A Month Of Wet

It rained in June. A lot. I realize that this is the rainy season, but I have lived in this city for about five years and I have never seen it this wet. My county is considered the hottest in the entire country. Typhoons either hit us directly or come pretty close every year and none of them have brought as much rain. I lived a little farther north in a wetter county my first few years in this country. It never rained nearly as much there. There was a category 4 super typhoon during my first typhoon season in the country that ran right over my little town and a category 5 the next year. Neither brought as much rain as this June.

It rained every day in June. It was not a constant Forrest Gump rain. Sometimes it would stop for a few hours, but there was some amount of rainfall every single day. And it was raining every day I drove to work. If you know anything about the way the Chinese drive then you know why this is exceptionally dangerous. It rained almost every day in July, but there were a few relatively dry days and even one or two where one could see the sun.

When I was 8 it rained a lot. It seemed like it rained forever, but it was probably only a few days. I looked it up online and some almanac site said there was 33.44 inches (849mm) of rainfall that year; the most in over 100 years. So maybe my memory is not so exaggerated. That same site said that 2005 was even worse (38”/964mm), but I was not there.

By comparison, we usually get about 1800mm of rain here every year. There are no official figures for this June yet. At least I could not find any in the five seconds I looked. But I found a news article that reported 611mm of rainfall. In one month. That seems like a lot to me. And it rains less here than most counties.

I have been to Thailand during the rainy season. It rains a lot there, too. Bangkok gets about 300mm in September. It is always hot and humid in Bangkok, but I have never seen it rain there as much as it is raining here. I have been to Hong Kong in August, when they get an average of 400mm. It did not rain nearly as much as it is raining here. But Hong Kong’s weather has been odd lately, what with a horrible pollution problem and all that fake climate change the Boston reenactors like to tell you about. The last 10 years have set new records in heat and rain.

One of the foreigners at my school is from England and he said it has rained more here than anything he has ever seen there. I always thought London was a particularly rainy city, but everything I have seen during my brief rainfall research says that there is rarely over 60mm in any given month. That seems piss poor by Asian standards.

There was one day at work when lightning was clearly visible from the classrooms. The reason we saw lightning on only one day is because the buildings here are so close together that one cannot see the sky without standing on the top floor and making an unreasonable effort to look upward. My school is in a small town, but the downtown area likes to pretend that it is a big city. The children reacted much as my class did when I was five years old. Except that these children are all over 10 and they live in a part of the world that sees far more rain and lightning than I did at their age. Their exaggerated reactions to common events never fail to surprise me. Lizards used to enter the classroom every day in the tiny farm village I lived in a few years ago. The children would always scream and panic at first sight. And then their attention was always fixed on the lizard rather than whatever fascinating grammar point I was teaching until it left the room. Mosquitos are the most common pest around here; in numbers probably as numerous as cockroaches and scooter monkeys. And yet every single time one flies into the classroom it gets the students’ undivided attention. When a cockroach enters the room I might as well dismiss the class. I suppose I should be most surprised by my own reactions since their melodramatics are such common events.

In sharp contrast to the predictable reactions of Chinese children, my American adult reactions sometimes even surprise myself. With all the rain there has been a fair amount of lightning. Largely invisible in the classroom, it is noticeable at home and even more obvious on the road. Usually when I drive to work there is lightning somewhere in the distance. After watching it almost every day for over two months it became far too commonplace to warrant a mention. But one day the lightning realized that sparks in the distance were not impressing me and it decided to give me a more interesting show. Instead of ignoring brief flashes from one direction I was looking at bright lights bursting all around me. And the accompanying thunder was so loud that I could hear it over the tunes blasting in the car. I wanted to pull over and watch but I was on the way to work. And I never leave early enough to make time to stop and watch the lightning.

The good thing about driving in constant traffic is that when you drive through a lightning storm there really is no need to worry about your car acting as a lightning rod. There are always plenty of trucks and larger vehicles around me to take one for the team should the need arise. I never got to see that, but while I was at a red light I watched a nearby tree explode like Peter North. It was super cool, as the kids say. I assume some children somewhere say that. I have never been the kind of person who particularly cares about fireworks shows, but watching that lightning tear the shit out of that tree gave me all the oohs and aahs I need to fill my recommended daily allowance.

Another oddity and something that did not really occur to me until late June is that despite all the rain there has been little if any flooding. There was a typhoon last year that killed about a thousand people and left over 100,000 homeless. The agriculture industry is still recovering. Most typhoons kill a dozen or so people. And this was only a small category 1 typhoon. It was unusually dry prior to the typhoon so once the rains came they caused mudslides and floods that did most of the damage. An entire town was wiped off the map by mudslides. It is no more. Pi Chi went there. I have seen pictures.

This year’s month of wet was proceeded by plenty of rain. It did not rain every day in May, but there was more than enough for my liking. One of my concerns when we moved to our current apartment was that the windows do not let in nearly as much light as in our previous apartment. This has not been an issue since there have only been a few sunny days in the entire time we have been here. It has been the opposite of super cool.