From Sandton to Shanghai

(3 minutes of silence in Beichuan near the earthquake epicenter. Photo: European Pressphoto Agency)

There are lots of things I would like to write about the devastating earthquake to hit Sichuan Province.

I would love to say more about how the Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao was on a plane to the disaster zone within 1 hour and 22 minutes and talk about how he was bleeding from stumbling over collapsed rubble. I would like to talk more about how George Bush hightailed it in the opposite direction on Air Force One when the Twin Towers can tumbling down or how it took a week for him to fly over Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath.

I would like to explore the idea that natural disasters are often a prelude to seismic shifts in Chinese affairs. The massive earthquake that hit Tangshan near Beijing in 1976 was only 2 months before Mao died and the subsequent opening up of China to the rest of the world after China had withdrawn into its shell during the preceding 500 years. Or how in the first place, it was a lightning strike that razed the Emperor’s Imperial Palace to the ground and under this ominous sign that the mandate of heaven was on shaky ground, China closed doors on the world.

I could talk more about how the political pettiness of Tibet seems years away already when more than 50 000 have died and many took their last gasps beneath building rubble. How even the unstoppable Olympic Flame will be stopped in tracks for 3 days of national mourning. Or how sad it is that it needs such a huge tragedy to show the world that maybe China’s Communist Leadership is not quite the bumbling, emotionless human rights disaster that seems to always crop up in the last paragraph of most foreign articles on China like a big ‘but’ at the end of an argument.

I could say more about how the earthquake was so powerful that my wife and most of Shanghai’s financial district so many thousands of miles away had to be evacuated as the long waves from the Sichuan epicenter swayed the huge concrete forests to dizziness. Or about a fellow South African student who slept outside in the rain for days in Chengdu as 140 aftershocks of level 4 or more pummeled the buildings that remained defiant to gravity.

Standing on my balcony yesterday with all these thoughts flowing through my head, a national 3 minutes of mourning kicked off at 2:28pm to commemorate the dead and give channel for a national outpouring of unified grief. Only the silence was not silence as people had been encouraged to sound every car horn and air raid siren in the country. It reminded me how Chinese people like to set off loud firecrackers to chase the evil spirits away and bring luck to new businesses, new years and new homes.

In my case, every single barge that littered the Huangpu River was simultaneously sounding their fog horns in what was one of the loudest noises I have ever come across. The silence was truly deafening for me and a couple of Chinese people that scrambled to the river to pay their tributes.