Thursday, September 8, 2011

Street fight Day

  • I saw two street fights on Thursday:  one, near my home; another, near my school.  The first brawl was in the Hui Shan Tesco parking lot; the second was on a side street near my school.  
  • I saw the first fight from the bus, I saw a man with no shirt flailing wildly opponent.  A crowd of twenty people surrounded him.  The fight then went out of my view as the bus went on its way.
  • I had a better view of the second fight.  I saw it as I was walking from the bus stop to school.  Going down a side street near my school, I saw an older man and a man, in either a security or police uniform, screaming at each other.  They thrust their arms straight-out as they pointed aggressively at each other as the Chinese are wont to do.  A woman, presumably a companion of the older man, was trying to get in between the two men.  The two men then briefly walked away from each other.  The older man walked through the entrance of his apartment complex; the uniformed man went down the street.  But they continued screaming, and all-of-a-sudden, they both returned to a spot on the street to confront each other.  They got into each other's face, and seemed to be about exchange blows.  The woman got in between him, and ended up flat on her ass for her efforts.  Others came in between as well.  And I walked off.
  • Quarrels between uniformed people and citizens happen all the time here in China, but it never fails to surprise me that the uniformed people, in these fights, don't maintain a stoicism or professional dignity.  The uniformed people take the quarrel as indignantly and personally as the civilian.  I remember another fight where the end result of a street fight between a civilian and uniformed person was the sight of the uniformed man having to be restrained by his uniformed colleagues from a man on a electric bicycle. whom he had stopped.  The cyclist objected to being stopped in a most violent way.  The guard objected, just as vehemently to the cyclist's reaction. 
  • One theory about this is that the uniformed persons here have so little power.  The traffic cops are routinely ignored at intersections.  It must grate at them to stand there for no real purpose.
  • I saw a grown Chinese adult wearing a Sesame Street Elmo shirt.  It didn't seem right.  In China, people will wear t-shirts bearing images of which they are ignorant.  I have seen people wearing Beatles, James Deans, and Sex Pistols t-shirts, and found when questioning them they didn't know who these people were.
  • Wuxi Expat praised for his manner of death.

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