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How one
Chinese escaped death on 11 September (Continued from the previous
page) At the boarding school, before her father finally called, Sun's daughter thought her mother was dead. The school organized a session for those students whose parent or relatives worked in the WTC. The teenagers stuck together watching the live TV broadcast and sharing their anxiety. Phone calls began to come in from those who had managed an escape. "Next call will definitely be from my mom," Xueni told her teachers. But this "next call" never came. Seeing one after another of her classmates get their calls and then leave the room with relief, Xuni said she almost believed the worst had happened to her mother. But she was calm and sympathetic to the remaining girls. At 2pm her father finally called. A week later she was reunited with her mother. "She was really behaving like an adult in those difficulties," Sun said of her daughter. Her paper called her later that night from Beijing to do anÊinterview. Sun praised the New York firefighters, while the reporter was more interested in exploring the dark side of the story. The 600-word article, titled with "China Daily Worker Haunted by Tragedy", first showed up on the China Daily website on Sept 11 an was placed on the front page of the paper two days later. "The reporter was appealing to the one side of the story," said Sun. "I was pretty upset about it." Much of the content concentrated on the ordeal Sun went through. There was one sentence addressing firefighters--"All of us had the deepest respect for those firefighters," Sun said, sobbing--the newspaper wrote. And Sun doesn't like the word "escape" --which in Chinese implied the meaning of cowardice--the reporter used to describe her experience. "It's not an 'escape'. We were in good order and chaotic things didn't happen," said Sun. "Or at least I didn't see it." She said she believed the China Daily reporter wrote the article with
a certain amount of "political concern". "People did panic," Ms. Gao said. "People were rushing down the stairs, pushing and shoving each other around." However, for those who did not see the tragedies with their own eyes, the Sept 11 would be a matter of another type, said Gao. Sentiments like "so cool to see America bombed" or "Serves 'em right" could be located at almost every popular Chinese-language website. Even if many sympathetic Chinese placed wreaths in front of the US Embassy in Beijing, there's a common feeling that the only superpower in the world brought it on itself. A survey by the Social Survey Institute of China published in the first week after Sept 11 indicated 38 percent of 1,450 respondents thought the attacks were partially a consequence of America's own foreign policies. "Every one is entitled to his own opinion," said Gao. "For those who haven't stared Death in the face, it (Sept 11) was something else." Such gloating was a consequences of the Chinese government's long-time policy of propaganda and censorship, said Marcus Brauchli, the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, which had to move its headquarters in the World Financial Center near the twin towers to the business offices in South Brunswick, NJ. "Gloating is silly," said Brauchli, who used to be Journal's foreign correspondent in Shanghai."I don't think serious people in China were gloating; I don't think thoughtful people were gloating; I don't think people who understand the world were able to gloat over it (Sept 11)." The Chinese government long used "nationalism" as a weapon to breed anti-American sentiments and so to distract their people's attention from its own political and economic corruption, Brauchli said. "In fact, I don't think people in China's Foreign Affairs Ministry would be happy about Sept 11," the Journal's managing editor said. But Mr. Yao, president of China US Net Group Inc which was also a WTC tenant, would argue that such a "taking joy from suffering" was understandable, because the target was supposed to be the U.S. government instead of innocent American people. But he refused to elaborate or even give his full name. He was also reluctant about the topic of the compensation money his company obtained from the local government. "I don't want to be written about on this subject," Mr. Yao said. "The companies that really suffered from lost lives didn't talk much, so I guess we'd better shut up." None of his company's eleven employees were early enough to be affected. Yao himself was on the train from New Jersey when word came that the building where he worked for the last three years had collapsed. Like most of the thirteen Chinese companies in the WTC twin towers, the normal work time began after ten. No Chinese were killed. "Had terrorists struck half an hour later, they would have got me," he said. Sun said she would not choose to live or work in any building that has
more than five stories. She has bad dreams; airplanes flying overhead
make her feel dizzy; and she has stopped feeling proud of her good memory,
which seems to have gone down several levels since that Tuesday. It just
felt unseemly for survivors to complain about their losses, she said.
None of the three members of her company was dead or injured. "Some people
told me to argue hard for compensation money," Sun said."My reply was,
first why, and second, you go for it yourself." "It's totally unspeakable," Sun said. END |
