Within the proximity of the 7 o’clock am hour, mainly 6:30-7:00, the noise begins.  It always seems to be a varied assortment of egocentric humanly blather that covers the town similarly as a layer of dusty sediment covers a desert town:  it’s unrelenting and inescapable.  Firstly, there is the chop-chop-chop-chop of the family above, preparing to break the fast of the previous night; this begins around 6:45 in the dim of the morn.  This clatter also can be experienced at 11:30 am and 5:30 pm with daily synchronistic fury.  When you try to ignore it, the candid chop-chop-chop becomes an explosive boom-boom-boom, but if you are actually able to disregard it, the other sounds will succeed in breaking you from your already jilted, staggered slumber. 

 

You can hear dogs barking, children screaming, the local, nameless to all, invalid that sells newspapers blubber and beckon, the others that sell everything from tofu to bread to milk off of the back of bicycles call out, the sounds of cooking and frying filters in from all directions, machinery noises from the smoke-spewing factory nearby, firecrackers at all hours, the clatter of metal, glass breaking, chop-chop-chop, boom-boom-boom, haphazard shards of conversation, the clop-clop and shuffling clamor of stone stairs being ascended and descended, every measurable by decibel fraction of noise exists here.  It’s as if the genesis of all noise originated here in LangZhong, China; loudness is in its natural environment; and it has it’s own ecosystem of stability.  Noise feeds upon noise and creates a nearly visible web of cacophony.  If you could see sound waves, it would appear as if the Fates were weaving over this city.

 

Let’s not forget that at 6:30 am on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday (sometimes sporadically on Tuesday and Thursday as well…as well as on the weekends since the Chinese students are in school then as well) the theme song of Langzhong Middle School, a poorly keyboarded, MIDI-esque, musical piece of rubbish is trumpeted via loudspeakers which unfortunately lack suitable treble and bass power; basically it sounds like the work of a remedial, seventh grade music class.  Besides the poor aesthetic quality and horrid reverberation of the song, my close proximity with the school makes it inevitable that my slumber by this point is condemned to failure.  The entire neighborhood, a “small city” of no less than 1,000,000, also suffers simultaneously, but nothing is done to correct the annoyance.  We suffer in silence.