Even more cultural differences

My guess is that many of you have heard about the two major natural disasters that have hit Asia in the last few weeks: Cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar on May 3 and a 7.8 earthquake hit Sichuan, China just outside of the city of Chengdu (think pandas) on Monday. Both disasters have been just that, complete disasters and loss of countless human life.

The rescue efforts in Myanmar have been blocked by a "government" that has been reported to be keeping food & water to sell on the black market. The UN has only been able to reach 270,000 people so far (according to the AP today) in a country where millions of people are without clean water or food. It is raining hard there again and the U.S. Joint Typhoon Center is predicting that another cyclone could hit the area again in the next few days. It makes Hurricane Katrina look insignificant, and I am by no means downplaying that devastation.

On Monday, while friends of ours were taxiing down the runway of the Chengdu airport to return to Hong Kong, the earthquake struck about a 30-minute drive away from them. They thought that their plane had run over something. No such luck. With over 19,500 already confirmed dead, the outlook doesn't look very good. The country is rallying in support for one another but it is a pretty awful situation all around.

So where do the cultural differences come in to play? Well, it's certainly not in the way that the general public responds. People here have had the same reaction as they would have anywhere else in the world. The difference comes in the slight nuances in which this stuff gets reported in the media.

Quite predictably, news of the earthquake covered the front page of the main English newspaper today. Updates and statistics accompanied a picture of the school that collapsed on the front page . But it wasn't a picture that we would see in the States. When this kind of thing happens in the U.S., the front page of the paper has a picture of parents crying out in sheer terror for their children or someone looking completely lost and devastated. I hope you can imagine what I'm talking about. Here, when this kind of thing happens, there is a picture of the actual school, collapsed, and dead children being pulled out of the rubble by rescue workers. It's one of those pictures you don't want to ever have to see yet it's plastered on the front page of the paper. I've decided that today's picture topped the one last week of dead bodies and cows floating in the water after the cyclone in Myanmar.

This is one of those subtleties in cultural differences. As my friend Sophie pointed out, in some parts of Asia, people actually need to see the dead bodies to believe that a person is dead. It's not really that way in China but you can sort of draw a comparison. It's just a different level of sensitivity that you don't really think about until you pick up the morning paper and see 5 limp children, covered in cuts, being pulled from wreckage. I keep telling myself that it's not better or worse, it's just different from what I'm used to. However, the more I think about it, the more I really think that it doesn't make me feel any more sorry for the victims. It just makes me more nauseous as I'm drinking my coffee.