Noah's Publications & Manuscripts

Kids, Before Running Away...

(DESA Challenge article, Summer 2006)

After almost two hours of contortion to fit in a seat above the bus’ wheel well, I’ve lost all feeling in my lower extremities unfolding onto the puddle-pocked pavement below. The downpour prompts the two mile warm-up run past jeering, covered rickshaws, to the back-alley school. Inside the warehouse/dormitory, 40 small Chinese faces break their concentration ever so briefly to smile at the drowning victim who has just scampered into the Fuyong Acrobatics Troupe.

I stretch for 30 minutes while drip drying on the thin red carpet, more dust than fabric, used for padding the cement floor. Taking my place next to a boy throwing spinning vases onto a scabbed bald spot on his head, I work solely on equilibrium exercises by rolling a ball between both temples. While the artists receive their pre-lunch pep-talk, I temper my over-used wrists with handstands.

I decline their lunch call for mystery protein sauce and rice, and use the precious half-hour to set up mats for unassisted inverted maneuvers. A background in trampoline somehow prevents any serious injury. The repeated flipping and falling is the most taxing, rewarding, and ridiculous looking part of my daytrip. While the acrobats nap I stretch again before another hour with upper body circus props. The Chinese meteor and the Maori’s poi, leave my muscles depleted of glycogen and my shirt, again heavily hydrated.

Fortunately, my large backpack is half toys and half nourishment. Milk, bananas, noodles, apples, granola bars and peanut butter are the usual suspects taken into my stomach’s custody. Not even half of my usual dose of Novolog is injected as the kids groggily slump onto the mats, dreading the trainers’ return. Although unsure of the insulin pen’s contents, they all feign understanding when I describe diabetes in my broken and pitiful Mandarin Chinese. Pantomiming a Popeye power-up upon injection, I join a group of jugglers in one corner, and begin channeling gravity-defying creativity for another few hours.

I can feel my body’s various impending weaknesses despite the cross-training, and I bid farewell to the young professionals. I jog back to the bus to let my body simmer in a plastic seat with its’ seven-hour, sweat and dust marinade. This is my only disservice to the American ex-pat image, as my fragrance aura occupies all surrounding seats and air vents.

It was my dedication to performance art that granted the unimaginable privilege of training with prodigies on par with Cirque du Soleil. The Chinese circus is notorious for its’ mind-bending technicality, danger and the complete absence of clowning. The trainers dole out beatings to discourage the clowns, as they reference my poster-child perseverance. Bruce Lee’s fundamental principal of Jeet Kune Do, is to take only what is useful: the knowledge that my privileged position allows love to guide my training while they persevere out of fear and necessity. I came to China to find out if the international tongue of circus and performance arts existed, instead I was accepted by those who invented it.

The fast paced lifestyle and increasingly Westernized eating habits in China’s large cities have tipped the scales of the overweight population demographic from 21% in 1992, to 30% in 2006 (1). China’s population of 23.8 million diabetics ages 20-79 is suspected to more than double by 2025, maintaining its’ place as the first runner-up behind India for largest national populations of diabetics (2). China and India already account for 26% of the global diabetes prevalence (3).

(1): China Ministry of Health & State Statistics Bureau, 2006
(2): International Diabetes Federation Atlas 2nd edition, 2003
(3): Diabetes Research in India and China Today: From Literature-based Mapping to Health-care Policy, 2002