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.
