The flags are out again, this time at half staff. The Chinese government declared three days of mourning for the victims of the Sichuan Earthquake disaster. There are Big Character signs (these are signs posted around China usually in red and white used to spread propaganda messages) in black and white out everywhere. I can recognize the characters for Sichuan, but not much else.
Mourning in China includes more than just raising flags half-way. The government has forbidden entertainment, parties, or general merriment out of respect for the victims. I'm not exactly sure how I feel about this. In one regard, life goes on. There's nothing we can do (the government has also forbidden volunteers from going to Sichuan) except donate money, and that seems a little risky. On the other hand, it is a terrible, terrible disaster, and it should only follow that some sort of sadness should be felt.
But, I guess, I'm too Western for these Chinese ideals. My three days of mourning after Katrina were spent in a house with no water, electricity, phones, or any modern convenience. I would have been highly disappointed if the rest of the country had choosen to live without happiness for those three days as well just because I had to. I think watching the news reports about what was happening was frustrating enough to be mourning.
And during these three days of mourning in China, I've given my students a rather lighthearted assignment. After a boring vocabulary lesson (one of the words was soap opera), I asked them to plan a soap opera to present to the class. Chinese young people have a very hard time interacting with the opposite sex, so I thought it would be entertaining to see how they worked it out.
In one of my classes, one of my students (whose family lives in Sichuan) suggested that this assignment was inappropriate. He said that it fell into the category of entertainment and shouldn't be done during these three days. I told him that it was just a class assignment. But he almost had tears in his eyes as I asked about his family, so I decided to take a vote. Most students didn't think it was inappropriate, so we went on. I told him his group could do something serious; it didn't have to be funny.
What they did...I believe definitely falls in the category of "inappropriate", but I clapped when it was over.
He and his group mates arranged themselves on and under desks with their things piled on top of them and their glasses askew. They played a somber music track from one of their cell phones. One student read a message about remembering the vicitms in a very Southern Baptist preacher sort of way.
The rest of the class was almost as shocked as I was. I guess it was their way of avoiding entertainment and showing they care about Sichuan. While trying to prove that everyone else doesn't.
