Chasing Out The Devils

Zhengzhou has been under heavy attack for sev­er­al days, appar­ent­ly to chase out accu­mu­lat­ed dev­ils. These aren’t minor explo­sions, though I have been dodg­ing small boys for a cou­ple of weeks. The streets are cleared of the usu­al surg­ing crowds and most shops were shut­tered yes­ter­day. Every rooftop and court­yard is smok­ing with cordite. The favourite seems to be a thing that is a metre long and about 2.5 cm in diam­e­ter. This ejects explo­sive devices at ten sec­ond inter­vals, and they trav­el for about 100 metres before shat­ter­ing with a mighty boom. Basi­cal­ly, it is a mor­tar. Heav­en knows what the casu­al­ty fig­ures are. All the for­eign dev­ils except me have cer­tain­ly been chased out of town.

Chi­na is the most reli­gious coun­try I’ve ever vis­it­ed. The reli­gion is called luck, and it’s con­trol is at the bot­tom of major deci­sions. One of my stu­dents has just sent me this account of an impor­tant domes­tic god:

Chi­nese new year begins from today (23rd of the lunar month). Today is one of the impor­tant fes­ti­vals , which is called “ji4 zao4” . It said that the kitchen god will return to heav­en tomor­row after spend­ing a whole year in this world. He will tell what he has saw to the moster of the gods. But he says bad words most­ly. We always eat a kind of spe­cial sug­ar stick cov­ered with seasame seed because we believe it can stick the kichen god’s mouth.Thus he can’t speak bad words and we will live a good life next year. Peo­ple in some oth­er areas may put some hay and beans in the yard. They are for the kitchen god’s horse.They believe that if the horse is full, it will run faster, so the god of the kichen will be pleased. Thus he won’t speak bad words either.