Shanghai

It was not death
For I stood up
And all the dead lie down

-E. Dickinson

Crossing the street is an exercise is navigation. This is not the navigation required by the pilot of a boat or the pedestrian in the market. No, this is an entirely different field. From the approach you relax yourself knowing that if you're going to be hit you'd rather be hit so that the impact will cause as little damage to yourself as possible. Have you ever come across those mini-articles in the Toronto Star where a baby opens a car window and bounces across the highway unhurt? It is by these that I am inspired. And you can't help but think that this is how you must be inspired. Here's why.

Every morning I cross Zhangyang Rd, an eight lane affair. Now, it's quite normal to, while accepting the green signal, walk across with a modicum of caution. You must, I dare say, do that everywhere. Here you must do it with a dose of optimism. Optimism that this time you'll make it to the other side of the road, unskimmed, whole, alive. Come, walk with me. It's Monday morning and we've just left the apartment, down the four flights of stairs, past the old bicycles in the stairway and out the metal gate. The date palms wave just a little in the breeze. At the corner I turn to you.

"Be careful when you're crossing the street".
I say it because first, I'm looking out for myself.

Our signal turns green and you step off the kerb. A scooter whizzes past, turning right. It becomes a school of fish to navigate, then it's the buses roaring wide around them, puffing grey-black. Now you've got to consider the scooters and bicycles turning left, into the same lanes as the cars turning right. In this game you're no one and the buses don't stop. Well, no one does, but they come roaring across the huge intersections at perilous angles. If they weren't about to hit you you might be concerned that they'd topple over, first. We stop, dodge right, dash ahead to the median and we're clear until we realize the walking signal is about to change so we make our sprint to the other side where I pull on your arm one lane before the sidewalk and as the light turns red a stream of cars brushes our shirts. We cross in peace and just as we step on to the other kerb a bicycle clips the back of your shoe.

I've gotten so used to the morning course that I've become bus blind. Last night death marked himself and I realized that had he pushed me an inch I would be with him - swept, crushed, pushed, pinned, broken, headless, dead.

I thought back to my first days in Shanghai. In the early morning sun the police had stopped before a beige Toyota and behind a cyclist laying on the pavement, chalk outlined. I stared.

I watched tv that night wondering whether the news would report the dead cyclist. She didn't appear, but this is, after all, a city of thirteen million people. Why should she appear? The news went on and on, an economic report, military exercise, classical music, and scenes from the Zhejiang province.

Actually, there were no reported deaths in the PRC. Not one. No murders, infanticides, rampages, suicides. Neither were there car crashes, train derailments, or planes sliding off runways. And were it not for the typhoon that made landfall south of here in Zhejiang province on Monday you'd have to believe that we weren't in for that storm either, the worst, they say, in fifty years.

So too, that brush last night would have gone unmarked save for a clip in a foreign paper of a citizen stepping rashly before a bus. You can be certain it wouldn't make the news here.