Silty dry
morning. Cold, dull utterly barren feeling
that proceeds Chinese New Year. On my
way to the airport again, early morning stare out along An Hua Jie, now Tian
Bei Lu. J. J. Johnson's trombone on the 1964 track "Neo", pensive, determined, dulling the sharp edges of my morning. Normal routines slowing down.
People have begun to return home. The
largest annual human migration has begun.
My wife went to go get more fabric over the weekend. They’d already left for Wenzhou or
Anhui. “Honey can your office help to
take care of . . . ?” “No. The girl who does that has already left for
home.” Technically the number of days off is merely a week. Technically the holiday doesn’t start for
another five days. But most people get
out early take at least two weeks and many take three or more.
Construction sites that usually hum are at a
standstill. Migrant labor, of course,
the first to leave. At New Year’s in the
north everything feels the way an iron bar sounds if you hit it with a stick in
the cold. Dull ring, hands sting,
unforgiving. Red is the color of New
Year. Red splashes out. Red bows draped
around stone lions. Cheap red lanterns
hanging in row. Torn paper scrolls hang
on the doors, 万事如意[1]
and other auspicious messages. The
character “Fu”, 福luck,
fortune, upside down, the homophone for “arrival.” Everything set but no one is around. Dusty.
Always crowded, suddenly a bit lonely with the migrant sea
who swell the population all en route now to the country-side. Reading about the trouble that peasants have
trying to procure tickets to return home.
The system is rigged. Scalpers
buy up all the cheap tickets and gouge everyone who didn’t secure a seat in the
first few secondss of opportunity.
There’s an IT consultation challenge for you. There’s a government relations dilemma. That’s one group of people you don’t want
furious en masse. 400 million people
trying to go home, forced to spend multiples of what they budgeted to do so.
I read Evan Osnos piece in the New Yorker on Xu Zhiyong with
my daughter last night. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2014/01/the-trial-of-the-chinese-dream.html?mobify=0 He is a young lawyer
and legal activist who tried to push for reform from within the system. Lauded
internationally and at home, Osnos juxtaposes Xu’s earlier profile in Esquire
magazine about China’s reformers, about their Chinese dream. It is, however at odds with Xi Jinping’s
China dream. Mr. Xu is essentially
accused of organizing people to fight corruption and he will go to jail for it:
On
Wednesday, Xu will go to court, in Beijing, where prosecutors are preparing to
try him on the charge of “gathering a crowd to disrupt public order.” He is
accused of organizing small-scale protests against corruption and in support of
migrant parents who are seeking to enroll their children in city schools. Xu
faces up to five years in prison. Nobody
doubts that he will be convicted.
Reading consciously after having watched “The Butler” and
discussed MLK and Malcolm X, we compared his efforts to organize with those of
the other two Americans. The March on
Washington, was a much larger scale “gathering of a crowd.” Let alone the message of armed resistance and
separation that Malcolm X could legally articulate again and again in public in
the 1960s. How difficult and courageous
Chinese people must be to simply speak publically.
Those Malcolm clips from yesterday stayed with me longer
than anything else. If you follow the
link from the Youtube collection of vignettes yesterday forward ahead to the
end and watch as they interview people in Harlem after his assassination. A reporter with a British accent is trying to
get people to talk. And they do. A savvy woman who looks like a house wife,
decries the “white power structure” then holds her ground. And there’s a young man, a teen, who reminds
me of so many students who describes why Malcolm X was a hero and why it mean
trouble for “you” Mr. white reporter. No
one believes that anyone other than the white world has killed Malcolm. Then, an old, West Indian gentleman who
doesn’t want to speak, erupts, as though from the bowels of the earth to say
that he loved Malcolm, because he was black, like him. Voices, unfiltered.
There are perhaps two cultures, one of which, African
American’s of the deep south, the world of Mahalia Jackson and Martin Luther
King that was, is a “country” I’ve never visited. But Malcolm’s world of Harlem, of Brooklyn,
of the urban north. That’s a country I
know well. He builds such a fierce,
unforgiving world and allows no way out for a white viewer. Until his final year or so, when he begins to
evolve as an black internationalist from a black nationalist.
[1] wànshìrúyì: to have all
one's wishes (idiom) / best wishes / all the best / may all your hopes be
fulfilled
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