The day after Christmas the trans-Pacific cable broke and China was cut off from the rest of the world.  Suddenly we were forced to live in China the way people lived here back in the dark ages, five or ten years ago.  We had to do without NPR, “Battlestar Galactica” and “The Office.”  Not only that but we couldn’t use our American Yahoo! account to keep in contact with our families. 

We dealt with the problem by opening up a Chinese Yahoo! account which worked just fine.  It seemed strange that e-mails could be re-routed without any problems, but navigating the web was impossible.  Then we learned another strange fact from some friends:  Skype, the internet phone service, was working fine, and so were various other peer-to-peer file sharing services.  After weeks of radio silence we were able to talk to our families.  It was a relief, but it made the whole situation seem very odd.  Why could people around the world send full length movies to each other, and yet still be unable to web surf?

The two newspapers we could access were the China Daily and Al Jazeera on line.  We also found a peer-to-peer site that offered live coverage from various American TV stations, but the only one that worked was a Fox affiliate in California.  With Fox on one side and Al Jazeera on the other, we could be lied to by two completely different, opposing sources.

We were jonesing for non-Fox, American news, so we asked friends from home to send us interesting newspaper articles.  Most papers offer the option to “click here to send this article to a friend,” but that didn’t work for us because we couldn’t follow the links to the actual articles.  Our friends had to cut and paste articles into the texts of e-mails, and they sent them to our Chinese account.  That worked well.

The problems with the cable lasted longer than anyone thought they would.  The damage was serious, and the repairs had to take place deep under water.  It seemed like every two weeks the estimated date for a solution was moved further and further away.  After a while we became suspicious.  Was the problem really the earthquake, or was it something more nefarious?  We may never know.

But now everything is back to normal.  Sort of.  We have full access to the internet at the office at school, and also at the internet cafe where I am writing this, but we are still limited back in our apartment.  At home, we have to be satisfied with the China Daily and Al Jazeera.  At least now I can go to the net bar, and do the cutting and pasting myself.  I think I might send a copy of Savage Love to the account we can access from home.  It has been a while since we have heard from Dan.