I Believe

My prevailing memory about China was the heat. The sun beat down mercilessly, furiously upon the earth as if it took some diabolical glee in scorching its inhabitants. The air hung limp and heavy; bloated with minuscule droplets of water suffocating it. The atmosphere seemed on the verge of bursting in any moment as if the heat and moisture would all escape in one giant, cool sigh. It was on one of these days my cousin and I were in the Emperor’s summer palace, Ye He Yuan. We were crossing an exquisitely carved arched bridge when we felt a strong breeze, a cool breeze, the first of the day. We stopped, waiting for something unspoken. Indeed it seemed as if time had stopped. The trees stood breathlessly still, the water in the lake dared not ripple. Then rolls of dark clouds began to move up the horizon and another gust of wind tore through the trees disrupting the mirror smoothness of the lake. Droplets of rain fell at our feet darkening the path. At the end of the bridge was a crimson pavilion and my cousin and I raced across seeking shelter. As we set foot inside the pavilion the rain began to fall in torrents. A minute later, in sheets. More people began crowding inside the pavilion running to get out of the rain. Another minute the rain was falling horizontally, driven by the wind. Gusts of wind and rain spilled into the sides of the pavilion. We all crowded into the center of the pavilion, the people with umbrellas on the outside formed a protective shield around the umbrellaless that huddled in the middle. The rain intensified; the wind howled. My umbrella was beaten and battered by the wind, bent without any hope of usage again but the gap was quickly filled by another man’s umbrella. A woman helped my cousin fix her umbrella which had been blown in. We shrieked together with each torrent of rain that rushed into the pavilion and with each gust of wind that knocked us from our feet. Hail battered our legs, lightening cracked, thunder roared and seemingly shook the entire pavilion. The storm raged for an eternity. We were a mixed lot of all nationalities, of all ages blown from all corners of the earth by the wind that all bound us together now. We huddled against each other without knowing each other’s names. We shielded ourselves from the rain; we shielded each other from the rain. It was one and the same. We all stood there, in that pavilion where our lives converged for a few short minutes, and knew that we were all in the same boat; we were sharing the same experience. At that moment in time, we only had each other and we held on to each other. It was what we Chinese call “tong zhou gong jin”; the very sprit of cooperation. This I believe.