Slouching toward Wherever the Sun Shines

‘Sunshine cleaning’, a movie I watched years ago, presented stories about different women who divorced and tried to restore their savaged lives back to normal with positive thinking and challenge taking traits, and its characters’ willingness to endure and change. For most of us, life may be seen as living with challenges that need to be overcome, and we manage and get through. At that point, every person may be seen as a sort of hero.

the weather, in the Northern Hemisphere is getting much warmer and the sun much brighter and shiner, so shine I feel enlightened, physically. Do you love summer time? Answers may vary but I thought, most people may not dislike sunny days. Sunshine is bright, clean, and loving, and also evokes positive feelings. Looking on the windowsill in my room, full of potted greenies and flowers, which are blossoming progressively like burning kindles. Glistening lights are basking in my room, making it finer and softer. I feel happier staying in sunlit room maybe because that gives people a warmer imagination for our future lives, and strength to overcome the hardships we face.

I’ve always remembered that summer my father took me a tour outside of a elementary school when I was six-year old. His belly bulged and he wore a dark-red T-shirt. Leading the way to that school, on the trail outside the school fence, he turned his face back, facing me, slightly smiled and raised his forearm pointing towards the front-door of the school, saying that he prepared to let me study at that school. I felt his pride while he talking, saw swarms of pupils playing on the playground, crazily, enchantingly. That was summer; the small path we walked outside the school was surrounded by walls of burning ivies and greens. That was an afternoon, the most clear and exhausting one in my memory. “Dad.” I remembered saying and he answered slowly, softly and gently. “That’s a good school.” He said.

After a fierce argument between my parents, my mother had temporarily taken me back to her hometown that year so I didn’t go to that school. Every September when the school year began, I remembered that walk with my father, his gentle tone with his will to enroll me to that school. I didn’t forget though he had never mention that again. But I know as long as summer continues to come I won’t forget that summer when he walked with me beside that school, with water-clean light.

After graduating from university, I had tenanted with one of my schoolmates, in an apartment near a lake in Guanggu, a newly constructed borough in the city of Wuhan. While in university, roommates were eager to find jobs to earn money. “Whatever the job is, I will do; and where there is a job, there is hope.” A roommate joked saying. But if one said he or she doesn’t want to find some work to do then, that won’t be true. They need money to go to restaurants, to buy extra outfits to increase their attractiveness and to show their power. Most of the students I encountered then wanted to work, to improve their living standards.

So hurry was I to find a work to do then that I was lost. I had met a friend, Bee who in his middle thirties, was working as freelance. In his age with an unstable working position, life was fragile and depending on luck. Though getting days by, he loved outings in mountainsides and thus invited me to go outside biking.

We decided to go to Jiangxia, a mountainous suburb in Wuhan, to have our afternoons pasted. We bought transit tickets and rented bikes to go into the forest in the mountain. There were trees and the sun shining sharply, making us sweating like mad. But he loved biking and often turned his face back to me encouraging me to compete with him on the mountain path on which we biked. There were raspberry bushes, whose twigs were full of thrones. Though unwashed, he picked those berries and ate happily, smiling to me. That was summer; there was sunlight. I knew life could be hard. He struggled to find a well-payed job to get him being able to stay in Wuhan. He said he had never thought about buying house in Wuhan, so expensive that he said he would never bother considering. “Do you know where can a person find a well payed job?” He had asked me. Struggling to make my ends meet, I said I didn’t know either. While sitting on the bench in the neighborhood where then I resided, I saw his face darkened, though that was a bright afternoon and the sun was near setting.

He said he always loved days we spent on biking together in Jiangxia’s mountainside because he felt he was alive by our energetic defiance towards money. Though we were both not living high-standardly, we felt happy and that was summer.

There is the light and it has come into my room.

Healing and Recovery in a Community Hit by the Pandemic

After social-distancing measures lifted, cities in Hubei province aim to reopen local businesses. But could the economy of Hubei, which is heavily relying on private sector’s growth to create jobs, be restarting smoothly? In Tome Loulin’s observation in Qianjiang, a small city in Hubei province, there are some silver-linings in a pandemic-ravaged city aiming to reopen its economy.

It has lightly rained hours ago in Qianjiang, a small city in the central China province of Hubei, but now the rain has stopped and the sky darkened with evening breezes flowing through sidewalks. With such an opaque and humid weather condition, streets in the city have been half filled by cars.

Businesses that reopened have mostly been eateries, fruit shops and groceries. Just half past seven, an eatery mainly serving Zhájiàngmiàn and Hot peanut-jammed noodle, or Règānmiàn, which first originated from the city of Wuhan, had just closed its daily service; the owner of the shop, a short-haired young man wearing a purple apron shut the door off; his face seemed emotionless. In ‘the Crayfish Street of Qianjiang’—a nearby road sign suggested—a local attraction known for its sophisticated crayfish cuisine, diners used to be waiting before the entrances of certain local eateries serving crayfish on the street for their turns to dine inside, not this time, owing to the stringent travel restrictions to prevent a second wave of the outbreak. There was only a smattering of customers eating inside eateries which remained all but deserted, bustling no more.

China’s economy has shrunk 6.8 per cent in the first three months of the year compared with a year ago for the first time since 1976, according to the New York Times. “Many people were only buying necessities these days” an interviewee in Beijing said to the Times in the same report. The recessive atmosphere could be obviously felt among pedestrians on the streets who pass roads by without any emotion; only car-horns and ambulance sirens could be heard. The city turned quiet.

“Damned, I forgot to take my mask.” A stroller passing me by and turning back to his store to pick his mask mouthed that loudly to himself. People seemed much restrained emotionally since only their eyes could be seen while walking on the streets.

There were signs of returning to normal. A patron sitting before a dining table in a restaurant, Shāxiànxiaochī, eats his helping while looking on his mobile phone concentratedly; the chef, also the owner of the restaurant, a lady seemingly in her late fifties, with her face mask sliding down to her jaw and hanging on her ears, was wiping her hands clean with a dishcloth. The restaurant brightly lit seemed clean and cozy. Anyhow, people got to eat and they may find their consolation from food, especially at such a cold spring night that nothing could be much wormer than eating a noodle with localized flavor.

A hospital where triage doctors wear hazardous material suit sitting inside on the Crayfish street in the city of Qianjiang. by Tome Loulin

As the pandemic interrupted global supply chain, some local businesses aiming overseas markets in Hubei struggled to resume production. A manager of a lotus root plant in Jianglin, a county in Hubei province, said that his company has not shipped its lotus root products to the customers in the US for nearly a week due to an ongoing ban put by the US, Canada and other countries on such products, adding that this year is the most difficult one since the founding of his plant in 2015, according to China Daily

Mr. Xiao, owner of a barbershop in Wuhan said his shop has only served 4 patrons for hair styling from April 8th till now and felt pressured under expenditure on rent but relieved since the landowner of his shop exempted his rent for one month. Though customers were drastically reduced, Xiao feels optimistic about future improvement on profit of his barber shop, according to Hubei Daily.

In a hospital on the Crayfish street, a triage nurse still wore a hazmat suit sitting behind the reception desk; only emergency room was opened for patients. On the opposite of the hospital was a local restaurant, known for its sought-after crayfish dish, and whose signs shone vividly at the night of Qianjiang presented a rare prosperous vision of economic recovery in the future at this currently deserted street.

In a newly opened snack shop near the ‘Crayfish Street’ months ago, the cashier inside sat on a chair, motionless, concentrated on his mobile phone and whose shop lit darkly instead.


References:

1China’s economy shrinks, ending a nearly half-century of growth by Keith Bradsher.—The New York Times, April 16, 2020.

2Falling demands overseas hit lotus root industry in Hubei—China Daily, April, 20, 2020

3Barber customer traffic 30 percent recovered.—Hubei Daily