The earthquake

A heartbreaking slideshow.

Peter Hessler writes about Sichuan Province -- a place where bad things happen with depressing regularity.

In China, when bad things happen, they happen in places like Sichuan. The province is landlocked, remote, and rugged; it’s always been heavily populated, and it’s always been poor. When I was in the Peace Corps, Sichuan was home to a hundred and ten million people, a staggering figure: roughly one of every fifty human beings on earth was Sichuanese. Since then, the central government has divided the region into two parts, Sichuan province and Chongqing municipality, but that has done nothing to change the sheer sense of massed humanity. And the recent earthquake is by no means unusual. If you’ve lived in Sichuan, and continue to follow it in the news, you become accustomed to terrible stories—floods and landslides and collapsed bridges. Periodically, I’ll receive an e-mail that stops me cold, such as the one that Kevin sent last May:


I am sorry to tell a bad news. My town is called Yihe in Kaixian County in Chongqing. Two days ago, a big thunder hit my wife’s village school. It killed 7 students and wounded 44 students. It was not my wife’s class. But when the tragedy happened, my wife was teaching her students. . . . I am sorry to tell you about the bad news. These days my wife and I are both sad and scared at home.

The Chinese often believe that human beings are shaped by the land around them. After my time in Sichuan, I came to agree; I had never lived among people who were so tough. The Sichuanese are natural workers, and they dominate construction crews in many parts of China. They are patient and tireless and determined, and they’re famous for pragmatism—Deng Xiaoping came from Sichuan. The people are also surprisingly good-natured and optimistic. Maybe that’s what happens when you’re a survivor, and maybe that also accounts for their sense of humor. On Tuesday, I received another e-mail from Willy:

…a minor quake measure 6.1 occurred again in Chengdu at around 3:00 and I called my friend there, they said when it happened yesterday, the whole house was like a swing. But this afternoon, when I called him, he said many of his colleagues (some teachers) were playing mahjong happily in the wake of the terrible quake.…
Do you still remember my uncle, who went to Gansu as the early migrant worker? His son survived the quake. . . . He was a college student in Aba Teachers’ College, which happens to be located in the epicenter. He is going to graduate in July, but he found a job for Yanjing Beer Company, the company asked them to go to Guangxi to get training instead of going back to school to study, so when the quake happened he was on the train to Guangxi not knowing that Yanjing Beer Company had saved his life.

Meanwhile, NPR has been doing a tremendous job of reporting this story with immediacy and sensitivity.