Further life and times of *liltayinchina*

In all my life I have not been prepared for what I just witnessed. Even now, I can hear that the struggle is continuing outside my window. It is a beautiful day in Wuhan, my windows were open and I heard the desperate screams of a small child. I looked out my window to see a man and woman struggling to get hold of a very small boy. From the beginning, I could see that though the woman did not want to give up, her strength simply wasn’t a match for the man’s. The woman bit the man’s hand and then, I saw the man raise up his hand and strike the woman, not once, not twice, but repeatedly. In the face, he hit her, he kneed her in the stomach, all the while, as the boy screamed and choked on his fear. Even though it could have been blind rage, what man rears back before hitting a woman? What man tries to throw all of his energy into it? He didn’t just want to scare her; he wanted to debilitate her. I have heard that in situations like these, lookers-on will not participate or get involved. They won’t call the police, assuming that others will. In this case, I couldn’t call the police. Even if I knew the number, what would I say when they answered the phone? How would I explain? But I couldn’t just stand there and watch from my window high up. I shouted over and over, “Stop it! Stop! Don’t touch her!” but it didn’t faze either of them. It seemed as if the man was consumed with hatred and couldn’t see beyond it. I threw a bottle from the window hoping to get his attention and to show him the useless cell phone in my hands, as some sort of threat, or at the least to remind him that he was shaming himself in public. Neither he nor the woman noticed. Finally, a man ran up to the aid of the woman. He put himself in between the two. The man wouldn’t give up his fight, and kept slapping and hitting the woman. She held her child close to her and shook all over. She was trying to talk to the man and was calm at first but her words grew in anxiety and frustration. The man who intervened managed to keep them apart just long enough to pull out his cell phone and make a call. I couldn’t watch anymore and sat down to write this with a heart still pumping, a stomach gone, and fingers almost too furious to type.

It is calm now. It is back to a beautiful day and only moments ago, I watched as the man got hold of his son again, threw him into the front seat of a car, ran to the driver’s side, got in and locked the doors. The woman tried to pry the door open, seeing her son on the floor and only a thin piece of glass separating her from him. The man who had intervened helped an older woman, now at the scene, pull the woman away from the car so that the man could start it and turn around. I couldn’t see the woman’s face, but even from behind, the traces of tragedy were apparent. Her whole body moved as if any reason for existing had been taken away. She moved her hands from her sides to her mouth to her sides, as if not knowing whether or not to stifle her distraught sobs. She crumpled on the curb and waited for the car to drive past. The man turned his car around and drove slowly past, seeming to almost stop as he came to the fallen woman. As he had driven by my window, I noticed the boy on the floor of the passenger side, his face stunned, relief that the fight was over.

I’m reading a book right now about a woman who lived in China during the turn of the last century. She was a devout Buddhist and used to pray to Buddha to be reincarnated as anything but a woman. I wonder, if this woman were living today, would she make the same prayer?

The sun is shining; my curtain is lifting slightly every now and then from a gentle breeze. It is one of the nicest days in Wuhan since my arrival in August. A man just whistled past my window and a bird is sitting in a tree across from me. Tell me? How can the world have not just stopped cold in its tracks?