Tonight Stacey and I decided to walk downtown for dumplings. Just after we walked past the corner market I noticed a man learning oddly into the backseat of a Jetta. It looked like he was stretching or doing yoga.
As we walked past the car I saw it wasn’t yoga–he was kneeing a man in the back seat in the groin.
There was at least one other man in the back of the car, apparently trying to keep the victim inside.
On the far side of a car a small crowd had gathered to watch the fight. They’d probably heard the guy screaming as he was getting hit in the crotch.
I’d slowed down to get a better look when the yoga guy pulled a pistol out of his waistband.
This is when things start to get blurry. Literally; my vision blurred and everything got very bright. Stacey yelled “Gun!â€, grabbed my arm, and started to run. I tried to get behind a van. I looked back and saw the gun against the victim’s head. The man with the gun said, “I’ll fucking shoot you.†I heard him cock the hammer. All I could think was that I didn’t want to see some guy get shot, or get shot myself.
An old man sitting on a stoop next to us laughed.
“Scared?â€
I never heard a shot. We walked away as fast as we could and didn’t look back. At the gate to the park we went inside and tried to look inconspicuous.Even now I have no idea what the hell was going on. As far as I know, handgun ownership is illegal in China. It seems unlikely that a crowd would gather to watch criminals beat and kidnap someone, so perhaps it was the police. There are lots of officers in plain clothes driving unmarked cars, so it may just have been a violent arrest.
Michael tried to convince us that we saw part of a TV show being filmed. This is the theory that’s probably least likely to be true, but the one I’d like to believe the most. If I’m immortalized in China as looking terrified and running away from a TV shoot, that’s worth not having seen someone’s life threatened.
Yes, people would gather around to watch someone get held up at gun point, beat up, threatened, or even bleed to death after an accident, and no one would call anyone for help. First, sometimes it’s unclear who should be called or how. Second, if you call you’re responsible. There are no good Semaritan laws to protect passerbyers who help, so most people don’t. I would bet that you saw something real and scary against the police or TV shoot theory.
It turned out to have been the cops–an officer came by my apartment the next day.
Different types of tragedies draw different crowds. People seem only willing to watch spousal abuse from a distance. Car accidents everyone gets close to (encircling bleeding people lying on the sidewalk, inspecting damage to the car). Fights are watched intensely, but maybe from a little distance if things look like they might spill over. Corpses are ignored; I saw someone literally step over the legs of a man who’d frozen to death in the streets.