Fanfare for a fellow man

It’s not very fashionable to be male these days. The patriarchy is in the dock everywhere, literally and metaphorically. Sometimes, our very gender seems to be bad news.

Because of legal restrictions on identifying suspects, crime reports often concern what a “man” has done somewhere, usually to another “man”, and how investigators would like to speak to a third “man” who fled the scene on a motorbike.

When the term is constantly repeated, especially by female news readers, it can sound personal. As a male listener, you feel you’re part of the problem.

That’s why today, I want to pay proud tribute to my fellow owner of a Y-chromosome, Mr Li, from Xiaolan in China’s Huangdong province, who was also widely reported to be a “man” this week, as in a thousand variations of the headline “Man catches falling baby”.

You must have seen the video by now. To recap briefly, it shows Mr Li in a Xiaolan street under a window from which an infant (initially unseen) is in danger of falling. First he tries to persuade the baby to go back inside. Then he realises that’s not going to happen.

So now he braces himself urgently. And as the infant hurtles into the picture like a rag-doll, at terrifying speed, he makes a perfect catch.

The footage is all the more riveting because it centres on Mr Li. We see his initial uncertainty. Then we see the moment it dawns on him that the baby is coming his way. From there on, he is a study in concentration, making frantic last-minute positional adjustments, but his gaze never wavering until the child is safely in his arms.

I have seen men do similar things countless times – it’s a fundamental male skill. Almost always, however, the object they were catching was inflatable and made of leather. The difference here was that it was a child’s life at stake. And not just a child – a wet child. The Xiaolan incident happened during a downpour. That baby must have been slippery.

If it’s true, as women claim, that men can’t multi-task, here was the glorious corollary. Anything less than Mr Li’s laser-like focus on one task – no doubt inherited down the millennia from his hunter ancestors – and that baby might not have survived.

It’s interesting to contrast the reaction of others in the street. Just out of shot, for example, a person (I’ll try not to mention the gender, because that might be gratuitous) throws a sheet of cardboard on the ground. Like that’s going to help much.

Then the cardboard thrower moves into shot and, as the crisis approaches, reaches a single arm out towards the window, but about five feet short of the target area, while at all times holding an umbrella with the other hand. That would be the multi-tasking.

Mind you, the footage also features what news reports might call a “second man”, who joins Mr Li in trying to catch the baby, but about as uselessly as the umbrella holder.

On the plus side, he does reach with both hands. Against which, he’s in the wrong position. He’s never going to catch the baby and he knows it. Y-chromosome and all, that would probably be me.

Also, in fairness, I should record that while reading up on Mr Li, I discovered there was a very similar incident in New York last year, wherein it was a woman who made the catch. That too involved a one-year-old falling from an upstairs window. Then Cristina Torre, a teacher, emerged as the hero of the moment.

It would have been a bigger story except that, incredibly for something that happened in America, it appears not to have been recorded on video, either by CCTV or by some onlooker whose first thought was to point a mobile phone.

So it’s not possible to judge Cristina’s technique. Besides, she turned out to be the daughter of Joe Torre, manager of the New York Yankees, and a former player himself. Thus, the catch was widely credited to her baseball genes. Some reports stopped just short of declaring her an honorary male.

I don’t know whether this week’s hero plays ball games. Xiaolan’s badly-translated Wikipedia page does mention the town’s enthusiasm for sport, but then only specifies “ping-pong”, which would hardly help with a falling baby.

Anyway, the important thing is Mr Li’s gender – a fact underlined by his near anonymity. His name is so common in China as to be meaningless. So, as in crime reports, he was widely described as just a “man”. On behalf of men everywhere, I salute him.

@FrankmcnallyIT fmcnally@irishtimes.com