Every time I read the news on the Web or turn on the TV news, I get really depressed. It seems that at any given moment the world is just about to fall apart completely. War, pollution, protests, fires, disease, housing foreclosures and school shootings are, without fail, the lead stories on the news every day. Of course, with the Olympics coming up, news about China is also finding its way to the front, middle and back pages as well.

I ordered the Yangzi Evening Newspaper to be delivered to my house about two weeks ago. My wife never really read the paper or watched the news boxed sets of "Friends" and "Sex and the City" had a death grip on our DVD player but I wanted to find out more about what is going on locally here in China. The other problem is that while my Chinese is good enough for text messages and e-mails, the characters in the newspaper are a little advanced for me. I have gotten lazy over the past couple of years and have not been studying as much as I should, so I can only understand about 40 percent of the stories that I read. To fix this, I have taken to trying to read a couple of articles each day in the paper with my dictionary in hand, and guess what I found the news is pretty much exactly the same as it

Advertisement
is in the west! Olympic torch stories abound, along with depressing stories about train crashes, viruses infecting whole towns and predictions of doom for the average person with constantly falling house and rapidly rising food prices. In fact, the other day I read an article on a western Web site about the horrible train crash in northern China. The story continuously referred to the "state-run media" and the tight control of journalists and the fact that no doctors wanted to talk to the reporters in the hospital for fear of reprisals. I read the same article in the Chinese newspaper and the facts were exactly the same as the ones in the western article, with the added tidbit that the doctors were actually too busy treating the hundreds of dying and wounded people to talk to even the Chinese reporters.

Two weeks ago, the paper ran a picture of a Special Olympian who was attempting to wheel the torch through the streets of France. She was obviously terrified as an enormous police officer, in comparison to her slight wheelchair-bound frame, was trying to hold back two angry protesters. This image has stuck in my head since I saw it and I thought about my blind student Crystal Wu, who was a Special Olympic sprinter in Athens in 2004 (the Fairfield Citizen ran a story about her last year when she visited my parents), and about the adversity she had to overcome, the hours of training, the passion she poured into making her way from her modest background in China's poor Anhui province only to pull a muscle in the finals in Athens. Despite all of this, she refused to give up, limping across the finish line to a standing ovation from the crowd. Then I thought of this wheelchair-bound girl in the newspaper that must have had to overcome so many hardships only to be attacked as she carried the torch a short distance. It is no wonder that the locals are boycotting French businesses in town now.

So as the weather warms up, I am finally able to come out of my hibernation and try to take off some of this weight that seems to pile up around my midsection every winter. For the last couple of days, I have awakened at 4:30 a.m. and jumped on my bike to get a couple of hours of exercise before my school day starts at 8 a.m. I am sure you are thinking, "4:30 a.m. that is crazy!" But, unfortunately, when you live in a crowded city of 8 million people who are all rushing out and buying cars, this early hour is about the only time when the streets are quiet enough and the air clean enough to actually get any exercise in.

Added to that is the fact that all of China has only one time zone and no daylight savings time. The sun is up by 5 a.m. (by 4 a.m. in June!), and the locals make it impossible to catch a couple extra minutes of sleep. The garbage men for my whole apartment complex congregate five floors directly under my window at ungodly hours, and similar to garbage men all around the world, love to shout and joke with each other at full volume. In another international show of brotherhood, the elderly also seem to come out of the woodwork earlier and earlier as the summer solstice approaches, and they also hang out under the window making comments on whatever happens to be crossing in front of their myopic fields of vision. This combination of garbage men yelling and the old folks' inability to hear makes for some pretty loud mornings. So I just give up, put on my shorts and iPod, and jump on the bike for a ride around the lake or up the backside of Purple Mountain.

I logged on to my MSN messenger the other day and the lead story in the little splash window was something like, "Is it Safe for Americans to Travel to Totalitarian Countries?" The picture that went with this headline was that of a soldier standing in front of the chairman's picture on the Forbidden City. On Monday, I left my house at 5 a.m. and biked down the almost dead quiet streets of Nanjing. I want to paint a picture of the totalitarian regime I saw.

Nanjing is really a pleasant, green and livable city when the streets are not clogged with smoke-belching buses, honking motorists who have just got their licenses, and bikes (myself included) zipping every which way. It was a bit colder than I like and as it was one of my first rides of the year, I found myself going a little slower than normal, taking in the sights. The street sweepers were out not the big Elgin machines we have in the USA but armies of workers in orange jumpers sweeping the streets with rice stalk brooms. One worker in my neighborhood he is actually a dwarf waved to me as he whistled and swept. The late-night dumpling carts were shutting down while the morning breakfast cart vendors were setting up. The woman from whom I buy a Chinese breakfast burrito a couple of times a week winked and said she would have my burrito waiting for me when I got back extra bean sprouts and no seaweed! Taxi drivers were lined up at a couple of the late-night bars and karaoke places some in their cars sleeping, others sitting on little 6-inch-tall stools playing cards, smoking and drinking tea from old glass jars.

I biked down Hunan Road to the entrance of Xuan Wu Lake. Nanjing has a large lake in the dead center of the city, surround by a towering Ming Dynasty wall. The main entrance to the lake is closed off by three enormous red doors about 50 feet tall at the center of the arch. The doors are locked in the early morning but the chain is loose enough to allow people and bikes to squeeze through. By 5:30 a.m. literally thousands of old people begin congregating in around the lake for their morning exercises. A group of about 75 old women dressed in red silk pajamas had a boom box set up and were line dancing in unison, laughing and teasing each other. I stopped for a pull of water, and listened to the women comment to each other, "Hey! A foreigner," and then to me, "Good-a morning," followed by giggles.

I biked around the lake and saw the same old men that I used to see every morning last year on my early rides. This one guy is always doing hip gyrations and slapping the trunk of a tree with his open palms as he bellows across the lake like a gorilla. He scared the you-know-what out of me last year when I bellowed as I passed, but now we just bellow to each other in a mock show of virility.

About 20 miles later I was making my way back home down the mountain when I saw about a dozen or so people on bikes pounding up the hill. As they got closer, I noticed that they were all women and they looked strange. One was on a tandem bike the girl in back was shouting out instructions to the girl in front. One girl had only one leg. Another had no hands. Still another was missing an arm. It was the provincial women's Special Olympics cycling team practicing. I had met them last year in exactly the same place and had a chance to sit down and talk to them. I know they have been working non-stop all winter with the hopes that maybe one or two of them could make the trip this summer to Beijing. I hope they do, and if they are lucky enough to realize their dream and get to carry the torch, I pray they can do it without being attacked and in the true spirit of the Olympics and international competition.

Fairfield native Keith Gallinelli's stories are published the first Wednesday of the month. He can be reached at Keith@elgrandeblanco.com or through his Web site www.elgrandeblanco.com.