Diary – 9 February 2008

David Tang reflects on the storms in China, and on being ‘Googled’

My daughter telephoned to say, to my disbelief, that she was snowbound in Hangzhou, where it never snows. The city is regarded as the most beautiful in China, with swaying willows surrounding an old lagoon on the edge of which Mao Tse-tung loved staying. I always asked for the same bedroom that Mao chose at the West Lake Guesthouse — until one night in the same bed that he slept, I saw, standing by the window, a ghostly figure of a woman in white. It wasn’t quite Wilkie Collins, but enough to put me off ever returning.

My daughter will probably never return to Hangzhou either, as she was stuck there for three days and spent 20 hours queuing at the airport which couldn’t cope with the snow. Indeed, the whole of southern China was besieged by freak storms. It couldn’t have come at a worse time (like the tsunami on Boxing Day) as it is the time of the year when a huge number of urbanites travel to their rural homes for the Chinese New Year, which fell on 7 February this year — it’s goodbye to the Year of the Pig, and hello to the Year of the Rat.

An astonishing 200 million Chinese have been affected by the worst weather in 50 years. While it was perfectly normal in Peking (where I walked round in a jumper, hardened by my days at an English boarding school), in Canton alone 700,000 were stranded by the capricious cold weather that brought chaos to pylons and trains this last weekend. Day after day, 150,000 people stood sardined together on the platforms of the railway station. A woman was crushed to death.