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10th anniversary of Wenchuan Earthquake
By:China Tibet Online
update:May 25,2018
May 25,2018--When the 2008 "May 12" earthquake struck, I was teaching graduate students in a classroom in Beijing.
 
A schoolfellow from Inner Mongolia called me and said, "your hometown Wenchuan just had an earthquake!"
 
After class, I discovered that all contact with my hometown had become cut off. I felt very anxious for my mother and three younger brothers who were still there, but I could only get any information on what had happened to my hometown through the media coverage.
 
The sudden earthquake caused an unprecedented disaster in Wenchuan: basic infrastructure was seriously damaged, and the highway that had just recently been completed from Dujiangyan to Wenchuan was nearly toppled. 80 percent of houses in the county needed to be rebuilt and most rural houses collapsed, but the rural people were not even well off enough to rebuild. What would happen to those who survived, what could they do? How could we build a better and stronger Wenchuan after such a disaster? These were the issues that most concerned the people of Wenchuan.
 
One month after the earthquake, I was appointed to a specialist group by the Ministry of Culture (now known as Ministry of Culture and Tourism), and I had the opportunity to visit my hometown after the disaster. As we were unable to enter Wenchuan due to the severe road damage, we were only able to examine the situations in Dujiangyan, Mianzhu, and Beichuan. The miserable situation in the county town of Beichuan was very painful to see. Wenchuan seemed to be luckier, however, both urban and rural areas suffered unprecedented losses. It was not until Spring Festival in 2009 that I was able to meet some of my relatives who had relocated to Chengdu, and to learn from them that some of my classmates and acquaintances had been killed in the earthquake.
 
The destruction brought about by the earthquake exceeded people's imaginings. A close uncle of mine was missing after the earthquake. His family and friends searched through all the rescue hospitals and bodies of victims, but they couldn't find him. Finally, it was determined through DNA identification that he had been killed, but they could not recognize him in any of the corpses they had repeatedly searched. In the face of such huge natural disasters, human beings are too small and fragile. One of my high school classmates and his wife were buried along with their house in a landslide. Their child was orphaned instantly. Another classmate was buried in a road tunnel along with his car. Although several highway tunnels did not collapse, and many of them even became safe havens for cars and passengers traveling on the rugged mountain roads, this particular tunnel that my classmate had been traveling through became blocked on both ends, turning into a passageway of death. The visit to Beichuan County after the earthquake is a particularly profound memory that I will never forget.
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