Saturday, 19 September 2009

• How to live in the dangerous is Buenos Aires?

  Sunflower’s trip to Latin America was already planned several years ago. She knew that Latin America was a   dangerous place and therefore she learnt some Kung Fu, so that she would be able to protect herself in case of any attack. But when she was actually there, she realized how silly she was. Everyone said to her, “if you are robbed, just give them everything you have, don’t try to fight with them!”

  When she first arrived she lived in a very remote area with dark streets, every night when she got off the train station she always had to ask the way home because she had no orientation at all. The gentleman at the newspaper stand said to her one evening, “little Chinese girl, you want to go to this place on your own at this time of the night?” She nodded. He went on, “I think you better take a taxi.” She didn’t really take his word at the beginning because she walked home two nights already. As soon as she was rushing through the crowd, she could feel that someone was trying to open her backpack. She turned around immediately. All she saw was a well-dressed young guy smoking and looking up to the sky. She stared at him aggressively and he did as if he hadn’t done anything at all. She then jumped into the next taxi. The next day an Argentinean lady told her in an interview about the social security problem in this country and that her daughter was just robbed recently with a gun near where she lives.

  She was glad to leave this dangerous place after the first week. Both her body and mind were tired to this self-protection game.

  One month later she went back to Buenos Aires
  A young Chinese immigrant girl told Sunflower before recording their interview: “I was robbed yesterday in front of my Japanese school, 10am in the morning!” Instead of being sad, she reported happily, “One grabbed my school bag and ran away on a scooter the other at the highest speed.” She sounded more impressed by their efficiency than the loss of her property. She said, “I was robbed finally!” Her boyfriend next to her also said, “I hardly know anyone who has not been robbed in this city. When I was young, we were four kids and got robbed by one guy who claimed to have a gun. We surrounded him on the main street at the wall and gave him everything we had. The street was full of people and no one knew what was happening.” He told me this in a very casual way.

  During Sunflower’s interpreting job in a Jewish-Argentine company, her young boss came in one day and said, “I only parked my car one street away from the factory yesterday and was robbed with a knife!” He didn’t sound sad or angry.  Sunflower asked him, “why don’t you sound annoyed at all?” He smiled charmingly, “It doesn’t help, does it? I’m 40 now and I’ve only been robbed twice, it’s not so bad, is it?”

  If you like, there are still endless exciting robbing stories: the car window gets smashed at the traffic light and the handbags of the ladies get ripped off, robbing with knife, with gun, without anything, with or without violence……etc—any taste you like. The interesting thing is that, people seem to be so used to it that it’s nothing as tremendous as you would feel in Europe or Hong Kong.

  Sunflower’s martial art didn’t serve anything but another type of Kung Fu helped more: Sunflower’s Argentinean mother taught her  “Be-careful-Kung Fu” was more useful. As soon as she got into the car, button locked down, handbag on the floor. She always carried a little amount of cash with her.  She always put a few little notes in her jeans pocket to be ready for the thieves. She even thought of the dialogue with the thieves, she would say to him, “HA! You’ve come finally! I’ve been waiting for you!” Then hand him the money and say, “I hope this can help you”. Fortunately or unfortunately they never came.

  2 months later
  Weeks after, these dangerous scenes of rumours have become part of the daily life. Sunflower walked almost everywhere, at almost any time on her own. Sometimes she even had a nice picnic on her own in a nice park, after eating she had a nice siesta under a tree in order to become one with this city. She often thought: Buenos Aires, you are such a lovely city (apart from the rubbish and the thieves)!

  After living in this dangerous city almost half year, she was not scared anymore. She was even nostalgic when she left. As she was leaving this city, she listened to a Buddhist master’s talk on the “universal Kung Fu”. He said, “the real Kung Fu we have to learn is “Qi Kong” but the [Qi] is not氣[Qi] (energy) but棄[Qi] (to let go).”

  Indeed, if there were nothing you could not give away, what else could they steal from you?

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