Chinese new year. The afternoon before the fireworks began, I stopped on campus to chat with my friend, Liu Bing, a genteel man who had been to Skagit Valley College years ago and who loved to speak frankly of his country. The campus was very quiet, as the students were on break. We talked about this and that, the CPC’s moves against corruption, the great swell of people traveling back to their home town for the Spring Festival, clogging the highway and rail system. He said fireworks in Beijing were banned for a thirteen-year period in the 90s and early 2000s and that netizens demanded the return of booming fire, as it was an important part of their tradition. He said that with all the bad pollution lately, letting people blow off fireworks was no way to solve the problem.
“Fireworks,” I said. “I can’t imagine they’d have that much effect on the air.”
He closed his eyes and nodded.
“But where do we go, you know, if we want to see them?”
He waved his hand at the sky. “Anywhere.”
Starting from about 8:30 and crescendoing at midnight, there was a battering of the air like I had never heard before. Incessant, cracking, exploding fireworks. Big-time stuff blooming in the sky every second all around us, gushing white behind buildings, cloaking the city in a smoky haze. I walked outside just after midnight and breathed in a sulfurous odor like smoke bombs on the 4th of July. I spoke words out loud into the night and found that I could not hear my own words over the boom, crackity-crackity-crack, the boom again, followed by rocket noises and mortar fire noises. Sometimes it was a Doplar whistling as in war movies. Sometimes it was like a child’s rocket. Now a bazooka blast from a Copolla film, now M-80s in Wisconsin—with the difference being that in Wisconsin the kids would have run off after two detonations. Here there seemed to be no laws.
I won’t deny that the adrenaline rush felt good. The possibility of a fire starting among the pine trees on campus added to the energy. The constant flashing over this city of 20 million gave light to the air. The percussion set off scooter alarms. Green and red fountains of fire rose up behind the TV tower. Amber spokes of light shot up from the workers’ plaza on west campus. Some booms were big and swollen, resonating deep among the buildings. Others rippled forth in volleying assaults.
Part of me loved the stimulation. Part of me felt creeped-out by the large-scale group behavior, as though the energy of the masses could be released at once for any purpose good or bad. You see the same thing in America or Egypt. Viewed from the outside, any common thrust of a culture looks frightening. And yet, I wanted to be out there roaming the streets in the celebratory war zone.
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