Sichuan Down
June 2, 2008
My mother grew up in Chengdu, and she just got word that everybody she knows there was fine, as was the Microsoft office there. Less lucky are the 60,000 to 80,000 dead and 5 million homeless. The 1976 Tangshan earthquake was bigger with 250,000 to 655,000 dead, but the worst quake in recorded history was way back in 1556 China when 830,000 were killed. A shake map showed a red bar about 150 miles, or a three-hour drive, long.
Myanmar is predicted to have lost just as many people in a nation of just 55 million. Its annual defense budget of 7 billion dollars pays for what has been called the toughest, most effective light infantry jungle force in Southeast Asia. That evidently doesn’t leave much for stocking up on emergency supplies other than setting up a few tents for U.N. observers. They’ve finally let up on allowing civilian aid, but military ships are still verboten. Admittedly, our one C-130 prop transport sent to Myanmar and a bigger C-17 wide-body sent to China were pretty much symbolic.
I picked up a free Chinese paper with an arresting picture of children’s shoes sticking out of the rubble. “Don’t cut off my legs; I’d rather die,” the headline read. NBC showed students ducking under desks as everything shook to the floor, and the people surrounded by dust as buildings fell around them. Web photos showed rows of blue tents, and workers putting up a small city of prefab buildings with solid white walls being assembled that FEMA doesn’t have. Everybody the government didn’t reach has to buy tents, which are in short supply. Interesting that we Americans aren’t told to pack a tent in our emergency kits.
Out of a population of about 9,000, only 2,300, or one in four, survived in Yingxiu. The county seat of Beichuan will be abandoned — 600 were rescued, but 5,000 died in a town of 30,000. Moved in the 1950s to escape earthquakes, the valley still fell in on the town, with one picture of a narrow leaning apartment building of Beichuan standing out among its fallen neighbors.
For all we’ve heard about Chinese education, Northwest Asian Weekly had a story by Cole Potter who visited Chinese schools in Xi’an that would cost $30,000 to rebuild and are falling apart so badly that they are in danger of falling down just standing still. Entire generations of students were wiped out in some schools, hit especially hard with the one-child policy so many Americans admire.
Other memorable pictures include a car with a big rock on its hood, air bag deployed, and a man carrying what looks like a refrigerator on his back. A man holds his child killed in the quake, blood showing through the blanket as workers could only bandage up his head before he died. Even a conservative column on Town Hall asked for aid for China, as were Chinese in green vests in downtown Seattle across from the Tibet protesters. We’re giving through General Electric, which is matching donations.
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Dear Arthur Hu:
Sometimes I’m totally flummoxed when it comes to addressing you OR your “columns” or even online “posts.”
But the above more than justifies this acknowledgment of common compassion and common decency.
As a longtime-Californ second/third-generation American citizen of “Chinese” descent, who chooses to put his few “discreeionary” “cents,” as in tens of “mills,” into more personal contributions, and as one who believes that “charity” is far too frequently siphoned off by the organizations thereof and that, in the end, we must each, in fact and in principle, rely on “ourselvesl.”
Which is not to say that the thousands of troops and hundreds of engineers and tens of thousands of neighbors and peers were any less than good and savior samaritans.
I find the reported “millions,” of dollars that is, raised on this Pacific Rim coast and in New York environs more or less “pitiful,” as in inadequate.
That said, the two cargo planes you mention, one apiece for Sichuan and the Irrawaddy delta victims, are even more cynical, especially since they carry with them the stigma of politization.
The “Western” “media” continues to exhibit its usual ambivalent reportage, leaning now to on-site “facts” but still exhibiting egregious schadenfreude in headlines celebrating a self-confessed “cowardly schoolteacher” and/or continuing oppressions of “Tibetan” dissidents.
As a domestic dissident, I cannot in good faith, diss ANY dissident. On the other hand, who and what and why and under what circumstances?
I note, in the adjacent “column” online on this website a “moving-picture” bid for APA votes for McCain come November. Sponsors and “believers” have ponied-up the millions for such p0litical bait, which is, in fact, much more honest and understandable than the backhanded and patronizing despatch of a “military” cargo ship of “disaster” aid. Better they had flown same to the Gulf Coast, where thousands are being “evicted,” a claim FEMA claims to be soft-pedalling, from their “trailer” “homes.”
Let’s see how l0ng and how far and how efficiently the cadres own up to their obligations and promises to “their” “peoples.” So far, they’re making “Brownie” and FEMA look like the incompetents and the domestic brownshirts they are at heart.
On-screen today are reported “lines” of fellow citizens queuing up for “food.” And the causative “disaster” is that of an administration and government gone mad on a putative “war” and totally impotent in beginning to address the root and the nave of this harvest of dust and dominion.
My pennies wouldn’t feed a hungry child for a week?
But what would the trillion, two?, already flushed down the corrupt and obscene theoneocon channels of bomb and kill and maim and destroy matter here?
Maybe at least a half-assed “new deal,” lower-case, for America and Americans, rather than for Cheney/Bush, Blackwater, Pentagon generals, “indepent contractors” and the rest of that crowd of mindless pirates and cutthroats.
Today, Counterpunch reprints a Uri Avnery column from Tel Aviv, wherein he gives further evidence as to the simple and saddening fact that the Israeli powermongers are one and the same.
Money, honey.
It all boils down to dollars, feeble as they are becoming, and the lack of common sense on the part of their valuation by one and all.
Whether or not the renmenbi is pegged in proper valuation to dollar/pound/euro or peso? matters little if anything to the five-million displaced in Sichuan.
It is good to know that the million-and-a-half “orphans” thereof will be snapped up, eagerly, by doting adoptive parents, or so one hopes.
For the rest, how the cadres continue to address the implacable consequences of a region-wide 7.9 “temblor” remains to be seen. But, on the record and evidence thus far, they are doing MORE than honorably, details and headlines aside.
But the prognosis for thee rest of us is grim, especially here in these continuingly benighted states of Amurrika, wherein spin-and-tell counts for more than “facts” on “the ground,” forget the “street.”
Does ANYone truly believe that the electorate will go for four more years of the precening eight? Even modified and adulterated, as the McCain campaign is veering a mite “left.” Note well too that Billary continues a mite “right” of McCain when it comes to “nukings.”
Today, a Euro “summit” disinvited two participants, Mugabe and Ahmadinejad, to a formal “dinner.” How about such “manners”? Even Oscar Wilde’s dowagers in their drawing-rooms admitted their lessers.
Well, at least Latin America is evincing signs of shedding their status as “banana republics,” and about time, Colombia notwithstanding. Check with James Petras, who knows.
As for silly sallys, with or without racist ex-hubbies, who gives a flying-you-know-what-at-a-rolling-donut?
Not moi. Noe should you.
What we all should continue to care about is mutual respect, which COULD lead to mutual understanding, whence could issue the millennial UTOPIA of a global world of “nations” united under a just and fair rule of law and humanity.
But, the sine qua non is the recognition of, the rejection of, AND the disarming of the inter- and intra-national oligarchies who continue to rule and oppress and make a mockery of the possiblities of human dignity and decency AND achievement.
Frank Eng
P.S.: So your mom is from Chengdu? Cheng is “city,” no? And “du” is “capital,” right? An ancient and historic enclave in the annals of the Central Flowery Kingdom.
That makes you at least “half” “Chinese.”
I gather, then, that your dad is “Vietnamese”?
In which case, I refer you to today’s AsianWeek piece on the fracturing of the Viet diaspora in San Jose yet, and not even in that “Little Saigon” of South L.A., where overmacho types overrun newspaper offices and bully journalist types, like you.
Ah, Art, we have more in common than we realize. Where we differ is in the perceptions. And, more to the point, in the “evaluiations.”
My father was “uneducated,” as in “lettered,” but he was, by character and by right, a true “gentilhomme” for all time, a generous and a kindly man. I would gladly lay down my life for him to this day, just as he did for his mother and family and clan and peers in HIS day. Can you think of a more worthy progenitor? I can’t.
As for honors and celebrity and wealth and perks, how much can you eat, or wear, or show off?
No, as I challenged In-Chul, the ultimate test is simple, a matter of individual to individual — simple RESPECT.
If respect is there, then communication and dialog can ensue, out of which understanding MUST arise.
And, if one understands, then one will NEVER raise a hand against another. least of all those defenseless and those in need.
I repeat: I would rather be “hated” than “ignored,” and ignored rather than “patronized.”
So, troll not these waters for irresolute “votes,” at the very least, address us as EQUALS, and not as suppliants and wannabes and arriviste oligarchs.
Man Frank, I got a headache just reading through your response. My father was from Hupei, I am married to a Chinese from Saigon, er, whatever. At least the Bush administration sent something over there, I hadn’t heard anything from Obama the Messiah about the twin disasters other than “we need change”, including evidently a change of church, man did you see that Father Pflegler guy? This guy does a perfect impression of Wright down to the patting down his chest and putting a hanky to his forhead and ranting about Hillary. Hey you Democrats, you picked Obama, we Republicans will glady take those bitter churchgoing gunloving noclass whitefolk if you don’t want them. Assuming Obama, his wife and his friends don’t say anything else spectacularly stupid between now and november, he’ll be president for sure.
Dear Arthur Hu:
Now I believe I know who you are.
So, your dad’s from Hubei, which, if my errant and scant knowledge of the language remains, Hu ia “lake”? and bei, of course is “north.”
Well, may I as a “south” laker apologize to you for unwarranted assumptions. But you MUST admit that your prior posts AND columns proclaimed you South of Hainan.
Not that that matters.
Now, Art, may I rant “familiar”?, what has Uncle ever brought to Vietnam other than THREE million dead and the residue from Agent Orange, never mind those ever-paddlin’ “swiftboaters.”
Sorry, too, that I bring on migraines. Join the crowd, Art, and I will gladly send you my “baby aspirins” that seem to disagree with my disagreeable bod.
But, pleased, no, make that “happy,” “deligjhted” even, that you, finally acknowledge the obvious outcome come November, bar idiocies and murder.
C’mon, Art, face it. Republicans are the Nguyen Cao-kys of today’s America, the Chiangs and the Liebermans and Lieberman-Lites, and I DO mean Billary.
Frank Eng
P.S.: And I still wish you well on a seat next to your Malkin peer, albeit I hope you will be able to discern the fact from the fictions still ongoing on CNN, like the continuing mantras on “electability,” forget “race” and “religion” for the nonce.
GANBEI, landsman, whatever you or I may posit OR claim, as in that single vote that tilts the balance?
Dear Arthur Hu:
Now I believe I know who you are.
So, your dad’s from Hubei, which, if my errant and scant knowledge of the language remains, Hu ia “lake”? and bei, of course is “north.”
Well, may I as a “south” laker apologize to you for unwarranted assumptions. But you MUST admit that your prior posts AND columns proclaimed you South of Hainan.
Not that that matters.
Now, Art, may I rant “familiar”?, what has Uncle ever brought to Vietnam other than THREE million dead and the residue from Agent Orange, never mind those ever-paddlin’ “swiftboaters.”
Sorry, too, that I bring on migraines. Join the crowd, Art, and I will gladly send you my “baby aspirins” that seem to disagree with my disagreeable bod.
But, pleased, no, make that “happy,” “deligjhted” even, that you, finally acknowledge the obvious outcome come November, bar idiocies and murder.
C’mon, Art, face it. Republicans are the Nguyen Cao-kys of today’s America, the Chiangs and the Liebermans and Lieberman-Lites, and I DO mean Billary.
Frank Eng
P.S.: And I still wish you well on a seat next to your Malkin peer, albeit I hope you will be able to discern the fact from the fictions still ongoing on CNN, like the continuing mantras on “electability,” forget “race” and “religion” for the nonce.
GANBEI, landsman, whatever you or I may posit OR claim, as in that single vote that tilts the balance?