should talk about the problem, and that he should not hit her anymore.

He walks away, calms down, and comes back and sits beside her on the curb. He starts talking to her like I suggested.

This works great for about 2 minutes, but then she reaches over and slugs him hard in the face. She isn’t trying to end this fight at all. For all I know, she started it.

I yell at them one final time. They stop hitting each other again. My compassion has not reached its limits, but my bag of tricks for successful intervention has. I drive off, with no illusion that the incident is over. I decide to let the new slew of onlookers take on this challenge. I had given the couple a chance to get away if they wanted to, but they preferred bruises, blood and cuts. I will never know, but at the end of today one of them will likely end up in the hospital (or worse) and the other in jail.

My intervention didn’t make a huge difference, but I won’t lose sleep tonight. If I had done nothing, I don’t think I would sleep so well.

Pray for hurting people in China, a place where domestic violence is rampant, a place where (almost) everyone looks the other way. Pray they will discover better ways to deal with conflict.

Note: In China, onlookers who witness a crime or accident are generally taught not to become involved. If you see a fight in public, you’ll see a crowd gathered around to watch, but no one will try to stop the fight. In America, you might fear weapons involvement and call the cops. Here, there are no guns, and cops generally won’t come unless someone is unconscious.

Before she was a Mom

Happy Mother's Day to my mom, pictured here when she was 17 years old. My dad was in the Army at the time and they were engaged. He said he's had this black and white picture of her in his wallet for 57 years. Happy wishes this day to my Madre!

My first apartment in the Middle Kingdom - circa 1996

The world, in 1996, was a modern place. Or, shall I say, MOST places in the world were modern. I, however, was teaching at a university in the Middle Kingdom. I was given a place to live. I was told "it may not be much, but it is the best they have to offer." I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of that statement even now. I was grateful to have shelter, occasional electricity and water, and a pillow on which to lay my head at night. I didn't have a working telephone or internet service. And I was willing to be inconvenienced, if necessary, for a higher purpose. Inconvenienced?!! Even if you live in this country now, you cannot imagine what it was like a mere 15 years ago.

Here is my tiny, narrow bathroom. There was no bathtub or shower stall, but there was a shower head. I could stand in the space between the door and the toilet to take my shower. The entire room would get wet, so I couldn't keep toilet paper in there during a shower. During winter the floor would not get dry all day. It is an uneven floor and not all the water could drain. And, it was filthy.

This is the only sink in the house. It is the kitchen sink and bathroom sink all in one. The faucets were outdoor-style faucets. The sink had grime ingrained in the crumbling cement. The bottom section had grime, bugs and worms. The wall was filthy. It was like this when I moved in, and no amount of effort would get things clean.

The washing machine was not automatic. The left side is the wash cycle. Move the clothes to the right side for the spin cycle. Add water manually (in the photo you can see me trying to get water from a faucet to the washing machine via a plastic pipe). After washing, pull down the drain pipe to drain water manually. And many people in town, even university professors, had no such luxury of a washing machine. They washed clothes by hand. No wonder the locals, even to this day, wear the same clothes seven days in a row. It's the only logical way to live.

The rusty two-burner stove is on the left. The wobbly wooden table is the ONLY "counter" space in this so-called kitchen.

Check out the electrical plug up high. The electricity and/or water went off frequently, at times one would least expect them too.

The two red bottles are thermoses. Most people, to get clean hot water for drinking, would take two empty thermoses to a boiler on campus and fill them boiled water. I boiled my own water at my apartment. I still didn't trust the water though, and drank a lot of Cokes those first few years. It was probably the safer of the options.

You can see my refrigerator (small), my oven (in America we call them toaster ovens), and my combination dish/food pantry. There were not many groceries, because there was no grocery store in town. I am not kidding. These food items were brought from Hong Kong. The only things I could buy in town were veggies from the street market several miles away by bike, meat straight off the pig from the butcher, Coca-Cola, and Snickers bars. It is no wonder I was hospitalized for anemia within a year. Cokes and snickers provide no nutrition, and at some point a body needs some.

Here's my desk area, with grimy green carpet to cozy things up a little. You can see a phone, but it didn't work. I was the third person in the city of several million to request internet service. Most people had never heard of it. It took the internet expert two months to get me connected.

Here's the sofa. If you sat on it, you would sink almost to the floor.

Here was my TV. At that time, there was no English TV channel. I didn't turn it on except to watch VHS videotapes from the USA. (I had purchased a video machine in Hong Kong that worked here.) You'll notice water stains on the walls. Behind those curtains is a balcony. On top of the TV is a can of coke. Like I said earlier....

My living conditions in 2011 are far better than what you see here. Adequate living conditions reduce stress and allow more time for more important things. Obviously, not drinking Cokes is better for my health, and having room to chop veggies allows me to eat a more healthy diet.

Given a choice, of course I would not go back, but those days hold a lot of special memories for me that I wouldn't trade for the world.