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Life in China A Lonely Death
Life in China A Lonely Death | A Lonely Death |
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The body lay sprawled on the road, legs and arms spread wide, the face white like wax, a pool of dark blood framing the head. “Laowai, laowai” (foreigner, foreigner) shouted my taxi driver, pointing animatedly at the corpse and looking back at me, a wide grin on his face. I’d read about the Chinese tendency to smile or laugh in times of trauma or stress but it did little to dampen my disgust at his reaction.
I got out of the taxi and joined the crowd of onlookers who had gathered at the roadside to stare at the foreigner lying dead in the inside lane of Beijing’s busy third east ring road. Police stood around the man’s body (I later learnt he was a 22-year-old Canadian tourist) taking photos and measuring the skid marks between him and the number eight double-decker bus that he had apparently collided with. The traffic continued along the road’s other five lanes, horns hooting, fumes rising in the warm April sun. Cars passed just feet from the uncovered corpse, businessmen on their way to work, mothers taking their children to school, all of them staring at the lonely, lifeless figure in the road. I too stared. Through my work I’ve seen a number of victims of road traffic accidents. But for some reason this seemed to affect me more than most. I felt like I had a bond with him, this young man lying dead in a dusty road in the middle of Beijing, hundreds of miles from home. I tried to imagine what his family would be doing at that instant, waking up, making breakfast, waiting excitedly to hear the latest from their son, or brother or husband. So I too, stood and stared. After 20 minutes the police decided to cover up the body. They placed a light pink plastic sheet over the corpse but it blew off a few minutes later when a van drove past. The man’s face once again looked up to the hazy sky above until medics wrapped plastic around his head, turned him onto his chest, placed him on a stretcher and carried him into a waiting ambulance. The crowd started to disperse and I set off towards my office. Later that day I looked out of my 18th floor window onto the road below. The bus had gone, the police had packed up and a line of traffic had reclaimed the inside lane of the third ring road, taxis, buses and sleek black Audis vying for space on the tarmac. Life in this tiny part of the city had returned to normal, a scattering of sand to soak up the blood the only sign that anything had happened. Tom Mackenzie Tom is a British journalist who moved from Finsbury Park, London, to Chaoyang District, Beijing, at the beginning of the year. Having spent nearly three years as a reporter for a weekly tabloid covering stabbings, shootings and celebrity shenanigans in north London he decided it was time for a new challenge and moved to the capital in a bid to learn the lingo, dabble with some freelance writing and familiarise himself with Chinese culture. |
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