I woke up on Tuesday morning to the sound of text messages pinging in my ears. The messages, in English, and Chinese, were the same: “Is everyone you know okay? Do you know what happened in Boston?”
Obviously my stomach began to drop. My friends here all know that I am from Boston, but it’s a place that most Chinese know only because of schools and basketball, and living so far away from home I almost think myself silly for still reading the Boston Globe online everyday. The distance between Boston and Beijing is vast, but my hometown never felt further away than this morning as I impatiently waited for my computer to boot up, to search for whatever doom it was that struck my city.
Watching video of the marathon go by was surreal enough in and of itself. Normally, when I see videos of Boston it feels like peeking into an incredibly vivid dream. From Beijing, Boston seems like a place more real than any other and yet so far from the congested streets and Chinese shops of Beijing that it seems almost unreal. But seeing the sidewalk explode on a street that I have walked countless times myself was even more surreal. Then I saw a cop shuffle by, hand on his belt and belly out, barking in a Boston accent, “Something’s f-‘d up!” And all of a sudden I knew that this was real, not a dream, and I was very, very far from home.
I booted up Skype and called my mother. The chances that she would have been there watching were so small… and when she picked up the phone, I breathed a sigh of relief. “Mom?” I asked. But I had no answer. For twenty seconds, I shouted at my computer, “Hello? Mom?” but had no reply. Was someone hurt? Were they waiting for my call all day without knowing what they would say when I did contact them? I strained my ears—was there soft crying in the background?
“Oh, hi Hon!” my Mom said. “I don’t know how to work this Skype thing. It was on mute.”
My family was fine, as were all my friends, but I felt less than helpless. Were I to be back in my home, I knew I would still feel helpless, but I was six thousand miles away from even being helpless, and it was even worse.
I learned my Stepdad, an Israeli named Guy who runs a bank in Boston, was right down the street from the blast. He kept his branch open and received weary stragglers, and opened up the hard-line telephone for people to contact their loved ones while cell phone service was cut. Guy had served in the Israeli army in Lebanon, and moved to America, precisely because in America, these sorts of things don’t happen.
I couldn’t help like Guy helped. But mostly, I felt helpless simply because I wasn’t there to be helpless with all the others. At home, my mere presence might have served as an anchor to normalcy at a time when normalcy is more valuable than anything.
Every day in China I see things that make me stop, give me pause and remind me that the world is a rough place where people must struggle in order to live decently. My pain at seeing people struggle is tempered by the fact that I am working to find ways to make people laugh, to use daily life and human interaction in my comedy. But today I didn’t have a joke to tell, no way to make people smile back home.
But there is hope in the fact that this inhuman action brought the humanity out of people all around Boston. And the concern of my Chinese friends who hear Boston and associate that place with me and my family is valuable as well, because it shows that more and more, people around the world are all becoming part of one great global family. Whether we were born in America, Israel, or China, when times are tough we draw together, even if we are far apart.