China Earthquake

Day 1

Monday morning was fantastic. I was giving final exams to some of my sophomores, sitting around and talking with them in groups of three, and loving every minute of what they had to say. One of my favorite comments came from a young man who confessed a love for Western history. “Your heroes are so different,” he explained. “In China, a hero must be a great man, such as an emperor. But in the West, a hero can be anyone – heroes are thieves. Like Robin Hood!” I loved that observation – immediately, a flood of my own lawless champions came to mind.

I was still smiling a few hours later as I began my afternoon lecture to my graduate pragmatics class. Our room is on the fourth floor of a very old building: chalkboards and desks and rusty plumbing are all we get, but it has a full wall of windows that overlook a green area, and the breeze comes through when the weather is warm. The light is natural, which I like. We were talking about politeness strategies, status, and camaraderie; things were going well, the students were engaged, and things had the momentum that good sessions acquire, the rolling and clicking life of their own that feeds back and forth between teacher and class. I was drawing cartoons of kings and commoners on the board, and we were all laughing, and I turned to explain something about this point or that, and suddenly I felt strange, like I was having a head rush. I put a hand onto the lectern to steady myself. Seconds sped past, and the feeling grew stronger. My next thought was that a really big vehicle had just collided with the building downstairs, an unlikely bit of logic, but my brain was grasping at straws to understand why I couldn’t stand up. A rumbling sound began to rise up from the floor. For an instant, no one spoke or moved a muscle.

Everyone knows that time flies when you’re having fun. What we need is a phrase that describes the opposite: the in-breath before your car strikes another’s, the instant a ticking heart monitor flattens to a tone, the beat after the words fall from someone’s lips to break your heart. In moments of disaster or radical change, time doesn’t fly, nor does it stop. It simply dwells, suspending us fate-first over a great void of disbelief, a long, airless place where everything we take for granted is held up for a glance, revealed as clear and dark and impermanent, quiet and small. There is a strange hush that falls over the senses, as if only eyes remain, no more sounds, no more skin. We become floating vision, tunnels of eyes, stretching out to focus on a single, yellowing detail. What I saw were the faces of my students, each frozen in an identical question, each hoping that the panic they felt was their own, that the rest of us were still talking and laughing and all was fine in the physical world. Instead, they looked and saw only collective fear. It lasted seconds only, three long seconds, in which time stretched out like a great elastic band. Our synapses connected our bodies to our minds and the movement beneath us to a reality, a shaky, crazy, unbelievably earthquakey reality; and suddenly, time snapped back and shot us headlong into the frenzy of the inevitable present.

There was yelling. The entire building had begun to sway back and forth by several feet. “Sway” is not quite the right word; when big things move side to side, elephants, hips, trees, we say they “sway,” but that swaying is a slow, lazy movement, a voluptuous movement. This was a big thing moving side to side, but fast, in a way that big things aren’t supposed to move. The oscillation was like a metronome with the clicker pulled all the way down, tic-tic-tic-tic as fast as you can count, but each period was a seven-storey building heading several feet in either direction. We don’t have words for movements like this. It became very loud. The beautiful wall of windows was not just rattling, but each was flexing in its panes. A thunder of footsteps swelled above and below us as hundreds of students got to their feet in unison and began pounding their way into the cramped halls and flooding the narrow staircase, the only way out. Girls were screaming, and already cracks were splitting open the walls in places, and huge fissures were dislodging the doors from their jambs. A strange little tidbit from elementary school safety priming told me “Get in the doorway,” and one look at the rifts and the bits of plaster that had begun to sift down from above answered, “Fuck that. Get out.”

The floor felt soft beneath our feet. A voice said “GO!” and it might have been mine. I remember glancing at my bag on the lectern, and all of my things scattered about. I grabbed only my cell phone, knowing I would need it to find my husband, and made for the door, one look to be sure all my students were getting out, and then I was washed away in the tide of panic, trying to breathe and stay cool, while all around me small young women screamed and cried, and windows cracked, and dust and chunks of ceiling rained down on our shoulders.

A sea of frightened people can only move so quickly down four flights of stairs. The building was still flexing and groaning all around us, and the staircase bucked and twisted in unnatural ways. I became uncomfortably conscious of the weight of construction, of how heavy each floor above me was, of how totally dead I would be should the walls cave in. I remember thinking very clearly that I had no intention of dying in a collapsed school building in China. I had enough surreal space to wonder if that thought were somehow racist, as if I thought I were too special to die like others die all the time. I decided it was okay to will oneself to live, to refuse a crappy offer from Fate. I passed a few lost high heels on the stairs and wondered who was barefoot and breathed a word of gratitude that hopefully she’d move faster without them. Hands were all over my back and shoulders, urging me forward, as I pushed lightly on those in front of me, holding an arm over my head in some futile gesture of protection.

And then, just as suddenly, we were out. The sun was bright. Students were flooding the streets from every building, and little pieces started to come together in our minds: it wasn’t just one class, one building, one part of town. The earth was in action. The initial tremor went on and on for at least four minutes, an eternity not to have a safe place to stand. My class monitor, Zhang Tao, was immediately at my elbow: “Lara, are you okay? Please, come away from the tall building.” Several of us gathered on the corner, shielding our eyes and blinking like sheep up at the place from which we had just fled, all of us confused and totally expecting the entire thing to come crashing down any second. I started milling through the crowd, trying to herd my flock to a place where I could count them and be sure we had all escaped. By now, there were hundreds of us, thousands, filling the street and the green spaces and the plaza beside. Someone grabbed my arm and said, “We must go to the playground, it will be safer there.” I laughed out loud. One of my pet projects has been to try to cure them of their habit of calling adult soccer fields and race tracks “the playground.” I pictured 10,000 graduate students on a giant swing set, scared pissless and wanting recess to end.

And so, we went to the “playground.” There were already thousands there, and thousands more were arriving by the minute. A second and third aftershock set the nearby buildings shuddering, and immediately huge masses of people screamed and ran, even though there was essentially nowhere else to go. My students and I assembled at one end of the soccer field, near the goal posts, and started trading breathless, nonsensical phrases of wonder and relief and concern. We put hands on shoulders, we laughed, we made exaggerated exhales and said “Whew!” a lot. I kept saying things like, “Well, that was exciting,” while they kept shaking their heads and muttering, “Terrible, very terrible.” Several expressed worry over Paul, but I assured them that he had been practicing xingyiquan in Qingyang Gong, the Daoist temple downtown, and that it was very flat there, and they had undoubtedly been outside. I checked my heart-radar as well: I was certain he was fine. Cell phone service was down, either due to tower collapse or an overload on the system; no one could get through. There was nothing to do but sit and wait, and so we did.

Several other students of mine from different classes came by, mostly in hectic bunches of nervous girls, arms all interlaced and in various states of casual dress. Many had been napping in the dorms and had fled without any clothes on at all, and had returned to slip on pajamas once the main tremors had subsided. Others had been in class and were busy each relating their traumatic escapes. One couldn’t stop crying, and the others had stopped trying to comfort her. Her hysteria frightened them, and so they ignored it and laughed instead.

After an hour or so, things started to take on a weirdly festive vibe. The President of the university was giving occasional speeches over the PA system, and apparently the guy is quite a card, as he had them all laughing and at ease. I couldn’t understand the muffled Chinese, but my students translated for me: mostly requests that we stay outside, assurances that more information was coming, and finally, the beginning of the grim statistics of the damage in other areas. The first number we heard was that it had registered an 8.1 at the epicenter; my only real response was, holy shit.

A student was able to get through on her cell phone, and I used it to make contact with Paul, who had already made his way back to campus. We met up at the gate, already feeling like we had been very far away from one another. We sat around with my class in the strange rubbery Astroturf, and everyone made the best of the situation. Some made runs to the store and the dorms for blankets, snacks, and water. Someone had leapt into action with the loudspeakers, and was playing a bizarre collection of post-Communist folk ditties and some Irish jigs, ostensibly because they thought music would keep us calm. One of my students ventured back to the classroom to retrieve the things most of us had left behind. My wallet was missing, as was another’s cell phone. Opportunism knows no shame.

As the hours stretched on toward evening, people began to get hungry, and it was clear that the students were expected to sleep on the playground that night, for fear of aftershocks or compromised architectural integrity in the dormitories. It felt like a giant slumber party at first, with tens of thousands of guests. Someone had organized a relief effort for those who were hungry, and people worked in shifts carrying out bottles of water to the field, along with enormous wicker baskets full of mantou, or plain steamed buns. Paul and I went back to our apartment to get some things: books, a deck of cards, his laptop, something to drink.

Home was not a pretty sight, although it could have been much worse. The bookcases had wriggled away from the walls at strange angles; things had scattered all over the floor, and the cupboards were open. The lamp lay smashed on the floor. It looked more like a half-hearted burglary than a natural disaster. The kitchen was more or less trashed, with broken glass from bottles and herbs, and our coffee pot was broken, which was funny only because we had just received a care package of coffee a couple of days earlier. We didn’t have the heart to clean up, and being indoors still felt dangerous, so we crammed what we needed into our bags, and headed back out to the playground, which was looking more and more like a Chinese outdoor rock concert by the minute: card games, bottles of beer, happy dozing bodies strewn in casual dog piles on blankets and mats, people lounging and smoking and otherwise taking it easy. Paul sat down and watched a Cubs game that he’d downloaded onto his laptop; I tutored an overeager graduate student in some tricky grammar points. Everyone wanted to have their photos taken with us, and I was interviewed by a college TV station by a young woman with acne and great English. Strangely enough, a good time was had by all.

These are some of my graduate students.

That night, we were asked to sleep in a hotel room with some other foreign teachers. The International Education compound has a hotel adjacent to our apartment and office building, so they asked that we all camp there, so that we’d be on the first floor, should another hasty exit be necessary. People milled about until all hours, checking for updates online and chewing fingernails and looking dazed, feeling hungry and nauseous and generally uncertain, but certain that we were lucky as the numbers began to roll in on the news: 3,000 dead; then, 5,000; then, unknown but rising. We felt like an accidental family, all of us standing together, chatting about nothing, listening to one another’s stories of “where we were when…”

It was a sleepless night, full of partially-dreamt nightmares and the constant shudder of aftershocks. The couple in the bed next to ours had their own ideas about how to pass the restless time, and were none too subtle about it. A single damn mosquito became the living embodiment of hell and pestered my already ringing ears. I killed it around 4 am and, triumphant, finally drifted off for an hour or two.

I caught myself marveling at the earth, its strength, its mass. As a child, I’d been fascinated with plate tectonics, and had spent hours poring over the beautiful color illustrations in my parents’ National Geographic atlas. We read somewhere that the earthquake had been triggered by India, once an island, pushing up into the Himalayas at a rate of two inches per year. Essentially, Tibet was being slammed into the rest of China, and the impact had shaken the Sichuan plateau, and was felt as far away as Vietnam and Thailand. I felt a grim smile at the thought that the uneasy connection between China and Tibet was playing out in such physical analogies.

…….

Day 2

A little past midnight, it had begun to rain. The slumber party on the field turned into a soggy, grumpy mess, and the students slogged back in to their dorms, only to be scared back out again by aftershocks that felt nearly as strong as the original quake. They hunkered under what shelter they could find and feel safe with, and somehow made it through the night.

The next day, the festival feeling was gone, having been drained away by a soaking rain that showed no signs of letting up. The effort to create shelter outside of the dorms had transformed campus into a desperate scene of plastic sheeting and umbrellas, weak and miserable structures doing little to keep the elements off the frightened heads of the students. We took a walk around, to see if anyone needed help, and to survey what ended up being a general lack of structural damage to most of the buildings. It looked like a shanty town, a bitter village cobbled together out of trash and fear and what simple pieces of furniture and string and bags that could be rigged together. Garbage lay all over the streets. Things had taken on the real look of a disaster area, people sitting balled up under meager shelters and hugging their knees, bored, tired, listless.

On the playground itself, things seemed a little brighter. Students had banded together and were clearly putting a lot of effort into arranging some kind of workable housing for themselves. I was amazed at both their persistence and ingenuity, and also at the lack of help they seemed to receive from the administration. I’m not sure where most of the materials came from. Some groups had cozy-looking posh lean-tos made of enormous tarps and collections of blankets, while others had cramped inside micro-shelters of little more than umbrellas and ping-pong tables.

Paul and I went back to my classroom building, Teaching Building 4, to look for my wallet, in the unlikely event that it had simply rattled off the podium and hadn’t, in fact, been stolen in the uproar. I had no idea how shaken I’d been by the experience, no pun intended. Aftershocks had been continuing throughout the day, and each time one rumbled through, I nearly jumped out of my skin, my heart racing in my throat. Stepping into the building and climbing back up the stairs I’d fled down only the day before felt bad and clammy, and somehow haunted. A piece of wood was jammed into a hole where a window had been. Things seemed pretty secure, though, until I reached the fourth level, where my classroom was. Fissures cut up and down from floor to ceiling and side to side, and great cracks had opened up around some of the doorways and through the plaster walls. My handwriting was still on the board in two colors of chalk, a cheery ghost of the aborted lecture. There were paint chips on the ground. My wallet wasn’t there.

We spent the rest of the afternoon in our apartment, trying to be normal. The building trembled what seemed like every five minutes, and each time it did, I sprang from my chair or couch or sandals, once or twice even making it out the door and into the hallway before the shaking subsided. Paul seemed weirdly at ease, and tried to be playful, mocking my nerves. I was surprised at how unsettled I felt. It was like airplane turbulence, those sudden jolts that make you grab for your ginger ale and send your peanuts into your lap, those brief breathless instants when you’re certain the plane is plummeting out of control, and then just as suddenly, things are calm. The fasten-seatbelts-sign doesn’t even ping on. It felt just like that, only instead of an airplane seat, I was in a chair at the dining table, grabbing for my tea. We drank a couple of beers and watched “Jaws” and cheered when the shark blew up, but I left my shoes on, and had a bag packed by the door, ready to leave at a moment’s notice. I felt very, very tired.

The instant that the news of the quake hit the U.S., we were inundated with emails checking to see if we were all right. We tried to get messages to our parents before they even knew what was happening, wanting to spare them any moments of dread before hearing the lucky news. Other friends had to wait a day or more for the mass emails and little flags waving from the wreckage that proved we were alive. The instant swell of support and concern was overwhelming and wonderful – I can’t tell you how grateful I have been for the well-wishes and love notes; thank you everyone who has been in touch.

As time wore on, we watched the news with an obsessive kind of blankness. The statistics are hard to comprehend. The numbers of dead reached 10,000 and rolled quickly past, threatening 12,000, then 20,000, and now likely more than twice that and still rising. The feelings of relief and strain and rightness (as in, “I knew I couldn’t die like this,”) gave way to a sick sense of wrong. There are tens of thousands of people who died: old women, young mothers, newlyweds, strong capable men, teachers, doctors, artists, and of course the horror stories of the children, so many children trapped in schools become tombs. I began thinking of each person who expressed concern for me and for Paul. I then thought of how each person who died had the same loving network, the same fearful community that was now in shock rather than relief. I thought of my own students, and how happy their parents are right now to know they are safe. Each of us is the center of our own universe, and has a sense of what can and cannot happen. I felt safe because I knew I could not die like that, refused to die like that. But each of those dead were also sure; 50,000 centers of the universe blinked out in a guiltless shudder of the earth. I can feel a great polarity rising up from the epicenter, like a tremendous magnet, a huge electrical field of grief and suffering, a hole that no one is going to fill again.

………….

Day 3

As if this scenario weren’t stressful enough, I had a job interview at 5:30 on Wednesday morning. It was for a full-time teaching position at Portland Community College, teaching reading and writing in the developmental education program at Sylvania campus. I really, really wanted this job; my application was outstanding, my resume full of fireworks, and my references solid and impressive. The only problem was, the interview was over the phone, and to a committee of six, and it began at 5:30 in the morning two days after I’d gone through an earthquake that measured 7.8 on the Richter scale, my nerves were made of battery acid and live static, I hadn’t slept in three days, and we had endured over one thousand aftershocks. Did I mention I had to do a teaching demonstration?

I had prepared as best I could, trying to fill in the gaps by sending in elaborately-conceived and explicit lesson plans, practice activities, and a curricular context outline. I even emailed them handouts that were to function as replacements for what I would have written on the board, had I been there. But, honestly – it was just too weird. I tried to stay calm and keep my focus, but I was nerved-out and exhausted, and three aftershocks hit in mid-sentence as I answered the follow-up questions, and I just can’t help but think I was too free-associative, and couldn’t quite pull together the interview I know I’m capable of. Oh well. It was, shall we say, a challenge. I figure, if nothing else, I’ll get the “Most Memorable Candidate” award.

That whole day was an exercise in endurance. Being on edge for that long is exhausting, having your fight-or-flight mechanism turned way up for days on end. I had little fight left, and mostly just wanted to lie down. As soon as I would, though, the building would shudder, and I was tired of feeling like a mouse, all fluttery heart and wide, staring eyes.

We went downtown to buy groceries. The stores were mostly closed, and those whose doors were open were totally sold out of basic staples: bottled water, rice, yogurt, instant noodles, beer. We fought our way through Carrefour to stock up for a few days; apparently everyone else in Chengdu had had the same idea. The lines stretched nearly around the interior of the store, and whole aisles were completely bare.

What is that impulse that makes people prepare madly for a cataclysm that has already occurred? Having made it through the worst, people seemed intent on living in reverse, stocking supplies and building a home out of flexible plastic in twine, far from the possible crush of concrete. I wanted to smooth everyone’s brow and remind them that it had all already happened. The students were still sleeping outside.

……………

Day 4

That night, we fell into bed around 11:30 PM and didn’t wake up until 11:00 the following morning. It felt good to sleep. The aftershocks continued, but we had acquired a new sense of dullness about them. I forced myself to lie in bed as one shook the windows so hard they rattled, and the ceiling made creaking noises above where I lay. Paul kept reminding me that none of the buildings in Chengdu had collapsed; it was our own sense of ego, of having tricked Fate, that made us think we were in danger now. I learned to take deep breaths, and to feel irritated rather than afraid. Enough is enough.

We tried to get work done, to prepare for lessons, to work on final exams and things, but it was difficult to concentrate. We watched “A Fist Full of Dollars” and ate a normal kind of meal. I found the act of cooking very pacifying; it is always a meditation for me, and I felt a fierce kind of defiance, chopping away on my cutting board as yet another aftershock tried to rattle my cookplate off the counter. “No. I am making dinner. You rattle me not,” I said aloud. Paul busied himself with packing. If he was ready to leave last week, he’s twice as ready now. The act of putting things into boxes was also a good practice: orderly, positive, and with a homeward intention. We all deal with things in our own ways.

Food drives and organizations collecting aid for relief workers have sprung up all over the city. We packed up some clothes we don’t often wear, along with umbrellas, and some blankets, and then bought a few big bags of rice, some cooking oil, some soap, and a few packages of sanitary napkins (who ever thinks to bring those to a rescue site?) and hauled them to one of the pick-up stations, a French-run nightclub, of all places. Many of the bars are serving as food and supply drop-offs; a lot of effort has gone into clearing and maintaining the road leading to the areas with the greatest damage, and trucks run several times a day, carrying food and bedding to the survivors. At the current estimate, over 3 million homes were destroyed. Hundreds of dams have been compromised, and there is the possibility that a nuclear facility was also damaged, although there have been no clear reports yet. Many of my graduate students will not be finishing the semester, having enlisted in a volunteer interpreter corps that is providing translation services for the international media and aid groups that have come to the region. I wish them the best of luck. We send what we can: food, care, water, love, sadness. I feel like there is nothing that I can do here that will be enough; I have never felt more cared for here, nor more of an outsider. It is definitely time for us to come home.

I talked with a young woman, a Senior, who is about to graduate. She said she is from Shaanxi province; her parents are far away. When I asked her where she was during the quake, she said that she had been in a classroom, waiting for a student that she tutors. She had been afraid to run out, for fear she’d be in greater danger during a collapse, so she spent the entire first tremor huddled in a corner of her classroom, frightened half to death. Minutes after it was over, her student showed up, and so they decided to resume the lesson. They were found by security guards sometime later, and were ordered to get to safety.

“My parents,” she said, “they want me to come home, now. But I told them, ‘bad things can happen anywhere.’”

“You’re not going home, then?” I asked.

“No, I will stay here, and I will go to graduate school,” she answered. “My dreams are here.”

~ by knifemaker on May 17, 2008.