Like A Teapot

The scale of damage of Monday's earthquake in China is astonishing. Partly because it hit a densely populated rural area where there were many simple-structured buildings and rescue effort is hard to reach due to testing road and weather conditions. The epicenter, Wenchuan, is near Chengdu, the capictal city of Sichuan province, where Sichuan cuisine originates.

Sichuan lies right next to Tibet. Chengdu is known for, among other things, producing good looking women. This is largely because it is traditionally a major land, water, and air transportation junction where Chinese of different ethnic backgrounds have met and mixed. ("Chuan" in Wenchuan or Sichuan means brook/stream/river, as "ford" in Oxford and Rockford.) Then the hot and spicy diet is said to help cleanse the guts giving the local women fine skins. My impression is that girls from Chengdu are not particularly beautiful, but they are unpretentious and unabashed in beautifying and showing off themselves, thus giving travelling businessmen the impression that the streets of Chengdu are full of eye candies.

What I intend to say is the locale of the disaster area is a bit sensitive. The heaviest devastation took place in a strategically important region of China. Thus, it is not surprising that, so far, international offers of emergency rescue support have been declined. It is already a progress, however, that some forms of humanitarian aids are accepted. Once upon a time, all forms of foreign aids were flatly declined for face and other reasons.
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Update of May 15: China has accepted help from two Asian rescue teams, Japan and Taiwan.