A few weeks back I turned on the China’s Children’s Network hoping to find one of my son’s favorite shows, In the Night Garden or, perhaps, The Wisdom Tree to keep him entertained while his baby sister napped and I fixed our lunch in the kitchen. However, regularly scheduled programming had been derailed and all I could find on any station was repetitive disaster footage of the catastrophic mudslide that took place August 8th in Gansu province, claiming the lives of more than a thousand people. Online, all Chinese sites deemed too entertaining had been shut down, which meant no cartoons or kids shows on the internet either. My husband’s beloved World of Warcraft was also inaccessible, and even movie theaters were shut down for this government-imposed day of mourning.

This was not the first day China had implemented mourning periods – the first in recent memory followed the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. There was another for the Qinghai earthquake earlier this year as well. During mourning periods there is usually several minutes of silence at the exact time that the disaster took place. I remember going to work in May 2008 at an IT company in a Zhongguancun high-rise and spending 3 minutes in silence with my coworkers as cars honked and traffic stopped outside. The period of mourning for the Sichuan earthquake lasted three full days in recognition for how serious the catastrophe was, and of course it seemed rather trivial to complain about losing TV, internet and entertainment for three days when so many had lost their lives. But after the third such period of mourning in recent memory, people around me have started to grumble ever so slightly. Surely we could mourn for Sichuan, for Qinghai, for Gansu without giving up all forms of entertainment ourselves? But perhaps what nagged at us most of all was the lack of choice in the matter, the presumption that we were incapable of mourning in our own way and had to have our “fun” restricted by the powers that be.

Of course, it says something about our modern society, even, perhaps especially here in China, when going 24 hours without TV shows, without games, without movies, without amusement parks and without “fun” can produce such sparks of annoyance in a populace. On the one hand, it is shameful that we can’t all just find something else to do. And of course, as foreigners, most of us are relatively unaffected by the mandates anyhow, as our foreign websites would still work and we download most of our TV shows anyhow. My Chinese husband grumbled considerably about not being able to access his favorite websites and online games and my kids, who are by no means TV addicts, were bored and whiny when midday rolled around and it was too hot to do anything outside, the TV was “broken,” and they were disinterested in their toys. What did we do? We went to the pool, which was still open (pools perhaps falling under the category of “sports” rather than “entertainment”) and had fun despite being told that we shouldn’t be having fun. Which forces one to wonder, is the point of the enforced period of mourning to have us give up something, kind of like a mini period of lent, or is it to make sure we spend 24 hours in somber grieving mode. Should we be avoiding other types of fun on principle?

Everyone grieves in their own way, and while China’s recent incorporation of mourning periods is a step in the right direction – acknowledging that all life is precious and that a great loss of life is a national catastrophe, something that affects each and every person in this country. The message is that life is not cheap, that even though China has more than a billion people, each and every one of those lives counts for something and is worth grieving for and mourning over, and that message is a good one, a step in the right direction for China. What is implicit in the enforcement of these mourning periods, however, is that if the government didn’t step in and do something, force people to care, then they wouldn’t. They’d go about their day to day lives and would forget about Wenchuan and Yushu and Zhouqu after the initial hype had settled down. Enforcing a period of mourning is supposed to force people to stop and think. But does it achieve the goal it set out to accomplish? The thought that always nags me on these days of mourning is that the mourning loses a bit of its meaning if it is only accomplished because the people are not given the choice. Certainly, not every one of China’s residents who dealt with a day of media deprivation was particularly thrilled to be doing so, and there were probably some (like perhaps the owners of the movie theaters which were not allowed to operate) who were downright resentful. And if families like mine (families with young children) simply find a way to have fun anyhow, are they really following the spirit of the day? And what if I hate TV and never watch it anyhow, and don’t own a computer – I’m really not giving up anything at all on the mourning period, am I? Wouldn’t a period of mourning be more meaningful if people gave up what was important to them voluntarily? If the government were to ask us to give up something in remembrance of the lives that were lost, couldn’t we each find perhaps even more significant ways to remember the tragedy? The moment of silence could remain, the fancy speeches from the leaders could remain, but if we voluntary decided how we would personally recognize the tragedy, perhaps by giving up TV, or giving up games, or perhaps by giving up dessert or coffee or staying in instead of going out to the bars, wouldn’t these personal acts of denial carry a greater weight than one massive mandate to quit having fun for a day?

But then, maybe it is me who has missed the point. Perhaps the point isn’t to make us stop having fun for a day, but to make us turn off the TV, switch off the computer, disengage from our screens and spend time with those around us. Perhaps taking my kids to the pool and having fun as a family was going against the spirit of the day, but rather quite the contrary, was exactly what the day was intended. After all, these tragedies teach us nothing if not the lesson that everything could be gone in an instant, one moment here, the next – gone. The victims of these tragedies no doubt wish that they could have one more day with their loved ones, sans screens and distractions, just to simply enjoy being together. So if a day of mourning forces us to appreciate each other, and to spend quality time with the people who really matter, and reminds us just how precious it all is, then that’s a sentiment that I can get behind, enforced or not.
 

Related Links
China to MournMudslide Victims
Sichuan Earthquake 2 Years On: How to Volunteer & Help in Chengdu
7.1-magnitude earthquake in Yushu, Qinghai Province - In Pictures

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