Guangzhou Dispatches

The old man called to me from the side of the road. “Sit for a while,” he said. “Talk to me.” It was getting late. Aside for a few streetlamps scattered between the rigid blue refugee tents there wasn’t much in the way of light. The earthquake had extinguished the neon and once gleaming signs that still clung to the shells of abandoned buildings.

When I pulled up a rough wooden stool and looked at the man, close, for the first time, I saw how old he was. His face was creviced and deep, and the crags of his nose heaved his huge glasses askew and you could wonder if he had been struck by lightning. His block torso was tied to the faintest rods of legs, bent in two at the nub of the knees. He didn’t offer me anything to drink because he had nothing to offer. We sat and exchanged the usual pleasantries, and he chided me for getting a hotel room in the one hotel still standing in town (most visitors were funneled there, and my room was a converted gaming den - an air mattress stuck in the space between a mahjong table and the TV – no one in town seemed much in the mood for games) because I could share his bunk in the tent with him. I told him next time, I would take him up on his offer, and he smiled and looked off at the steam shovels still digging across the road.

It’s rare to find an old man all alone and I worried about asking the unthinkable, if his family was crushed when his city shook. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising in the midst of obvious devastation but it is, hearing people point out sites of death, watching them list family members gone with the vacant stare that comes from two months of grief. But the old man wasn’t one of those people. He lowered his voice as he told me. Years ago, while he worked, his wife started sleeping with his best friend. This was back then, long ago.

So the whole situation seems sort of ironic to him. How when the earthquake started and cracks appeared on the walls he could imagine chunks of his home cascading down and burying him, and how, now that he’s alone and he’s old and his legs don’t work well and his lungs seem to take in no air at all no one would hear him scream, and how he walked away from his ruined home with the slightest of injuries and wandered on the streets for hours, alone and unattended to as he listened to the shrieks of trapped neighbors. He didn’t know what to think about that.

We were in the remote mountain town of Qingchuan, five and a half hours along twisting roads from the provincial capital of Chengdu. The place simply materializes from forested nothingness. Sichuan is known for its natural splendor and is one of the top tourist sites in the country. The mountains here mark the edge of the epic ranges that dominate the province’s neighbor to the west: Tibet. It was little wonder that the man, originally from mountains to the north, arrived in town and never quite had the motivation to leave. He said he hadn’t seen his wife around for years.

We sat in the twilight, exchanging occasional grunts of questions but mostly just sitting there. After a while the steam shovels stopped. There was something approaching silence. It was stunning, this pause. No matter where you go in China there is a constant decibel drone, an omnipresence of sound, of noise, of life that takes months to get used to. And now there was almost nothing. Across the river, a lone player on a stringed er hu lobbed sad notes into the night air. I wondered how long it’s been since hundreds of people on the banks of the river cocked their heads to listen to melodies conceived so far in the past. Not everyone was listening of course. Some tents by the river glowed from within with television sets miraculously undamaged by the quake and then hauled to the shelters. The sets cast fantastical shadows against the light blue inside of the tents, larger than life etchings of humans that sat, unmoving, like statues. I took leave of the man and walked down the river. When I walked back, I saw that the man had moved off down the road. He had taken his stool and perched himself behind some people a few tents over. He slowly smoked a cigarette and watched TV over their shoulders.

As I walked back to the hotel, I came across a large group of smiling neighbors arranged as an audience before three almost painfully cute young girls. School had just restarted in the aftermath of the largest natural disaster to strike China in thirty years, and the girls had a new song to share. Everyone was on the street, under the tied canvass of temporary tents. They were seated on low wooden stools and the mood was joyous. They called me over and asked me to sit and watch the show. When the girls started with their giggle-laden song and dance the group roared with applause and the girls responded with gigantic smiles. When the song was over the girls, two of whom were twins, looked at each other and, unwilling to let the spotlight fade, launched into the song again.

The woman sitting next to me was a teacher in the local school, which had been condemned and relocated to a field of temporary shelters at the edge of town. “You know,” she said, “before the earthquake I didn’t know what an earthquake was. When it started I thought it was a war. And then I thought, why would anyone attack Qingchuan?” The girls had stopped their singing and ran off down the street to brush their teeth in the water from the tap set up for the newly homeless by a storm grate in the road. As they ran, the earth trembled beneath us and people across the street bolted from the lee of a building already splintered and heaving to the side. It was over fast. “An aftershock,” the teacher said. I asked her if she was ever scared and she laughed. Two months of this, she said, and it’s become routine.

*

In the immediate aftermath of the quake, images of devastation were everywhere. It was a watershed moment in China, a convulsion of national mourning and exultation. There was a renewed sense, it seemed, of what it actually meant to be Chinese, and to drop everything and rush to help those affected by the disaster, even if it simply meant helping organize a donation drive, felt like a universal wish of unwavering fervor. Journalists scrambled to the area as tens of thousands of army soldiers clambered over obliterated mountain roads to rescue whoever they could.

Then, time started to pass. Questions were raised, about shoddy construction, about military training for rescue, and press openness quietly and definitively ended. The Olympics approached and, as there were no more survivors to be pulled from the rubble, attention ebbed away. I arrived two and a half months after the disaster and toured the area for about a week. I had no agenda or plan, other than just trying to see what was happening, and to get some reading on what the future might hold for the millions thrust out on the streets.

Soon after I arrived, before I travelled on my own over the mountains, I set off in a car with two journalists and a professor of local history, all of whom had crisscrossed the vast disaster region in the days and weeks after the quake hit. Our stops were Dujiangyan and Hanwang, places that had been eviscerated by the quake.

Everyone had an agenda. The professor to take photos in front of a dam he was supposed to help consult on, the journalists to dig out something sinister – corruption in the distribution of temporary housing, missed targets for moving people out of tents and into something more permanent before the end of summer. It seemed so fruitless, all of it, as we posed in front of the damn to satisfy the professor and as the journalists sniffed quotes out from people for stories they could never hope to get past the censors. I worried, before I had even started experiencing this ravaged place, that something essential and human had already been excavated from the wreckage to serve the personal motivations of so many outsiders.

Our car pulled up along the depressed streets on the outskirts of Dujiangyan. The day was gray and cool. There was little to differentiate the sky from the white plaster buildings latticed with cracks that lined the road. Electrical wires hung low over the quiet, dusty streets. Along one side of the road, sections of wooden boards and aluminum siding lined a vast plot of rubble. This was once a school, a combined elementary and middle school where hundreds died. There have been promises made, promises of thorough investigations and of finding out who was responsible for the shoddy construction that killed so many, but government payoffs to parents have begun and the place itself is now bulldozed and gone. No one walking through would ever know what was once there, expect maybe if they asked why there were a few intact basketball courts standing sentinel over the void.

Across the street from the school, a man had set up his blue disaster tent in the space surrounding a children’s jungle gym. I asked him if I could take some pictures and he said sure, the cops were all around the corner in their van playing cards, so why not. He lifted the flap of his tent to reveal a hard bed and a table cluttered together above the uncovered asphalt beneath. I snapped. He lowered the flap.

My journalist guide was perched on a small mound of rubble, taking pictures of the empty school grounds. He was holding court with a family of out-of-towners, who were also clutching their cameras.

“I heard people died here.”

“Yes, many,” the journalist said.

“Like, over a hundred?”

“Many hundreds.”

“Wow.” The man began taking pictures.

I wondered aloud about the lack of any sort of memorial. There were no flowers, no plaque nailed to the warped boards surrounding the nothingness. The journalist told me that wasn’t entirely true.

And, then, there they were. Amidst the cracked sections of sidewalk were dark charred circles, the ash long since blown away. In the days and weeks after the unthinkable happened, parents burnt money on the ground to honor the dead. The parents are quiet now. Maybe someday there will be a plaque, maybe on the wall of the new school. But not now.

The journalist took me aside. “I have it,” he said. “What?” “The list of all the parents whose children were killed. And their phone numbers. A contact gave it to me.” “Well, would it be any use to call them now?” He looked at me for a minute. “No. But I will. Soon.”

It didn’t seem likely. The group wanted to go survey the deleted school from another angle, where the barriers gave way to a fence. To get there, though, you had to round the corner, past where some workers were fixing downed power lines and past where a long police van was parked. The officers were playing cards, and trailed us with their eyes in between hands. Our cameras had all disappeared into pockets and backpacks and despite no one’s wanting to look the police in the eye everyone stared directly at them. We turned around and surveyed the school. Then we hurried back to the car. The phone calls, even if they were made, weren’t likely to achieve all that much. We drove on to the next site.

*

In the weeks after the disaster many friends of mine made the trip to Sichuan. Most were journalists but others were simply volunteers, and having actually visited the site became a badge of honor. It also enabled one to speak as an authority figure, as my group of friends mainly consists of cynical journalists who live daily with faxes, emails, and telephone calls from government censors banning coverage of something or another. At the discussion salon I attended, an entire session was devoted to “The story behind the story in Sichuan” which consisted entirely of shocked, rambling accounts of devastation by those of us who had been there. One young woman, a journalist, talked for nearly an hour about what it was like to go from site to site, seeing endless rows of bodies swathed in whatever the rescuers could find. Parents knelt by the side of their children, often their only one, weeping. Children screamed by the corpses of parents. Several people in the audience started crying and when the woman stopped speaking people didn’t really have all that much to say.

Death affects people differently, though, I guess. At dinner about a month after the quake, a photojournalist friend showed me and Ivy his collected shots from the days and weeks after the disaster. His work was familiar. He works for a top newspaper and his photo of rescuers arranged in mourning during a national moment of silence became the definitive image of collective agony and resolve. Of course, he didn’t see it this way. After a month spent collecting pathos from senseless death, his only commentary on the pictures were to gleefully point out all the bodies. “Shiti!” he chirped, corpse! smushing his finger against the computer screen. “Shiti! Shiti! Shiti! Shiti!”

*

On the morning I was to leave Qingchuan, I decided to take a walk through town. I hadn’t slept well. There were images that were hard to process and after a couple of days here it was catching up with me. I couldn’t stop thinking of this tiny place called Hanwang, where a couple of thousand people had died when a desalination plant collapsed. I kept thinking about this one street toward the edge of town that led to a row of locally-owned factories.

The street was on the far edge of town. I remember looking down the lane which was dominated at an intersection by a soaring metallic statue. It was starkly majestic in the way of an ill-conceived section of Futureland at Disneyland, imagining a space-age future with the weird aesthetics of the 1970s. It was huge this sweeping metal thing, and it presided over absolutely nothing.

It was like the house from Great Expectations or the jungle ruins of the Aztec. Huge sprouts of flowering weeks lined and interspersed the road. It looked like a place forsaken and left to rot. As I walked through the overgrown streets, I could only wonder about how fast, exactly, plants can grow. I didn’t think it would be possible, in two months, for nature to make it seem like a Chinese people alive and well had gone extinct so very long ago. It was oddly comforting, to think that so much time had passed one could be freed from wondering if the air still hung with the unfulfilled dreams of ghosts. I climbed the stairs of a paralyzed building, and stopped when I found myself at the third floor staring through a crumbled wall out through to the open sky.

To the left, though, to the left were children, grimy but exploding with energy. The kids and I engaged in a photo shoot while their parents beamed from the chairs outside their tents. One of the dads walked me to his factory, which had been undamaged in the quake. Good bricks, he said. The other factories in town had all been destroyed. As we walked, we passed doors painted with date and time stamps from the army. When, exactly, had rescuers arrived to check the place out? The factory owner shrugged. Yes, they did a good job, the army. Just not quite as soon after the disaster as the markings would have you believe. Instead it was an advance team of a party official, a couple of soldiers and a photographer, who arrived to document the deployment of life-saving aid. Miraculously, I thought, there wasn’t a trace of bitterness in his voice. His family, I guess, had survived. I was thinking about this because as I walked around Qingchuan I came across another factory owner, a slim, intense man running low on optimism.

I didn’t see the man at first. He was there, down in the rubble spread before a steam shovel, but he was just one of scores with his face caked in dust and I figured he was another worker. Homes and businesses obliterated in the quake, the city’s thousands had taken to systematically stripping their town bare, brick by brick. They hacked at walls with sledgehammers, women using adzes to chip away bits of cement from bricks that once represented homes. It’s a massive, hopeless project, but the prospect of earning a few kuai a day as opposed to sitting and doing nothing at all seems like an easy enough choice.

And yet here, in this clearing, the reclamation of raw material buzzed around a steam shovel. It struck me as odd. There was a surprising lack of machinery in the area, and what vehicles were working were all devoted to the building of temporary housing. I had bumped into teams of surveyors around the city who told me that the real wrecking work, the city-wide demolition, was still a ways off as plans needed to be finalized.

People walked without saying much. Kneeling to load baskets of bricks and unload them a hundred feet away. A shelter had sprung up in some shade, a structure of stacks of reclaimed bricks. A few guys, sweating, smoking, were perched on the brick tower. They gave me a hand up and on top and we talked when it got quieter or we weren’t coughing from the dust. We didn’t move much. The brick piles wobbled, built as they were of bricks from a hundred factories from everywhere, of every size and color.

I sat next to a young guy. The steam shovel was his and I’d learn later that soon after the quake, when the emergency call went out from the government to summon anyone with some machinery, he had rushed his shovel out on the highway and supervised the lifting of a fallen concrete wall in one of the schools in Dujiangyan. The wall, of course, had to be lifted but it didn’t make much difference. They were all crushed, the children underneath, the scores of children betrayed by their very classrooms. But now, he said, this was something more like business.

The slim factory owner clambered aboard the bricks and offered me a cigarette. He searched the debris collected nearby and came up with a large walnut shell, split open and covered in dust. “I made these,” he said, “over there.” He pointed out at his old plant, where walnuts were seasoned and packaged. The structure was gone, and a steam shovel presided over a mound of rubble several feet high. He had a fanny pack on, a simple black one that he wore at the front. He unzipped it and took out a laminated picture of what the building used to look like. The sun was harsh that day, and the obliteration of factories for miles around had turned the sky a deep blue. The old building was a massive affair, built of terracotta colored bricks and the striking plastic columns that stood as marks of cultivated wealth in poorer areas. It was built three years ago using money cobbled together from family members after the man had toiled in a factory just like it in some slightly richer province. Business used to be pretty good.

That day two and a half months ago, at half past two in the afternoon, his mother and his daughter were inside the place, as they often were just waiting for dad to come back from lunch. Chinese business lunches are often meandering affairs, especially if you are some citizen entrepreneur in need of some government official’s favor. The baijiu, the beer and the food keep coming and an hour-long meeting stretches to the late afternoon. So the man wasn’t back in time to die with his daughter and his mother. He turns venomous when people are callous enough to suggest that his remaining alive was testament to some form of luck.

There were psychiatrists roaming the quake zone soon after the disaster. I asked the man if he ever went to see one but he shook his head. “My friends were all telling me to go talk to the doctor but I did not need to. I have lost everything, what is there to say?” “It will help you move on,” I offered. He looked at me, a look I can only describe as the look of a man who has worked nearly every day of his life. “Who does not move on? Don’t you have to eat? Before all this happened, everything I ever did was for my family, my daughter. And now she is dead and there is no reason for me to do anything. But me dying too won’t help anything.”

He pulled out a few more laminated pictures. One showed his frail mother standing before his terra cotta factory. The others, all taken on the same day, showed his daughter in face paint and sparkly white dress, beaming before performing with her classmates. She was round-faced and short.

In the days after his daughter and mother were pulled from their walnut factory tomb, and after the burial rites had been administered, the man tried to escape. A cousin of his had relocated to Chongqing some time ago, and he went their seeking solace, and seeking work. He began planning for his eventual resumption of normal life – he still had a wife, and his father – wondering if a walnut factory could rise again soon, somewhere else. He stayed away from the site of his daughter’s death.

He tried to work. Truly, he says, long days of work anywhere that would have him, any place to earn a few kuai (though he had money of his own), and simply get life moving again. He failed. Waves of sadness overwhelmed him nightly. He couldn’t conscience trying to move on so quickly. So he made other arrangements. In Qingchuan, demolition of buildings wasn’t set to begin for at least another month, but the man knew that as long as the stones and plaster that had crushed his daughter still existed, his life would be in permanent stasis. He dug into his meager savings and hired a demolition outfit from Chengdu. They made the ride up to town. Their mission was to erase the building completely, shovelful by shovelful, while the man watched.

This was the process I had stumbled upon, large-scale steam shovel psychotherapy. The other men, the workers toiling to demolish this large factory, passed around the laminated pictures and nodded in sympathy. “I’m glad we can help,” one of them said. The man shook his head and started crying.

Then he stopped, and dried his eyes. He looked at me. “You know what would really help, help me post my details and experience on Alibaba.com,” he said, talking about a popular website meant to connect Chinese manufacturers with overseas buyers and investors. Everyone laughed, but he was serious. “I know how to create the best walnut factory around. I will create another one. I just need some clients again.”

A few yards away, the steam shove had transferred itself to the ground, and had spun around to scoop up the platform it had been resting on. Long trails of bricks and bent rebar went tumbling into a dump truck. When the last of the mound had been shoveled away, the dump truck drove off to the city outskirts where more workers left homeless by the quake would set about chipping away at the bricks to free them from the mortar that had long kept them in place.

*

Flowers in Dujiangyan. It was odd to see them, bright red and bound together in circles by the side of the road. This was a city of death. Buildings were cracked – tents sprawled everywhere. The first time I was there one of the journalists I was travelling with said everyone stayed outside, on the street, because no one trusted the indoors anymore. I wasn’t sure. But maybe. The hospital had sandwiched upon itself, with the upper floors obliterating the lower ones.

Days before on these same streets, the journalists, the professor and I met a man and his son sitting under a tree. Newspapers were spread out before them in the full, luxurious way you almost never see, the full-wingspan reading style of someone with all the time in the world. And the man was livid. The blue tents were stifling and the government day in and day out with its lies. He pointed to an article. “Temporary Housing Completed,” and he looked at us, and then looked at the article and then looked at the tent he was still living in and put his hands on his head. It was one thing to lie in some Beijing paper. Fine, tell them the temporary housing was finished and no one would be the wiser. But to put it in the local paper? Where everyone reading it was an earthquake victim and they were still so obviously, so plainly still living on the streets? Were they sick?

I was walking on the far edge of town when I saw the flowers amidst the omnipresent gray. They were the flowers of a grand opening. A new business, a freshly constructed restaurant around the corner from a field of tents. And I wondered about who could imagine such a thing, investing in the future when the past was still weeks away from demolition. Yet there it was. I sat down, alone at a massive table for eight. The waitress came over and I took her recommendation and then sat back, looking at the empty streets. A single blue tent stood at the intersection a few feet away.

Li is a wispy, quiet man of 28. After the earthquake he, like everyone else, lost his home and was forced out in the streets. Thankfully, no one died. In fact, and this, he says, shows you how crazy life is, his son was born less than a month after the earthquake, a beautiful, healthy baby boy and a saving grace to everyone in the city who happened to meet him. It was mostly that, he says, his angelic new son that gave him the idea of being a disaster entrepreneur. We talked in the late afternoon heat, surrounded by his fresh-faced staff, who relished the tale of this restaurant employee turned chef who chose to stake his future on this middle of nowhere street. They smiled as he drew out the characters he chose for his son’s name. Li Zhenxi. Li Splendid Earthquake. The man explained that, finally, something beautiful had emerged from the wreckage.

*

People ask me what it was like to be there and I never know quite what to say. Can I say what it’s like to look out upon fields and fields of temporary homes, like little cities rising from nothing to shelter thousands? Or know whether to be filled with hate or admiration for a system as corrupt as anything conceivable but also capable of restoring life in a way that is impossible to not to look upon with grateful wonder? Or even to know what to make of the residents themselves, people who lost entire cities and yet resisted most government plans to relocate them to other provinces and set them up with jobs because they would rather sit and wait for their hometowns to come back to life?

The death of tens of thousands doesn’t register until you see the site where it happened. Until you can see the buildings, imploded and dead, scattered in front of you and you can start to count off ten here, twenty there, a school where lives must have been lost by the hundreds, it is impossible to visualize. I couldn’t help those thoughts staring out at the deserted city of Beichuan on my last day in the area. This was the place on the news. The epicenter of devastation, the place that brought observers to instant tears. The city is in the mountains, occupying a valley bisected by a meandering river of lovely blue. Or maybe it wasn’t blue then, but it is now, now that life there has stopped.

I arrived with a motorcycle driver who sped my from the bus stop down the road up over the destroyed concrete of the highway and on before the gates of town. In the days after the quake, rescue workers combed the place for survivors. Then they combed it for the corpses still buried inside. And then, amazingly, they did absolutely nothing at all.

At some point in the gloomy aftermath leaders met to discuss what to do with this ruined carcass of a city. In most places the decision to demolish and rebuild was simply assumed, but here, well, here the city was annihilated. One leader declared the city, this once living place, a permanent museum. The government brought in fencing and razor wire. In days, the entirety of this mountain town was sealed off from the world, protected at the front gate by soldiers with machine guns and sign after sign carrying spray painted images of skulls and crossbones.

I had spent a week in the area, roaming through tents and ruins but propelled always by a lingering faith in the future. It was comforting to think that all these people, regardless of corruption or infighting, were assured of the progress of reconstruction. Here, though, was a place abandoned to time. As my motorcycle driver sped me up a mountain road for a better look, we passed a local entrepreneur who had already set up a telescope and a photo studio to take pictures of tourists eager for memories of the ruined town. But it was still early in the grieving yet, and she was the only one operating.

The driver and I pulled off the road and walked towards the cliff face. Down in the valley once tall buildings kneeled before each other, laying out offerings of rubble. The place was immense. Nothing moved.

After a while, the driver suggested I follow some others and move off road for a better look. We rounded a concrete barrier and headed down a path behind some Chinese people who had their cameras outstretched. We stepped down between white stairs overrun with the ash of burned incense. We stood on platforms and looked out.

Everyone was snapping pictures. Not smiling really but simply standing there, in the way people do when they feel obliged to document something. It was hard to tell if this was homage or tourism, and I’m sure it was a little of both. I wondered, though, if they saw what I saw. They must have. As I looked around the hillside, I noticed the steps we had come down ended in concrete planes fronting small white structures. The forms were familiar. These were graves.

And, so, I stood there with the driver, and with the tourists, perched on a cemetery and straining to take in the entirety of the devastation below. I sat down for a while, overwhelmed. After a while I stood up again and joined the others, standing on a hillside of graves, staring out at a lost city.