It Became Clear

And it’s back up north.  I’m riding a cab along Huangpi Road, down underneath the high way.  We cut over and under from XinTianDi and I realize that I usually travel this road above, on the highway heading out to the airport.  Off by the curb I thought I saw an altercation.  One guy on a scooter ran right up to two other people astride a separate motor bike.  The first guy yelled and gestured angrily, but then it became clear that he was kidding as he smiled.

It brought my mind back to an iconic memory of mine from 1994 when I was first living here in this town.  I was riding my Flying Pigeon on my way to the place where I worked. There was a thin passage where the road narrowed and only bikes and carts could pass.  Traffic all went one way up this route.   One day, traffic was slower than usual heading up this incline.  Eventually it became clear that a young man was peddling a three-wheeled cart with a broad flat back, down against traffic.  He made progress slowly and a number of people that passed him yelled at him and kicked his cart.  One man slapped him violently on the head.  And I winced.  As I recall there was no other obvious way for him to get down and surely whatever he’d done he didn’t deserve to be beaten on the head.  He was a obviously a poor country boy just trying to do some dead-end task that someone else had assigned him.

These guys on their scooters on Huangpi Lu had nothing fight about.  Traffic was orderly.  Their scooters didn’t require any exertion.  They live in a different time.  That’s what I just told a room full of prospective Chinese students at the University I teach at:  “What a remarkably fortunate time you all live in, to be able to have such an opportunity.   No generation since this cities earliest days in the mid nineteenth century had ever had the domestic peace and stability to allow them choices such as you enjoy. Grab it, shake it. “

Fighting in a tight, cramped space:  Sounds a bit like the latest airline indignity we all had to watch on youtube:  American Airlines this time.  The steward apparently punched a female passenger and nearly hit the child in her arms.  We pick up the incident shortly thereafter where the woman is crying and asking for her stroller back.  A passenger has jumped up and threatened to hit the steward if he strikes her again.  He threatens to drop him to the ground.  The steward stands his ground, ready to fight back. until he isn’t.  And he tells the guy he doesn’t know all of what happened.  It looked precisely like a passage out of the Jane Goodall book I just finished about chimpanzees.  Are there more of these incidents now or are we all just inundated with all the video that everyone now each and every day.  It is certainly the latter, but it affects our national psyche as if it were the prior.  No merciful chance to miss anything these days.  Civilized until we aren't and instincts resume control.      

Sunday, 4/23/17