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.
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