[Six]

… is deafening. With apologies. I’ve been travelling in the ‘wild west’ of Qinghai and Gansu for the past fortnight, with a week left before I’m back in Beijing and blogging will rebegin with a vengeance.

Am I – I hear you ask from afar – cut off from internet, civilisation and all but the most basic toilet facilities, in this ‘wild west’? Did I possibly craft some crude WAP device out of bark and earth in order to post this?

Not quite (except the toilet bit). But still: being on the road means less time for 6, more time praying for a suspension system in my stomach to help ease those bumpy bus rides.

Xin nian kuai le everyone!

In 2009, the most important number will of course be none of the above, but rather … 6. If you like, you can think of it as an upside down 9. I, of course, prefer to think of the 9 as an upside down 6.

To celebrate the exciting new year, I will be focusing this blog more sharply on the stories of young Chinese friends and acquaintances of mine. Look out for Marie, the sexy-jazz dancing student of A.I. at Beida, William, the environmental activist, ‘Leonidas’, adept at ancient Greek, Thomas the painter from Qinghai and more.

You might notice my ‘6 moods to indulge’ categorization (frivolous, dead serious etc.) will shift to a ‘6 characters’ (in search of an author?) feature. This way, you can keep track of the meandering narratives of young Chinese in a new China, as they negotiate 2009.

If the 21st century is China’s, it’s the youth of this evening’s shade who will be in tomorrow’s limelight. So follow the future here.

I tend to highlight the pieces I enjoy (and egocentrically think everyone else will) in the ‘6 Articles I’m reading’ feature, below-left. Once in a while, I stumble across something I feel deserves higher billing. Like these two posts from the indispensable Global Voices Online.

The first is the translated account of 40 parents of missing children all over China, who come to Beijing to petition for them. It’s the most moving thing I’ve read while in Beijing.

The second is the story of Chinese bloggers (again, self-told and translated) on the trail of Beijing’s hidden ‘Black Jails’. It’s a topic which has been floating around the blogosphere.

Both longish – by internet standards. Both worth it.

An advantage of opening the Olympics on 8.8.08 is that few will have wondered what hour of the evening it was likely to kick off. Wang Wei, VP of the BOCOG, told Radio 4 that morning:

Hopefully this lucky day will bring luck to the opening ceremony. According to the weather forecast, there will be light showers, outside the air quality looks a little bit misty, so I think tonight will be lucky.

An odd conception of lucky as far as the weather goes. As a resident of Oxford for 22 years, I sympathize when you live in a city where showers and mist count as good weather.

If 8pm on 8.8.08 is already ridiculously auspicious, then 8.8.88 is one better. (Seoul missed that trick, which is perhaps why their doves were burnt to death by the Olympic flame.) That’s the date, if you remember, of widespread protests across Burma – hundreds of thousands of Burmese chanting “We want democracy” and sporting the symbolic image of a fighting peacock. Human rights groups claim over 3,000 protesters were killed when the army opened fire.

So maybe 8.8.08 isn’t so lucky, if it calls to mind such comparisons – what with the trigger-happy Western media scouting for angles on the Olympics. And let’s not forget that the day in 2001 when China won its Olympic bid was a Friday the 13th – which means nothing to Chinese, but a lot to superstitious folks in the West.

6 is a similar story. It’s auspicious in China: ‘liu’ (the Mandarin) sounds like the word for ‘flowing’ or ‘smooth’. 666 is especially lucky. Not so in the West. Let’s hope this blog picks up that oriental luck, and occidentally – well, it can still be a devilishly good read.