The University

As of this morning, the official death toll from the earthquake in Sichuan stands at 51,151 with 29,328 still missing. This exceeds my estimate from last Tuesday afternoon when I replied to Dian that fifty thousand people were probably dead given the population of the area. Her English is better than my Chinese but she didn't quite understand what I was saying. She shook her head, "Twenty-two thousand people died." "There will be more," I said. There wasn't much else to say.
Red Cross workers and student organizations were quick to take up collections around the city although very little of daily life has been affected here. Sichuan isn't quite on the other side of the moon, but you can see from the chart below how far the truck o' love has to travel to get there.



The newspapers and TV stations are giving the disaster as much coverage as possible. Unlike Katrina there aren't any political crucifixions lined up (for the moment) and instead the government and its press are consistent in calls for unity, courage, generosity and so forth. In its defense the federal government acted very quickly and the first rescue teams were organized in something like the first half hour. And they've been doing more than a heckuva job. The news photo that I wanted to find a copy of was of an EMT worker breast feeding an orphaned infant in a crowded medical tent. These guys go all out.

There doesn't appear to be much discussion as to whether these buildings were up to proper specifications or how the slaughter might have been assuaged. There is still no designated 'earthquake season' that the Red Cross needs to be aware of, so it would seem that not only is the Party off the hook, but they can get a huge dose of global sympathy after the nasty torch relay and arms dealing spats of the past few months. I can't really tell since at the moment L.A. Times is timing out. Eighty thousand people is a small number when talking about Asia and even the Asians know it.

On Monday afternoon horns blared throughout the city at the appointed grieving time. Like the other students I rang my bicycle bell.

Apologies for the lack of specific information but I do feel almost cut off here, though it's indeed a pleasant place to be cut off. Last Tuesday I got a better idea of where I was. I was still heavily jet lagged so I went back to my room early in the afternoon and and didn't wake up until 10 pm. My professor I had met with briefly but he would be in Beijing till the end of the week and the lab was still under construction. Refusing to spend the night in my room after that grueling 15 hour flight I studied my guide book. There was an internet cafe and a metro stop not far from the campus. All I had to do was go out the east gate and head south for a couple blocks. If I got lost it was no big deal, I would just keep the campus and the highway to the north of me.

So I set off with my subway map and walked east for at least ten minutes before I got to the edge of campus and crossed the highway. The road was completely deserted, as in there was no sign of people much less a metro stop. The campus though was on the edge of my admittedly zoomed out map so perhaps if I kept walking east I would find something. About half a mile later a corporate park appeared on my right. It was on the other side of a canal and the only sounds in the night were the croaks of either frogs, marshbirds or some unpleasantly sized insects. I couldn't make out their shapes as I crossed over the culvert.

Luring me further into the corporate park were the signs on the buildings. I had wandered into the Chinese offices of Microsoft and Intel. Eventually I came to the night watch at a parking gate and decided to roll the dice. He didn't speak any English but I was hoping he could at least point me in a direction or reference the road I'd just walked down. I showed him my subway map where I circled Hongqiao Lu Station. He was eager to assist but I understood absolutely nothing of what he said.

As I was turning away, a cab pulled up to the gate, perhaps the third car I'd seen in the past forty minutes. The driver got out along with the passenger and I waited for him to finish peeing in the bushes before I approached him with my map. After a few minutes miming and using my four dozen word vocabulary in the most excruciatingly creative ways possible I just got in the passenger seat. Any place he would take me would be fine as long as it was *somewhere*. We began driving north.

It was clear by then that I was not on the map at all. SJTU had two campuses, I remembered, and no one had really informed me as to which I'd be staying at. At least I was being driven towards the downtown area where things might be open. After twenty kilometers I started getting very concerned and tried asking the driver to stop. He obliged in the middle of an exit ramp.

The problem with Shanghai traffic is neither the volume of cars nor the layout of the streets. Drivers jostle with each other like high schoolers in a crowded hallway and it's perfectly acceptable to move over the double yellow into oncoming traffic if you need to pass or if someone encroaches from your blind spot. My driver's tone though was very reassuring and looking around I recognized some features from my map. I relented and he drove the rest of the way into downtown.

I walked toward a commercial square and found I'd missed the last train at 11:15. The McDonald's though were open 24 hours so I went in and ordered McNuggets since I didn't know how to say "Hold the mayo."

Long long story short I made it back to SJTU, south campus a little after nine the next morning. All my photos may come to a Picassa album near you but here are a few in the meantime, unfortunately not compressed for bandwidth. As near as I can tell I'm the only American student here. There are some Russians and Malays in my dorm but we rarely encounter each other. Besides them I've glimpsed two other whites and a couple Nubian women. Someone I met in the cafeteria mentioned that there was an American accounting professor but he may have retired. Until this past weekend it seemed I could be the only American outside of downtown but I ran into one randomly during a bank run. An English teacher at a local high school who offered to guide me around. I'll take him up on it.