Tunnel Visions

 Another 4:30 wake-up for me. If you have read this before on my blog, you'll know that I have been stricken with the curse of doing some of my best thinking and writing at 4:30 in the morning. What am I thinking about today? What will I be writing about? Well for starters, I should be as happy as I can be today. I'm like a schoolkid on the day after the last day of school. It is unofficially the first day of my vacation today, Friday, July 30th. It is unofficially the longest time until I have to work again. I say "unofficially" (twice even) due to the fact that I'm only not working today because I have no teaching hours and I've recently convinced my employers to alter the contract to enable me to stay home when I have no teaching hours. If you have any knowledge of the Korean workplace, this is a plum that must be cherished!  However, there could be some carefully scheduled bureaucratic busywork that has been devised to disrupt the soft opening of my vacation on this Friday. I could be called in for a meeting, asked to do some editing, or given instructions or schedules for the upcoming fall semester, which starts in September. Or, sadly, it's more likely that I'll be summoned to perform one of the residual duties of my former security-like position - I'll need to open one of the doors for somebody. I still have the only functioning keys for the infuriatingly faulty sliding doors to my office. Some of the international students need to work there from time to time, but they haven't been entrusted with keys. Until now, one of the duties of the foreign professor had been to sit idly passing time in the office enabling their entrance into it. For these reasons, and because I didn't feel like it, I refrained from the customary celebratory beverages in which one tends to partake on the initial day of one's freedom from the salt mines, or wherever one happens to be stationed to do one's earning for one's owners.

I say I should be happy. I should be. But possibly because today is but a soft opening of my vacation, or possibly because of the dependability of cheer-draining Korean summer humidity, mosquitos, heat, and lack of sleep, I am not feeling the joy. Yet. 

My relative despondence may also have something to do with some of the news stories I have allowed past the cerebral surface and into conscious contemplation these days. And, as is so over-representatively the case, the soul disturbing story I'm referring to comes out of China. It's not Emperor Xi or his exhausting Emperor antics, which continue to be tolerated by fawning, obsequious leaders of countries that continuously illustrate the prophetic words of Dostoievski:

This time it's a more specific story out of China that is hammering up and down my spine with the icy mallets of mortality. If a person were to imagine the worst way to check out, I mean the most nightmarish of deaths, you'd have to go some to match the demise of the FOURTEEN people the CCP-controlled media is reporting to have died in a traffic jam in their cars in a tunnel in recent flooding in the Corporate Communist Kingdom this week. 

I kinda doubt the above video will last much longer due to the aforementioned Sino-gluteal-smoochery, so I'll try to summarize its contents and somnambuscarfious effects. Well, that'd be too ambitious. But I will sum up one part of it that gave me nightmares and continues to give me little daymares. It's the part about the Jingguang Tunnel. The Jingguang SMART-Tunnel. Like most other things with the label "smart" attached to them, there is a requirement of stupidity to believe that it is smart. The tunnel in Henan province that had cameras and digital tech enough to know at any time the cars, license plates, passengers, names of passengers, credit ratings of passengers, last bowel movements of passengers, you get the idea... was flooded in 5 minutes. All that technology and nobody could foresee this? All that "smartness" and nobody knows who's missing or dead yet?

But it's not the overhyped wonders of Chinese construction and development that bothers me so much. We all know about those shenanigans. I've written here plenty of times before about them. What is sticking in a veritable loop of horror in the back of my brain is what it must have been like to be one of the (officially 14 even though this video says 6) people who died in this disaster. My latent claustrophobia and non-latent fear of drowning are playing havoc with my imagination right now. Non stop. What would it have looked like to see a brown wall of water coming at you? What would it have felt like to be in the Titanically safe smart tunnel (see what I did there?) and suddenly be decidedly UNSAFE? What must their last 5 or fewer minutes have been like for those motorists? I can't imagine, yet at this moment, my brain is saying, "Oh yeah? Hold my beer..." and forcing me to try whether I want to or not. Again and again in my mind I am imagining the helplessness, betrayal, sorrow, frustration, the pure rage every one of those people must have felt. That is bad enough... but this is China, it only gets worse.

Thousands of people who knew loved ones who were travelling the road that led to the tunnel were using phones and social media to locate them. The Jingguang Tunnel holds hundreds of cars when there is traffic and there was traffic at the time of flooding. Even if all of those cars contained only the drivers of them, 14 dead? The CCP that is responsible for the situations in China that lead to mythical "sponge cities," "smart tunnels," and the like, horrible flouting of construction codes, and general citizen overconfidence in everything Chinese, is now adding insult to ass-rape by shitting on the people who lost friends and loved ones in the tunnel, withholding information, names and closure, just being the fucking Chinese Communist Party and protecting the bladder full of hot air that is their public image. But this is China, it only gets worse!

When mourners of the people sacrificed to CCP hubris laid flowers at the site of the tunnel, the CCP ordered a wall to be built around those flowers. Ostensibly because there were a LOT of flowers. More than one would expect for 14 people. The citizens removed the wall. The CCP put it up again and the citizens knocked it down again. Not sure how many times this went back and forth, but I can only hope this is but a microcosm of future relations in China between the citizens and their despotic leadership. And the video contains some hope of that.  You see, there is an ancient Chinese belief that nature indicates when dynasties are at their end. 

The Northern Song Dynasty from 960-1147 came to an end after mismanagement of environment and disastrous flooding of the Yellow River that killed over a million people. The Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) ended partially due to inability to manage irrigation and flood control combined with massive flooding and other natural disasters like Black Death, earthquakes and famine. The conditions in China now with flooding, mismanagement of flood waters, Covid 19, collapsing buildings, (and there are still earthquakes and starvation) look a lot like Nature telling China to get rid of its current leadership. Or at least it must look like that to traditionalists. Or at least, at least it WOULD look like that if any of this information were allowed to reach Chinese people unvarnished and  un-propegandized. But before this happens, methinks the Great Firewall of China (internet consorship) will be strengthened. I guess we'll see...

But aside from these horrifically nagging thoughts and images, I really ought to be happy. I'm not working, and that frees me up to watch the Tokyo Olympics which have been already postponed, and are in increasing danger of being shut right down due to Covid 19. Which reminds me of Hunan, China, which reminds me of Henan... and here we are again thinking about drowning in a smart-tunnel. Not to mention the fact that the next Olympics are supposed to be in China, possibly the least olympian country there is.

I gotta stop this post now and watch a full day of Olympics while I can. I want you to know, I still support Canada. After that post on Canada Day about not being proud, I still cheer for Canadian athletes. I don't feel proud of Canada when they win, but I do feel proud of the athletes for their dedication to their sports. 

I also want you to know that, with apologies to the individual athletes, I will be voting AGAINST China on account of their abysmal leadership that is a little bit worse than that of Canada.

Yay Canada, Boo China!

Addendum: I didn't get my full day of Olympic watching in after all. No real surprise. The diabolically devised bureaucratic busywork I predicted in the first paragraph was requested as predictably as predicted. I asked about attendance when Pyung Hwa, my old supervisor, told me about the July classes I'd be teaching, gave me my schedule and everything. She said I didn't need to worry about taking attendance. I had taken attendance during the regular semester using an Excel format (and I hate Excel) that Pyunghwa had given me before classes began, and she helped me with it when I ran into problems. I remember being relieved that I didn't have to struggle with the tedium of Excel attendance for the summer classes. That was why. They're just summer classes. Nobody takes them very seriously.

Well today I was requested to submit attendance for the classes that had finished yesterday. You read that right. Even though I know it's not important to the administration, even though I had not been told to do it or given any format in which to do it, now, the day after classes, "Please give us your attendance." 

Now in the hands of a lesser teacher, this would have been a problem. But I'm a seasoned vet and I've come across situations before that have made me realize that it's just always good to take attendance and even take notes on every class. People can't try to con you into changing their attendance to get the required number of hours in class to pass if you know they just weren't there. And even though I know attendance was not a big deal for these summer classes, I recorded stuff for every class. Notes on grammar and pronunciation mistakes made; little bits of info they told me about themselves like kids, hometowns, etc.; what we talked about; and who was in class.  

So I went into work (which I think was the ultimate motive here) and made my attendance using the info from my class notes. I had been given an Excel file by my NEW supervisor, Hyo Jeong, attached to the email requesting my attendance, but I downloaded it and immediately noticed some things that I did not know how to do. I needed to write Korean, which I can't do because of the keyboard. and some of the attendance symbols, like a check mark, were things I'd have to hunt for and research and I just couldn't be arsed to do it. So I made an MS Word file and put all the info in a FAR more organized way on a table. Then I submitted my attendance and went to town, bought some new glasses (my eyes have changed AGAIN) got some ointment for the obligatory sweat rash that is setting in during this crazy heat wave, and then went home to sit under my air con, watch some Olympics and drink some beer. 

When I got home, I had been sent the message, not an email from Hyo Jeong mind you, but a Facebook message from one of the international students, that I need to submit my attendance in the format provided. Well my computer doesn't even HAVE Excel cuz I hate it. I really don't want to get all sweaty walking in the 35 degree weather back to work for a second time to do something I'd gone above and beyond to do in the first place. I mean, honestly, if you don't ask for attendance and provide the format for it BEFORE the classes, I think you should be very happy with whatever you get. No?

So I have told the international student that I "didn't receive his Facebook message." It's now 6 PM and technically, I'm off and my holidays begin at 7:00. If I'm asked again to re-submit, I'll just say, "Geez, sorry, I didn't get the message. Now I'm on my vacation without my computer. Wish I could help!"

We'll see how that works... Playing Korean games again. It's a living!