I feel like an asshole.  It is bizarre how I came to feel like this.  It is my 24th birthday.  I had a really relaxing day.  I spent most of it watching movies, talking and being your average couch potato.  I went to one of the best buffets in Shanghai for dinner with JJ and stuffed myself with tons of sushi, seafood, Beijing duck and even Häagen-Dazs ice cream.  An excellent day, I could not have asked for a more relaxing and pleasure-filled day and yet I come home feeling like an asshole.  How did it come to be?

Well, the smallest of circumstances brought me to the emotional level I am at now.  JJ and I were stuffed to the brim with food after we left the buffet.  We were literally in the restaurant for 3.5 hours!  I still cannot believe we were eating for such a long time.  So we were in a very nice area of Shanghai (Nanjing East Road), walking around, talking.

Suddenly, about 100 yards in front of us, there was a large crowd, with police sirens and policemen outside of a clothing store.  Instinctively, I thought to myself ‘We should check this out, this could be exciting. Maybe its some kind of fight or someone is getting arrested or really anything’.  My own little sick mind always leads to thinking this whenever I see some kind of ruckus in public.  I don’t know if all people share this way of thinking but for me, its never really come to haunt me until tonight.  Usually the result of the public scuffle is mediocrity.  It’s someone arguing or someone getting a ticket from the police or something that really is both not interesting and nobody else’s business.

Tonight though was different.  I selfishly ran ahead, pulling JJ with me, to get a firsthand account of what was going on.  To my immediate dismay, the scene was awful.  It was not the gruesome fight that I had devilshly hoped for.  Nor was it one of the scenes that I am used to that I wish it would have been.  Instead, it was a group of Indians, presumably expatriates that live / work in Shanghai.  They were all distraught, one woman was crying, yelling and screaming louder than anyone would want to see in person while several of her friends were doing their best to try and calm her down.  Police were everywhere, blockading the area, trying to hide what had just happened inside this clothing store from the public’s view.  A police photographer was taking pictures of the scene.  A translator was doing his best to communicate with the group of foreigners and the Chinese police.  In the distance was the center of this horrible situation.  A man, covered with only a thin green sheet of paper, lay flat on the ground just beside one of two escalators on the first floor of this multi-floor clothing store.  

We heard immediately that the man had fallen, accidentally over the railing of the fourth floor.  As soon as anyone could start screaming, the man landed on the first floor, never to be heard from again.  No crime, no bad intentions.  Just a stupid accident.  And yet, to get to the place where I now stood, I aspired to see some kind of ‘action’.  That’s all I thought about.  It never occurred to me that this was an insensitive motive.  That what I could potentially see was most likely none of my business.  I’ve never gone from such a high to such a low on the snap of a finger.  I feel like an asshole.

Yet as I thought about it more, it kind of frightened me.  I mean, this could happen to anyone really.  All it takes is one silly accidental move, one misstep, one bad joke too many and some event of this magnitude could potentially take place and it could happen to anyone.  And not only is the grief limited to the deceased.  That sadness will get carried into all of his friends, his family, his friends’ family, his family’s family.  All of this over a stupid accident.  I feel like an asshole but more importantly, I feel really bad for the family of this young man.