Wish You Happy Forever

by Jenny Bowen

“My shoe . . . I lost it.”

  Granny Yu lurched forward, hugging the child, pushing through falling debris. Then something heavy fell and it was dark. The roaring sounds faded to nothing.

  Part Three

  Zijiren

  (One of Us)

  Forget the years, forget distinctions.

  Leap into the boundless and make it your home!

  ZHUANG ZI (369–286 BC)

  Chapter 19

  If the Sky Falls on Me, Let It Be My Quilt

  May 2008

  BEIJING (GUARDIAN)—The death toll from the most deadly earthquake to hit China in more than three decades today reached nearly 10,000 in Sichuan province alone, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

  Worst hit was Sichuan province’s Beichuan County, where a further 10,000 were feared injured and 80% of the buildings were flattened, including eight schools and one hospital. Photos posted on the Internet revealed arms and a torso sticking out of the wreckage of the school as dozens of people scrambled to free the students using small mechanical winches or their bare hands.

  Even as the Ministry of Civil Affairs called asking for help, we were already on the phone, trying to reach the orphanages affected by the earthquake. We sent two of our Beijing staff, both Sichuan natives who could speak local dialects, to Chengdu, the provincial capital, to coordinate our efforts. No more questions about mission. Children were in trouble. Family helps family.

  They needed tents, food, water, blankets, diapers, medicine. We called in favors from every business we thought might help us get supplies. Dick called a friend who ran a film production services company in Beijing and asked him to mobilize his team to help us with procuring goods, transport, and distribution. In an instant, we were “in production” on a massive scale.

  Mrs. Gao called us from the ministry every few hours with updates on the children needing relief. Along with a plea for help, I began to send whatever information I had to our supporters. The world grew smaller still. Our family would have to grow larger.

  We know that it is not only children in orphanages who are in trouble. We know that hundreds of children have been separated from their families, have lost their parents, are hurt, traumatized, and in pain. We know we must help.

  There have been dozens of aftershocks, one reported to be as strong as 6.0. Children have again been evacuated from the Chengdu institution. They need tents.

  Relief workers have arrived in the epicenter. The Ministry of Civil Affairs (this is the ministry that Half the Sky works with and also the agency responsible for disaster relief) has been unable to reach orphanages in the most affected areas: Mianyang, Zitong, Deyang, and Aba. While we’ve heard rumors about some of them, we won’t pass on that information until we’ve made direct contact and verified.

  Hongbai Town

  Two days passed before soldiers finally marched into the little mountain town of Hongbai.

  Like most of the buildings there, the kindergarten had collapsed. Parents and grandparents clawed at the twisted wreckage with bare hands, afraid to do further damage, calling plaintively for their children. Of more than eighty in the school, only about twenty had emerged before the building fell. Almost all had been rescued by their teachers, who had managed to pull another eight, still alive, from the rubble. Now the surviving teachers wept in the courtyard for the children they had failed. Beside them lay twelve small corpses, roughly covered. Alongside a few, parents wailed, clutching at the bodies in disbelief. The fate of forty children was still unknown.

  The soldiers fanned out and gently pulled the parents away from the rubble. The parents protested. How could they leave their children? A child’s head and arm stuck out of the debris. No one had come for him yet.

  Some of the soldiers linked hands to form a blockade, holding the parents back.

  “I hear someone in there!” a woman sobbed. “Please, children are still alive!”

  “We can help them if you will let us do our work,” one soldier said, choking back his own anguished tears. He looked no more than sixteen. The parents had no choice but to stand and watch as the soldiers moved carefully, all too slowly, across the mound of shattered lives.

  A small voice sang from beneath the rubble:

  Two tigers, two tigers,

  Running so fast . . .

  The soldiers moved in, cautiously removing heavy bricks and beams and twisted metal piece by piece.

  One without ears,

  One without a tail—

  Very strange, very strange . . .

  Finally they uncovered the cold body of Granny Yu. She was hunched over little Kailu, giving the child air and life.

  Kailu didn’t know that Granny Yu was crouched dead above her. She didn’t know that her own leg was crushed and would soon be amputated. She didn’t know that her own dear grandparents, the ones who cared for her while her parents worked far away, had died in their beds during afternoon nap.

  Kailu blinked back dirt and squinted at the light. She peered up at the hazy faces of young soldiers and said, “Uncles, my friend Pingping is sleeping. Will you wake her up?”

  Chengdu

  It’s Monday afternoon here in China. As I write this, the entire country just held three minutes of silence to commence a three-day period of national mourning. It began at 2:28 P.M., marking the very moment the massive quake struck in Wenchuan County, Sichuan. Flags flew at half-staff; the people wore white flowers and, heads bowed, held hands. Across the country, horns and sirens wailed in grief.

  There are 32,477 people confirmed dead, more than 35,000 still missing.

  Children in the institutions are all still well. We have now reached every affected orphanage, with the exception of Aba Tibetan-Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, where the orphanage is said to house fifty-two children. We will let you know as soon as we make contact.

  Mianyang has become a major refugee center. Of the more than 20,000 refugees in the city’s Jiuzhou Stadium, “scores” of them are young children. We are told, but this is not confirmed, that the entire center area of the stadium is reserved for toddlers and infants.

  Perhaps today’s most heartbreaking story was about some of the seventy injured children who’d been carried down from the affected areas to West China Hospital in Chengdu. Most of the children were reunited with parents or relatives; some were even well enough to leave the hospital after treatment. But a few remained alone and unclaimed. They were required to sign their own consent forms so that the doctors could amputate their limbs to save their lives.

  There were more reporters than doctors in the teeming West China Hospital corridors. Lights, mics, and cameras were focused on one ward where a famous television presenter was “counseling” a young boy who’d lost an arm, a leg, and his entire family.

  A nearby high school had been commandeered to serve as temporary shelter for displaced children. ZZ and I found them there, curled on rows of cots, cuddling stuffed toys or gazing at photos, if they were lucky enough to have them. Meals and warm clothes provided, but no adults—all available volunteers were closer to the action.

  Children alone with their sorrow. I began to see our role in all this. We were getting more information about children newly orphaned. Many hundreds, perhaps thousands more were separated from their families. All raw with trauma and grief and confusion. We needed to set up safe places for them. Places where they could take refuge in the arms of caring adults.

  In this land of eating bitterness, there were no resources to address trauma of this scale. Most Chinese mental health professionals dealt with disease. They prescribed drugs. A supporter told me about a group of American pediatricians and psychologists who had come together after 9/11 to help communities heal from disaster: the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement. I contacted them and began to make plans to bring a team to China to train doctors, teachers, caregivers, and volunteers in Sichuan.

  I drafted a quick proposal to our ministry partners to allow us to create instant Half the Sky Center
s in tents—we’d call them BigTops—in refugee camps or wherever there were large numbers of newly orphaned and displaced children. We’d use our skills to help them heal. We’d stay as long as we were needed.

  But, of course, first we must do what we could to get the children out of danger.

  Dear Half the Sky Family,

  With your help, we have purchased and delivered or are in the process of delivering huge amounts of medicines and medical supplies, tents, cribs, cots, bedding, baby formula, diapers, kids’ clothing and shoes, rice, noodles, cooking oil, water, powdered milk, bowls, cups, towels, mosquito repellent, and much, much more. As we finalized plans to ship, then bring in engineers to erect two more giant tents to shelter hundreds of orphaned and displaced children, we got an emergency call from the Aba Civil Affairs Bureau on the Tibetan Plateau.

  They are caring for approximately one thousand children, fifty-two of them from the orphanage. There are over a hundred infants. They just received news that seventy more children are on the way. There are no more tents and no more beds for them. Further, they urgently need powdered milk and diapers. And they need foods that don’t require cooking, as most of their cooking stoves and supplies have been destroyed. They need so much that they can’t even give us an estimate.

  IN SOME WAYS, if you ignored the tents and tarps set up on sidewalks and in parks, the city of Chengdu seemed untouched. We had definitely managed to give the Chengdu orphanage a makeover, though. The unsafe Half the Sky activity room, with its cracked walls, was piled high with boxes and sacks of diapers, clothes, food, formula, tents, and medical supplies. Our first BigTop (this one the size of a basketball court, purchased from a Beijing wedding planner and trucked in by our filmmaking friends) stood in the courtyard outside. Aftershocks were frequent and severe; everyone felt safer sleeping outside.

  Our trucks ran between the airport, the orphanage, and the places in trouble. When we needed more help, the ministry sent in the army (the PLA). Half the Sky was zijiren (one of us)—not so foreign anymore.

  A small convoy of red-bannered military trucks filled the orphanage driveway. Forty uniformed soldiers loaded one truck with tents, baby formula, clothing, and blankets. The front grill sported the Half the Sky logo and the characters for “Relief Goods.” The army would try to get relief to two thousand children in flood-threatened Leigu, tucked in a valley northwest of the epicenter. Another truck was destined for the children stranded in distant Aba.

  ZZ and I climbed behind Mrs. Gan into the ministry minibus. It was already full. The elegant UNICEF China representative—a foreigner like myself—her cameraman, and three Chinese assistants were surrounded by media gear and bulging plastic bags. Everyone wore bright turquoise UNICEF T-shirts. They scooted aside to make a bit of room for us. The UNICEF representative didn’t seem particularly thrilled to have us onboard (“What is this Half the Sky?”), but her colleagues welcomed us. I was humbled to be part of the team.

  “Do you share our policy on children and institutionalization?” the UNICEF representative asked, moments after we were introduced. I’m embarrassed to say I had no idea what it was. I glanced at the UNICEF team in the backseat. They smiled apologetically.

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “Good,” she said. “Because if you don’t, we don’t want to work with you.”

  The minibus headed north toward Dujiangyan, just fifty kilometers south of the epicenter. After careful scrutiny at each stop, guards at the military checkpoints allowed our minibus to pass through into the town.

  Dujiangyan, a once-bustling resort town, was in full relief mode. There was quake damage on every street, though not all of it catastrophic. Three-story buildings with faces ripped off, furniture still inside. Shops open for business despite pancaked rooms overhead. Tents crowded onto every possible bit of open space.

  Mrs. Gan showed us where the government was erecting Hardworking and Frugal Families Shelter, the first and largest refugee camp. Several acres of farmland had been cleared, and now, prefabricated blue-roofed housing was being erected in neat rows. An instant city, only a bit more than a week after the quake.

  We stopped at the local orphanage. The children and ayis were outside, like most everyone else, living in a tent. No one had really slept in days.

  Mrs. Gan, ZZ, and I climbed out of the minibus and visited with the children. They were eager to talk; their quake stories spilled out. Meanwhile, two UNICEF workers set about quizzing the workers and filling out questionnaires. The third hauled one of the plastic bags out of the minibus.

  The UNICEF representative remained in the minibus, adjusting her makeup and smoothing her hair. Eventually she emerged, smiling and fresh. Diego, the cameraman, filmed her giving toys to the children. Then she posed for stills while her colleagues did the work they came for.

  It was the same drill at every stop. Whether makeshift shelter or government refugee camp or hospital ward, each visit was capped with a UNICEF representative photo op.

  “WE’VE TALKED TO the Army,” Dick said. “The trucks can’t get through to Aba.”

  His call came while the ministry minibus was driving us through more quake-ravaged countryside toward the big refugee shelter in Mianyang.

  “They told us that nearly two hundred people have died in the last few days along those mountain roads in mudslides caused by the early rains,” he said. “As dire as the situation appears to be, even the Aba director feels the risk is too great.”

  “So you think there’s no way to get to those kids?”

  “There’s maybe one. Since the ministry was instrumental in launching us on this mission, can you ask if there’s any possibility the government could fly at least some of this shipment by helicopter?”

  “Okay . . . sure,” I said.

  I hung up and looked at the back of the head of the Ministry of Civil Affairs of the PRC’s sole representative in the vehicle, Mrs. Gan. She was sound asleep and snoring. The UNICEF representative sat stonily beside me. This wasn’t the moment for carpe diem.

  MIANYANG (XINHUA)—Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao went to the makeshift tent school established at Jiuzhou Stadium in Mianyang on Friday to visit teachers and students who survived the May 12 earthquake. Wen encouraged them to study harder following the calamity. “Let us not forget the earthquake,” he told the students in a tender voice. “Then you will know what life is all about—it is bumpy, as the roads are.”

  “Trials and tribulations serve only to revitalize the nation,” he wrote on the blackboard to encourage them.

  “The Mianyang Jiuzhou Stadium is the largest and most famous stadium in southwest China,” the local Civil Affairs official told us as our minibus neared the sports complex. “It cost 150 million yuan! Many people criticized such wasteful spending. Of course, they don’t criticize now! No other place is large enough to shelter so many refugees.”

  We were allowed past another military checkpoint onto stadium grounds. The giant courtyard was ringed by a multicolored sea of tents, tarps, and plastic sheeting. The Red Cross and various government agencies had set up aid tents and kiosks. Cases of bottled water were stacked in small mountains.

  Twenty thousand survivors, maybe more, overflowed the grounds. They were camped on quilts or sleeping bags among their few possessions; or standing in line for information or food; or wandering and looking for familiar faces; or scanning for the hundredth time the row of white boards covered with name lists of those in other shelters or hospitalized with injuries; or studying the big notice board and every other vertical space that was covered with missing-person flyers, photos, and posters.

  We left the minibus, and while Mrs. Gan went to check in with Civil Affairs officials, ZZ and I wandered over to the notice board. We joined the dozens who were standing stock-still in front of it, staring at the rain-washed notices and fading faces, wanting them to morph into someone they loved but seemed to have lost.

  I looked at the faces on the board. Children and grannies and strong young men.
All vanished. The same song played over and over again on the loudspeakers, “No matter where you are, I must find you. . . .”

  Mrs. Gan returned. She told us that it would not be possible to visit the children inside the arena, the “inner circle.”

  “But why not?” the UNICEF representative protested. “UNICEF has come expressly to help the children. That is our only purpose for coming all this way. Just today the drive was over three hours.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mrs. Gan said. “The authorities wish only to protect the children. They are concerned about the spread of disease. Since we have come all this way, however, I suggest you visit with the many families here. As you can see, there are thousands of children. I’m certain it will be all right to take their pictures. Our bus will wait here until you return. Take all the time you need.”

  The UNICEF representative sighed and turned away. She walked into the throng with her crew following.

  ZZ and I started to do the same. Mrs. Gan caught us both by the arm.

  “Follow me,” she said.

  A DOZEN MORE checkpoints led us to the “inner circle”—a very big gymnasium housing about a thousand children, volunteers (most in their late teens or early twenties), police, and soldiers.

  “No picture taking in here.” Mrs. Gan smiled. She’d had it with the photo ops.

  Neat rows of red mats striped the wood floors. We walked past a few counseling sessions—three or four earnest psychologists, brought in by the Municipal Committee of Youth League, questioning a single frozen-faced child.

  Mrs. Gan introduced us to Mr. Liang, the man in charge. Recently retired from the military, Mr. Liang had a calm and kindly demeanor.

  “How do the counselors decide which children to counsel?” I asked.

  “We look for the sad faces,” Mr. Liang said gently. “Generally, those are the ones who need help.”

  “That seems the right approach,” said ZZ.