Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Someone Else's Violence





Last night I was walking back from the restaurant I’d blogged about the other day.  Echoes of Nathan Davis funky soprano sax on the tune, “New Orleans” from 1976, still in my head, improving my walks-manship, suggesting a fine night ahead, just this way. “This is probably the pick of the litter for local family style food that I’ve found” I assured my old friend who had arrived here in town just two hours prior.  Entering down the stairs into the black and white interior they looked at us like we were an annoyance.  Things were oddly quiet.  It was 9:00PM and they weren’t serving anymore.  Lovely. 

“No worries, there are plenty of other places this way to explore,” I assured him.  Back we went, retracing our steps to towards Beijing Lu, and on towards Nanjing Lu to find some place that was open. Coming up from behind was a short man in a white short-sleeved collared shirt, marching the same direction as us, yelling into a phone.  One more frustrated person screaming into the Shanghai night about something that didn’t concern me.  I paid it no mind.  My friend who discerned more of the content than I said: “that’s not his wife he’s talking to.”  Up ahead, at a light, we paused and waited to cross.   Restaurant lights beckoned further on.



Closer, across the street it seemed as though someone were falling over laughing.  Again, my friend discerned before me that it wasn’t a joke.  She was weeping and then yelling into the phone.  Her friend was trying to support her.  She stood and walked to the side.  We commented on how in Shanghai people argue and argue, with a 狗血喷头[1], but never throw punches, like they would up north.  When we return here after dinner she’ll probably still be arguing.  And sometimes that’s true.

The light turned and we crossed the street towards the woman and her friend and the lights, veering left to avoid the scene.  By now she was shrieking into the phone and then, the man in the white shirt marched up from behind.  It was obviously she, he’d been yelling at before.  The wailing lady was now yelling at someone else on her phone and she backed away now from the approaching man.  

He came at her quickly, not far from us and bellowed at her, his skin taut back, tense.  She was perhaps thirty-five, and looked like a housewife, out for a meal with a friend. She screeched back at him with a sinewy neck, pocketing her phone.  And as we walked around, and craned back he pushed her and then he hit her and she fell to the ground.  Her face was bruised and her shoe had come off and she fetched it and rose back up weeping.  A crowd had formed, of course.  I yelled at the man to stop, saying he had no “cultural level,” which does actually make some sense in Chinese.  Others were closer and helped the lady up, and still others filled the space between them and stepped to the man, vaguely.  He continued to yell and threaten and then they parted.  We walked on forward, leaving them behind us, considering restaurants, in spite of ourselves.



Dinner was ruined, for me.  I kept seeing her bruised face, and his little-man indignity, yelling at her, lunging at her.  I felt impotent for not having, done more.  And impotent for the voice that goes off in ones head and assumes control that says: “don’t get involved” in someone else’s domestic violence and don’t get involved in disturbances in foreign countries where you don’t really know what’s going on and can easily become a target.  Don’t get involved because somehow, improbably it could result in trouble for you too; trouble, that has nothing to do with you.  And these are all layers that descend quickly over the more human impulse to help someone and interrupt violence between two people that should mark us as humans, rather than spectators.






[1] gǒuxiěpēntóu:  torrent of abuse (idiom)

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