Originally this post was part of a larger review of the past few days, but I feel it's important enough to warrant a dedicated post.
For reasons that will be clear in the next post, I had been out at a bar/club with some friends. It was getting late and I'd decided to go home. Mike was with me and we were past the South Gate when I noticed a girl sitting on the pedestrian path alongside the road. She was crying. She looked and sounded young and so did the guy standing next to her. But he was just standing there as she cried. We continued walking, but I kept glancing over my shoulder. It's somewhere between midnight and 2am at this point, the streets are relatively empty and the night air was cold, crisp. Sound was traveling pretty well so I noticed when the guy started talking... raising his voice to a shout and then... the worst thing.
He kicks her. I don't mean he nudges her with his foot - he kicks her. The only thing possibly worse is my response - I hesitate. I look to Mike and ask him, 'Hey... should we help her?'. He had apparently been in his own world up until this point, as he looks around, focuses, starts shouting and running back. I'm with him and stand alongside as he launches into his second tirade for the night (again, more on that next time), experiencing an entirely different reaction to the first one we had that evening.
The guy was almost entirely passive. Speaking in low tones, I wasn't sure what he was saying but my impression was that it was along the lines of, 'Hey, no trouble here guys, no trouble. No problems. Calm down'. The girl is still on the ground, sitting there and crying. And so we stand there, noone talking. This lasted for what was probably only a few minutes, though it felt like an age. Him, standing over her, waiting for us to leave. The relative silence is finally broken when she starts shrieking at him between sobs, and starts kicking back at him. Not fight-hitting, but hitting all the same. It pissed him off and he shouted at her, but he didn't do anything, not with us there.
I don't know what ended it. For some reason, we finally turned and slowly walked away. He didn't do anything to her again, at least not in eye or ear shot, but it has been a really... horrible experience. I have really weird feelings and thoughts about that night and that incident. By intervening, did we just make things worse for her later on? The only thing we stopped was another kick, another push, another shove at that moment in time. There's so many things I don't know. Is this common in China? Is it normal for those two people? What is their relationship? I'd guess that they are/were boyfriend and girlfriend, but I don't know that.
One of the worst things for me is what I found in myself. 'Should we help her?'. How could I have even asked that? What a terrible hesitation. What a terrible hesitation. I don't even know how to explain it. Why did I think that, why did I ask that question? There's no nice way to think about it. The best possible reason I can think of is that when I'm with Mike, I take my lead on how to approach situations from him. He's been living in China for over a year, and has a much better grasp of just about everything here. But what if that wasn't the reason? If he had said that we should leave it, for whatever reason, would I have just walked away? I don't know. I guess it's impossible to know without being forced into that exact scenario, but gods...
I'll leave that there - suffice to say, it's not resting well on my mind.
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Hesitation is a normal response. When you're not commonly subjected to such sights, it's like a shock to the system when you are. Almost as though the mind is slightly paralysed by the horror it's witnessing.
ReplyDeleteNot only this, but we are taught (from a young age) to mind our own business. It's very difficult to reconcile that when we feel obligated to help.
Don't be too hard on yourself, Liam. You're still a good person, because you're questioning your intentions now. And that's a very noble thing.