At 2:35 p.m. today, I was sitting in Chinese class studying Lesson 15, "Yanjiang" (n./v.: [to give] a lecture or a speech). At 2:36 p.m. I was still sitting there, unaware that an earthquake had just hit Tongzhou District (or that a much bigger one had hit Sichuan Province).
While towers in the Central Business District were being evacuated, the Taipei Language Institute's fifth-floor skybridge classrooms were tranquil. Whatever primal, instinctual sense of alarm might have passed through my animal brain, the cortex registered nothing more than the usual late-afternoon slump in the language-processing centers. Now that I think very hard about it, I do remember that as I swallowed the last of my second cup of hot water, I felt a wave of vertigo and nausea, and I wondered if I had been drinking too many fluids. Then again, I probably had been drinking too many fluids. Either way, I didn't know about any earthquake till I read it in the New York Times.
