I saw some fucked up shit today on the way home from work.

In the city, there are places where you can pass from one side of the street to the other via underground pedestrian tunnels. I use these things almost daily. Sometimes they’re crowded because they all connect to the underground wholesale store that’s underneath Phoenix Plaza. So I was taking my usual underpass and turned the corner to head up the stairs and almost smacked into a group of people milling around. This isn’t unusual. Chinese people will literally stop in the middle of the sidewalk or hallway to take a call or talk to a friend.

What caught my attention was the man on the stairs. I saw his feet first. He wasn’t wearing shoes. He was curled up so small I actually thought he was a boy and thought he was throwing a tantrum for whatever reason, again, happens all the time. But there wasn’t a parent standing over him yelling and I realized this was a full grown man. No shoes though, so perhaps one of the homeless. But that wasn’t right either because he was wearing a bright gold watch. A very nice watch. He’s rocking back and forth not making any sound. And there’s blood on the stairs.

A lot of blood.

About ten years ago my sister called me and told me her jeep had flipped into a ditch. I called 911, called my mom, got in my car and drove over to where she was before texting my dad. She and her friend had been trying to drift in the Jeep Cherokee. The smartest thing either of them did that day was put on their seatbelts or they would have been killed. The car was totaled. The top smashed almost flat, windshield busted out. It scared the everloving shit out of me, but I handled it.

I woke up one morning just a few years ago thinking my sister was getting things out of her closet to go workout. Until I got this weird Not Right feeling. I walked into her room and found her having a diabetic seizure. I called 911and stayed with her until I had to pin the dogs up for the firemen to come in and did it with so little fanfare my dad and stepmom didn’t know anything was amiss until the firemen came in and the dogs started barking. Sure, afterwards I had nightmares and insomnia for weeks and was terrified to leave her alone at night in case she went low again. And sometimes when she’s too quiet in her room I’ll knock on the wall or something to rile her dog up just so I hear her tell him to shut up. But I fucking handled it.

I cannot handle this. I cannot handle this man bleeding on the stairs. And it’s because I couldn’t help him. I know the number for Yan’an emergency services, but my Chinese is limited to conversational and grocery store vocabulary. I don’t even know what the underpass is called or what street the underpass is under. So I can call and say something close to “Man want help,” or some equivalent, but I have no actual idea of where I am. I navigate this city based on where things are relative to either the school or my apartment.

I couldn’t even give him reassurance that help was coming because who knew if any of the people there had actually bothered to call an ambulance. There was a man on his phone, but he was speaking the local dialect which has nothing in common with the standard Chinese I’ve been learning. For all I know he was on the phone with his wife telling her he just saw a man fall down the stairs. The best I could have offered was a solid, “Hello, how are you?” or “Do you need help?” both of which are fucking stupid things to say to a person bleeding from their ears.

Normally one of my Chinese teachers walks with me on Wednesday, but in a supreme twist, her fiancé got off work early and surprised her with a date. At first, I was angry she wasn’t there. At least then I could have found out if any of the vultures called an ambulance instead of gaping like fish out of water.

But I had a long walk back to the apartment to really think about it and I’m glad she wasn’t. She would not have handled this. I’m certain she has some kind of undiagnosed anxiety disorder and if that scene on the stairs didn’t make her scream she would have been in tears. So the Fates were kind to her tonight in sending her far in the opposite direction of that underpass.

But that left me to choose between standing there with the others or walking back to my apartment.

I came back to my apartment. And I am still bothered on a visceral level by my inability to help. In the States, something like this I would’ve handled. Did anyone call 911? Can someone find some towels? Did you see what happened? Do you know him? How far away is the ambulance? They’re all stupid, stupid short sentences but I can’t say them. I can fumble through and make the verbs and nouns stick together like a refrigerator poem but gods only know if they’ll understand me or of I’ll understand the answer.

They don’t clean the stairs in the underpass. So there’s a good chance that blood will still be there tomorrow.