Touchdown
See how Chinese boys did it
23
Aril 2007
A few days ago, while chatting
with her neighbour downstairs, a Shanghai
lady registered a dark mass falling from the
sky and landing in shrubs. At first she
thought it must be someone upstairs throwing
rubbish out of the balcony, but then she
noticed two tiny hands raised from the shrub
waving.
“Heavens!” she cried out to
her neighbour, “See that? There are hands
over there!” But before she had finished
her exclamation, the dark mass came out of
the shrub and transformed into a human. It
was a five-year old boy living on the 7th
floor of her block.
It turned out that a few minutes
ago this naughty boy playing in the balcony
suddenly had a strong urge to explore what
the life would be like on the other side of
the balustrade. He decided to see it for
himself and climbed over the barrier. The
world in the other side happened to be ruled
by Isaac Newton’s classic physics and have
a very strong gravity force. Once he crossed
over the line he was immediate attracted to
the earth, well, almost – he first landed
on the caravan canopy on the third floor then
had a brush with electricity lines on the
second floor before touching down on the
shrubs.
By the time his distraught mom
dashed down through the conventional passage,
the boy was up and running again. But the
little superman has his weak point too. When
he was told by his mother that he would be
sent to hospital for a check up, he was
scared as hell. “I don’t’ want a jab!”
he protested.
And
he is not the only tiny superman in China.
Some
weeks ago, another five-year old in Hubei
province flew out of a second floor window.
The
boy visited his relatives in a village with
his mother during the tomb-sweeping festival.
The next day the adults needed to ascend high
to the graveyard in the mountain, and left
him at the home with his cousin sister. The
door was then locked from outside.
It
wasn’t what the boy and his cousin had
planned for their lives in the countryside.
They decided to escape.
Their
initial plan was to slide down a rope. After
failing to found even a reasonably thick
string, they took a bed sheet as a
substitute. When they realised that the sheet
wasn’t long enough to reach the ground, the
little boy’s genius shone brilliantly - he
believed he could do without the rope or
sheet all together and switch to a far more
advanced technology. So he popped open an
umbrella and jumped down the window to
execute his maiden skydive.
But
his heroic feat was spoiled in the middle of
the air. The poor-quality parachute was torn
away from the handle, and our hero
experienced an embarrassing hard landing on
his bottom.
When
the adults eventually returned from the
mountain, they discovered in their puzzlement
that the little boy somehow was sitting
outside, instead of inside, of the front
door, with a broken umbrella nearby and an
anxious little girl looking down from an
upstairs window.
