Fuddland
As I made my way into the empty meeting room at just before half-past two to observe the three-minute silence, I thought about telling my colleagues what I was doing, but decided against it: it’s a personal choice, and I was interested to see how many people actually stopped work to mark the first anniversary of China’s worst natural disaster for thirty years.
I was surprised to find that no-one else stopped what they were doing. Not in my office, nor on the street below. I had been told that the city air-raid siren would sound at 2.28pm, lasting for the full three minutes, but over the sound of car horns and construction, I could only faintly hear the siren carried on the wind from the downtown area a few miles away. Either the Industrial Park area, where I work, doesn’t also have one, or for some reason it was not used. From the 28th floor I looked up and down the street, into the construction sites and at the cars and buses, to see if I could spot anyone who had downed tools or pulled over, but people were seemingly oblivious. I asked several [Chinese] friends in other offices in the area if their companies, or even they themselves, observed the silence, but no companies did, and most individuals didn’t either.
This is not to say that the nation is at all unsentimental about the tragedy: there are plenty of events taking place all over the nation to commemorate the earthquake, not least a day of specially-dedicated television. Given that many of the office blocks around here shook with the force of the quake, 2000 miles from the epicentre, I just thought more people here would mark it too.
