Fun fact: three of the stories we’ve posted in the past two days have been from Shenzhen. It’s where Alicia and I happened to be this weekend (for Ultimate Frisbee), and on Sunday we attempted to fly back.
Attempted and succeeded — but barely. A separate Shenzhen-to-Beijing airline ended up being delayed until 2 am, while our flight was only set back two hours, to 11 pm. (To the best of my knowledge, it wasn’t because of bomb threats.)
A big hole formed in Shenzhen Longgang District's Henggang Road yesterday at around 9 pm, killing three people. The road collapse is under investigation.
Sinkholes are particularly deadly in Shenzhen, apparently. On March 26, surveillance cameras caught footage of a five-by-eight-meter sinkhole killing a man.
Young thrill-seekers in Shenzhen's Bao'an District were caught doing the above on May 15. You'll note that there's no guardrail on the edge of the rooftop, slanted at a scary 45-degree angle. Was this a dare? A challenge that could only have been accepted by eager preadolescents with something to prove, to themselves if not their friends? One thing is for sure: this video not for those afraid of heights.
Alcohol makes us do the damndest things. In Jiangmen, Guangdong province on Tuesday, a young woman flipped off her heels and began dancing on top of a police car. The Nanfang reports: "By the time she was on top of the police car, a large crowd had gathered and, despite not knowing what to do, police eventually managed to subdue her."
How bad must a car dealership be to drive someone to demonstrably obliterate his own car? Outside the 12th Qingdao International Auto Show yesterday, three men, apparently driven to the brink by customer service (we've all been, yeah?), took sledgehammers and systematically ruined a Maserati (we've not done this).
Surveillance footage has surfaced purportedly showing 22-year-old Yuan Liya entering Jingwen Mall in south Beijing on the night of May 2. She would fall to her death several hours later -- not seen on tape -- in what police have ruled was a suicide.
Authorities reportedly blocked Yuan's family from seeing this footage last week, which was one of the reasons cited for an unusually large protest in front of Jingwen on May 8 that caused gridlock and an increased police and paramilitary presence through the city center.
On top of everything else, Ai Weiwei is a barber. A good one?
Hm. Maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's start here: exactly what kind of haircuts does he give?
“The kind that will make you want to cry," he said.
“Just don’t make it boring,” I told him.
“It won’t be boring.”
~
We were sitting on outdoor benches on Wednesday evening at the restaurant Fodder Factory in Caochangdi, a tiny urban enclave whose intimacy and absence of pretension has attracted some of the city's more self-motivated and independent artists, filmmakers and celebrities, Ai Weiwei included...
There are two lessons to take away from this video, both learned the hard way by a Porsche driver in Shenzhen on Wednesday morning. First, being rich doesn't make you above the law.
Second: cabbies have more friends than you.
The Nanfang reports:
At the start of this POV video taken at Wednesday's protest near Jingwen Shopping Mall in Beijing's Fengtai District, the people chant kangyi, "protest." As a collective they rock back and forth, like a wave. It surges in fits and starts, apparently toward uniformed officers. There is safety in numbers -- civilians outnumber cops -- so individuals feel little hesitancy to shout whatever they please.
But there is also a kind of muted chaos.
