Hounds and Goldfish

The incredibly suave goldfish vendor parks
his scooter-trailer on Luxiying exactly once
a moon. He likes to cross his legs and smoke
cigarettes and look really, really cool.

In Nanjing, leashes are unheard of, except for cats, oddly enough.

Dogs trot down the sidewalks without any owner in sight, cats dart in and out of bushes by the road side, and on a stroll down any side street you can buy yourself a turtle on a string, a goldfish from a man on a scooter, a rabbit in-a-cage-on-a-stick or a small kitten in a plastic bag (though I think that one was for free).

Earlier tonight, I saw a weasel or a ferret or something slinky like that dash into some bushes, and even as I write this, I can hear at least three cats fighting or mating or both.

The Magic Turtle Man and His Turtle. I met this wizard
one smoggy day in November while I was walking to work,
thinking about ways to quit my job without actually seeming like
I was quitting. The Magic Turtle Man made me realize that
I could quit anytime I wanted and sell turtles instead. 

The turtle crawled toward me and hissed as I approached. It seemed to me like a great, prehistoric reptilian predator was trapped inside that little soft-shelled turtle body. Just look at those eyes...

This is the Hound of Luxiying, named so because I've only seen it on my street, Luxiying Lu, but
where he lives or who his owners are still remains a mystery.
Some kind of shaggy-haired Italian Race Hound, he can be seen running down Luxiying
faster than any electric scooter known to man. I often see him bounding down the street from a distance
and think that there is some kind of prehistoric, siberian mega-fauna-alpha-predator
on the loose. But then I realize its just the Luxiying Hound, one of the friendliest dogs I've met. 

Have you ever seen a cat on a leash? This is the third or fourth cat
I know that is regularly kept on a leash in Nanjing. I'm not sure if this qualifies as
abuse or not, but it seems like a pretty normal practice
and I'm sure its owners wouldn't tie him up
if they didn't love him. A metaphor for all relationships, I suppose.
(I.E. "The Chain" by Fleetwood Mac.)

And of course, the numerous strays around Xuanwu lake, included here to
round off this visual menagerie.

Smog in China

The smog in Nanjing can get pretty bad and it is as unpredictable as the weather. It has been the most depressing thing about China that I've seen so far. It is not so bad on windy days, and cold weather seems to dampen it somehow, but when its wet and warm it gets so thick the visibility is less than a kilometer. 

Now you see it...

...Now you don't.

How often is it this smoggy? Not very often; but it is usually a little smoggy, and when I say a little smoggy, I mean smoggy enough to shut down any city in the USA and start a riot. Last month there was a thick spell of smog for about ten days; I don't think I saw a blue sky for two weeks, and it wasn't cloudy or anything, the sky was just full of burnt particulate matter.

There's a lot of coughing going on in China. I know several people here who have asthma whereas in the States I didn't know anyone else who had it, save one. Some people wear respirators and I've thought about getting one myself, but I already stick out too much for comfort. 

When I was in college, all the talk about environmental ethics and sustainability seemed like hype to me or some kind of trend. But now that I've lived in a place with a serious pollution problem (you've got to boil the water before you drink it, as well), and felt that trapped, suffocating feeling smog tends to inspire, I think differently. 

If you want a nice description of what smog is and what it does to your health, look up "PM 2.5" on Wikipedia.

Xuanwu Lake

I found an apartment near Xuanwu lake and really like being so close to it. Whenever I've got time and its not too smoggy out I spend a couple hours walking around it. There are some places where there are very few people, which is something very special indeed in Nanjing.

For sixty yuan (ten dollars) you can rent
a small electric boat for an hour and go for a ride

The plaque read: "Water Goddess teasing naive boys"
or something like that.

There's got to be over a hundred stray cats around
the park; they don't care to be approached unless
you've got food, though. Many of them are very fat
from all the food people give them. I think several people
have made a ritual out of feeding them.

There's an incredibly long city wall which was built in the 11th century that surrounds the city and the Western shore of the lake. You can access the top and walk along all thirty kilometers of it.

The Zhifeng Tower was built by the same firm who did the Sears tower in Chicago.

First Day in China

From my journal:

10-6-14, 14:00, Li Mano Hotel, Nanjing. Cool breeze mixed with dense smog. Horns incessant outside my hotel window. People pumping through the streets like blood in the arteries of some big angry giant...

---Thoughts today about environmental ethics, individualism, capitalism, schizophrenia and how awkward I look in the new leather shoes I've got to wear to work. People grinding together, a friction and a heat and a noticeable smoke hanging above them all. The shopkeepers at 7 am ready with breakfast, to sell you cigarettes or grind down an awkward screw on your custom-fit electric scooter. Machine parts, wires, bean curds and rice. Laundry looming above form apartment windows like flags. 

Camaraderie at the little tables placed outside shops, old men laughing and pouring tea- there's something inspiring about an old person laughing. 

Sure it feels strange to have so many eyes on me when I walk down the street; sure I haven't seen or heard anything but Chinese since I landed; sure its smoggy, crowded, loud, dirty and unintelligible but I am having the time of my life. Its sort of fun trying to leaf through my Survival Chinese book and trying to interact with the people around me.

There's a firewall imposed on all internet access by the PRC and it makes it terribly difficult to access my email and impossible to access Facebook. Media suppression- a creative way to control a population- very Orwellian. I wonder if 1984 is available at the bookstore- I doubt it. 

Shanghai New Years Stampede

1-01-15, 00:01, Shanghai: 35 Killed, 45 injured in Stampede. Millions Disappointed by Curious Lack of Fireworks in this New Year’s Celebration.

Last night the New Years Celebration in Shanghai got out of control. Endless waves of people flowed down Nanjing East towards the already packed riverfront thirty minutes before midnight. I was a part of that crowd.

A collective cry sounded as we drew closer and people began to run. It was a sort of battle cry, ecstasy mixed with fear--- I wondered later who could have started it, but it was impossible to tell. It came from nowhere and everywhere and maybe inside your own head all at once--- it was easy to get excited and start running along. I tried to stick to the sidewalks, but as in a flash flood, I fell in from the banks.

View from The Bund Riverfront in afternoon of 12-31-14

We rushed ahead euphoric, totally drawn in, pulled by the sight of the beautiful Pearl Tower looming ahead between the buildings, pulsing with red, purple, yellow and green lights, calling us onwards and upwards, the thing itself a 100% genuine deity (whose nature we would soon discover) that drew us in like lint to a magnet, powder up a straw.

Though it felt like we were going towards some indescribable joy or pleasure, I thought that this was surely a sign of some malignant crowd mentality and that this infectious excitement could turn deadly.

At a music festival in Michigan in 2008, thousands protested on the final night when the operators closed down the gated stage area and began pushing people out. Many stayed behind dancing, singing and drumming on one of the many metal sculptures installed near the entrance/exit of the stage area. Obviously anticipating this, a dozen or so mounted policemen formed a line and began slowly pushing them back. The crowd, torn against fighting the police and running, were soon tripping over one another and falling down under the approaching hooves of the horses, some of which began rearing.

A conscientious, heroic shirtless man with dreadlocks began pushing everyone back violently, yelling that it wasn’t worth it and to get out.  Everyone left and nobody seemed injured.

That was at a music festival of a few hundred thousand- Shanghai is the most populated city in the world, a city of over 25 million, and on New Years, many people came from Nanjing, Hangzhou, and Hefei to see the legendary fireworks display, which, as I’ve said, never occurred.

So there we were, perhaps a million or more near the water-front, infected by the excitement, eyes wide open and mouths set into the lock-jaw smiles of adrenaline, rushing towards the Pearl Tower up ahead. We were running closer and closer together, and soon there was pressure from behind and we began pushing those in front of us just to keep standing. When you are caught in a mob situation such as this, there really is no way out- you become the mob, whether you want to or not, merely by being pushed, and so, falling upon the person in front of you and becoming a pusher yourself. Domino effect, and all that. 

Soon we hit a brick wall of people. We could see the Oriental Pearl Tower up ahead clearly, and the mega-tall Shanghai Tower rose up on the buildings to our right like the coolest vinyl siding of all time, pulsing at the corner of our vision and if you moved the person in front of you a little to the right you could see the whole damn thing, third tallest building in the world pulsing lights up and down like it was god’s yo-yo or something. 

We looked up and over the heads of the crowd, thousands of arms up, camera phones out. The pressure from behind mounted and I pushed forward to stay standing; everyone began pushing or pulling on everyone else.

The countdown on the tower started at thirty. It looked like the digits on the digital watch I wore in sixth grade. A great cry rippled throughout the crowd; the famous fireworks display would soon come. At ten, the cry rose and became intermittent- Chinese and English mixed together so that you couldn’t tell the crowd was saying “Ten” or “Shi”. At "three" the cry peaked and plateaued across "two" and "one" and at “Happy New Year!” (which was in English, up on the Oriental Tower), we issued forth the obligatory statement or greeting or slogan or whatever it is, and braced ourselves for the legendary firework spectacle to answer us with its dazzling lights, endless thunder and heat.

We waited.

And waited.

It still hadn't sunk in when a police man began gently shoving us back, blowing a whistle and yelling “Meo la!” (negative of “have"). Even when a sort of eddy of people flowed back and out, we still refused to believe that the fireworks would not come. 

The Crowd Turns Back

It began to finally dawn on us when a policeman, who looked like he had been at it for well over an hour, began pushing and screaming at people like he was about to smash in everyone’s map if they didn’t move out of the way and let the ambulance through. 

Some other policemen approached and began pushing the crowd back and out. The crowd turned back and shuffled away. No fireworks this year.

Some stayed, ourselves included: I wanted to let the crowd thin out a little before we left, but I underestimated how thick the crowd was, because we waited about a half hour before it seemed the crowd was less a big fleshy object and more of a collection of individuals.

The ambulance returned, driving slowly behind the people, blaring its siren. It passed by us and I could see that in the back of it, which was lit up for all to see, a paramedic was giving some aggressive-type CPR to someone. He pumped at his chest so hard it looked like he would break his ribs.

Behind the ambulance a group of people ran with their camera phones out Princess-Diana-style, filming the paramedic trying to keep the vital organs of someone who was clinically dead from shutting down entirely. Many of them still had their extreme-sport-euphoria faces on. I lost what was left of my excitement, it was literally just sucked out of me at the sight- I looked at my friend, Jerry, and informed him of what was happening:

“That guy in the ambulance was dead. He was getting CPR. Did you see the people running behind with the camera phones? Do people suck, or what?”

And then someone tossed up a huge inflated ball and the crowd bounced that around for a while.

The Shanghai Oriental Pearl Tower, the Moloch of Towers

We stayed a while longer and then left. We found ourselves further up the street in the same situation as an hour before, packed in, pushing and pulling--- this time, not towards some exciting thing, but away from something dreadful, which is a totally different feeling. Like being trapped, and all that.

A woman shrieked from somewhere in the crowd.  Cars like little islands with people stranded inside. A man on a gas-powered scooter got his accelerator stuck and he yelled (whoa, whoa-oh, Whoa-ohh! WHOA-OHHH!!!!) as he crashed into the crowd to our left. He regained control and it seemed like no-one was hurt. A European looking guy (French, maybe) without a shirt and what looked like a speedo was dancing out the sun-roof of one of the stalled vehicles to our cheers.

We shuffled on for another twenty minutes before we could actually walk. We reached a road which had vehicle traffic and Jerry tried to hail a cab. I said there was no hope and that we would be walking home that night. We ended up walking many miles before we reached our hotel. Jerry dashed across the road to hail a cab and nearly caused a three-car pile-up; I peed in a dark alley. We finally returned at three in the morning, still buzzed from the excitement and the cappuccinos we drank earlier in the night which is my idea, these days, of a real crazy time.

A "No Fireworks" Sign in Nanjing. These signs
went up everywhere about a week before New Years.

I found several pimp’s business cards for 24/7 sex services on the floor of my room which someone, or several people, must have slipped under the door. I smoked two cigarettes and got into bed, but didn’t fall asleep for at least another hour.

When I awoke, I saw that my mother had tried to call me from the states and that she had sent me a text message telling me that 35 people were killed and 45 were injured in a stampede in Shanghai last night. It was on the USA’s national news headlines, and I guess it was known internationally as well. The whole world knows what happened by now.

Apparently someone had started throwing US dollars down from a building off the Bund, which started a sort of fatal stampede. People rushed for the money and met their death. A profound metaphor for something, probably.


(This article was written from my own perspective without consulting any outside media sources. Whether the Stampede was started by a flurry of money/ coupons, which the government denied, or by the incoming rush of people running to the already packed river front is, as far as I can tell, still a matter of opinion. A friend told me tonight, however, that the fireworks and light show were cancelled once the stampede started--- I thought that may have been the case but was not sure at the time, for fireworks were banned in Nanjing this New Years, supposedly because of the pollution they cause, and many are saying that they were banned in Shanghai, as well. I am not sure what to believe and nobody seems to have any clear answers. It is a fact that fireworks were banned in Nanjing for the New Year celebration- I think that the excuse of pollution is a poor, careless lie.)