Three minutes silence
One week out from the Sichuan quake China began three days of official mourning with three minutes’ mourning. I had assumed that this would be a silent affair, as those times that I have observed such things in the past, usually in connection with war, ANZAC day in Australia and Buss und Bettag in Germany, this has been the case.
On ANZAC day in Australia we have a football game that invariably draws a large crowd. The day remembers the victims of war. The last post is played before a minute’s silence as players, officials and a crowd of more than 90 thousand all stand heads bowed and quiet for the majority of the minute. Toward the end members of the crowd slowly take voice for their team and the silence breaks into a roar.
I was at work today in Beijing sitting in the same chair on a very similar day to last week. I went out on to the balcony at the end of the central corridor of the 8th floor of our building to watch Beijing for the duration. Earlier I had read that people had been asked to observe three minute’s silence but that boats, trains and cars had been asked to sound their horns. There had also been other rumours flying about that the government had banned all public entertainment, entertainment based websites and all television not covering the quake. This does not, in fact, seem to be true at all, but rather sites appear to have put up static memorials stating that they will cease service for the duration of the next three days. tudou.com, China’s largest video hosting site defaults to a memorial video and its front page only shows videos covering the disaster.
At the appointed minute traffic stopped and all that I could hear was the sound of vehicle horns. This was not a deafening sound; not the volume of the firecrackers during spring festival. Three minutes, though is a long time. Enough to imagine a building collapsing on top of you, to picture a rescue that involves an amputation, and enough to think of suddenly being without pretty much everyone you know. A city full of car horns provided an appropriate backdrop to these thoughts. Hundreds of horns at once add up to a long, plaintive and annoying blare. The anger in the noise suited the occasion.
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