The Earth is Quaking

The death toll is rising. Every day higher estimates come in. Cities I've never even heard of with hundreds of thousands of people have been destroyed, with no way for help to get in.

How can I write about anything else, how can I stop to think of families who lost their only child, who have worked their entire lives for this one being of their love, crushed? Mercy.

I felt the earthquake here in Beijing. Eating lunch, I thought I was dizzy, about to pass out and then realized no one else was talking either, and the buildings next to ours was swaying. So far away from the epicenter and I was still scared.

I once sent a friend an email, asking why I hadn't gotten an update in a while and the reply said something like, Well, I do the best I can and then I forget how to live. Sometimes, I feel this way too.

A prayer for those suffering.

I suppose it's time to split it all open. I am almost done with this "job" and "apartment," though really the combination of these two things is exactly how I'd imagine being under house arrest must feel like. Not really allowed to go anywhere or have anyone visit, but also without any thing to do, and no one to talk to. I could say more, but I won't.

The best thing to come out of my living / working here is the relationship I've developed with my Aiyi, the woman who cooks and cleans every day. Yesterday I went home with her, to her little place an hour and half by bus outside the city. Her rent is 100 yuan per month; this place is 17,000. ( $US 14 and 2,472 respectively.) I'm not saying that money is the only factor in shaping character, but Aiyi is certainly more kind, patient, and good hearted than some of the folk living here. Again, being outside the city, with common people spitting on the ground, cooking in a room much like the tree house I spent most of my time in as a child, my heart again felt full. I had a fantasy of living in that place, making compost and gardens, not speaking English or using a computer at all. With Aiyi's next door neighbor and best friend we bought vegetables, made jiaozi, (dumplings,) and talked our hearts out. (Literal translation.) After living for months in this cold apartment, I suddenly realized why I've been depressed.

Going to use the toilet (public, squat, no doors) this morning, we heard that one of the neighbor's younger sister's husbands had died from a cerebral hemorrhage. "Who knows?" said my Aiyi as we walked back to her shack next to a canal full of green water littered with garbage. Who knows? Who knows when this life will end?

I am coming back to the states sometime in June, with intentions of returning to China in the fall.