14 People at the Moment of the Great Earthquake: We Begin Tracking the Lives It Changed Over 10 Years | "Ten Years"

Not all of us lived through it, but we hope all of us remember.

A life is made up of only a handful of decades.

One of those decades can matter more than all the others put together.

Two months ago, we began these interviews. The record starts at a moment the whole world knows: 2:28 pm, May 12, 2008.

That moment changed the lives of the dozen or so people we spoke to. Seen against a wider background, their 10 years are also everyone's 10 years.

We report from Yingxiu town in Wenchuan, from Beichuan, Dujiangyan, Chengdu, Beijing and Shanghai.

1

In 2008 Yu Yuntao was 42 and ran a plumbing-and-electrical shop in a town in Beichuan County. Over the better part of a lifetime he had saved more than 1 million yuan, and in this small county seat he lived comfortably. In his spare time he served as head of the Beichuan Islamic Association, doing service work for the local Hui community.

He had money and he had standing. A settled middle age looked about like this.

And then there was his son, in his first year of senior high at Beichuan Middle School — Yu Yuntao's greatest pride. Out of more than 800 students in the grade, his son ranked 23rd, and the walls at home were papered with award certificates. Hui families are allowed a second child, but Yu Yuntao was stubborn about it: "My son is already that big, and he studies like mad. If I raise him well, I don't need another one."

Yu Yuntao's wife worked at the county cultural center. Because Hui eating habits are different, every day at noon he carried her lunch over. He could have found the road from home to the cultural center with his eyes shut.

On May 12 he cooked as usual and packed the food up. The night before, he had watched an episode of the TV drama Field Agents No. 5 (《五号特工组》) on Sichuan Television, and bits of it kept replaying in his head, so he decided to stop at the disc-rental shop near the vegetable market before going on to the cultural center.

As luck had it, the old street to the rental shop was being repaired. Muttering about the nuisance, he had to swing around by the old road toward Beichuan Chengguan Elementary School. The detour cost him a good deal of time, and once he had rented the Field Agents No. 5 disc he hurried toward the cultural center, on the phone with a friend as he went.

He had taken only a few steps when the ground began to shake.

Small tremors were ordinary in Beichuan, but this one kept getting stronger. By the time Yu Yuntao understood that something was wrong and tried to run, a wave of force — as though a giant were shoving him — threw him several meters through the air. He came down in the courtyard of a nearby power company. His feet were scraped and his trousers were worn through in two places.

What he remembers of the moment he pushed himself upright is the deafening noise breaking out across all of Beichuan. "The yellow dust came out, and then every kind of sound came out — people calling for their fathers and mothers, people crying."

By the time Yu Yuntao rushed to the cultural center to look for his wife, a landslide had already flattened it. Then he set off at a run for Beichuan Middle School. "I couldn't take anything in at that point. I was still inside the earthquake."

When he reached Beichuan Middle School, gasping, only one class in the whole senior-high section had come through; every other building had collapsed. His son was not in that class.

He went down onto the ground, and someone beside him picked a piece of torn cotton wadding out of the rubble to put under his head.

2

Fan Meizhong enjoyed every sort of privilege: if the students wouldn't behave, he could simply not teach; among the school's Chinese-national teachers he drew the highest salary — he had, after all, graduated wearing the halo of Peking University.

He taught at a boarding school known across Sichuan as a school for the rich, facing an institution he thought was no match for his intelligence and middle-school students he called "trash of the trade, dregs." For a long time, feeling that way, Fan Meizhong believed a life like his had no meaning at all.

On the afternoon of May 12, 2008, he was teaching first-year IB Chinese at Guangya School (the IB program is for students who plan to study abroad). The day was stiflingly humid. Fan Meizhong walked once around the classroom, opened every window, and started on Chapter 13 of Dream of the Red Chamber.

He was in the middle of trying to persuade his students that Qin Keqing appearing in Wang Xifeng's dream was magical realism and not superstition when the desks began to shake. He told the class calmly: "Don't panic, it's an earthquake, we're fine!"

Before he had finished the sentence the teaching building began to shake hard, with noise coming from every direction, and Fan Meizhong understood: a big earthquake was here.

He rushed for the stairwell, fell while he was running, got up, and kept running for the middle of the soccer field.

When he got to the field, he was the only person on that whole expanse of open ground. He was a little surprised to find he had been the first one out. A moment later students began coming out, one after another.

Then came a still more violent shock, and the wall along the east side of the soccer field came down completely.

Only then did he see the students from his own class running out one by one. They gathered around him and asked: "Teacher, why didn't you get us out before you left?"

3

In 2008 Zhang Liang had closed out 10 years as a journalist and was in his second year of moving into PR. By then he was already the CEO of a PR firm; in two years the company had opened offices in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou and was growing fast. He had moved from Guangzhou to Shanghai himself to build the business there.

At 2 pm on May 12, beside Raffles City on People's Square, the busiest part of Shanghai, he was talking terms with the day's big client, the recruitment site Zhaopin. All of Zhaopin's large meeting rooms had been booked, so he and his two clients had to meet in a small, poorly lit one.

The meeting was still going when the phone on the table rang. The Zhaopin manager picked it up and said there had been an earthquake in Sichuan, and that their own office building had shaken badly. The three people in that dim little room had felt nothing at all. "I personally had no direct sensation of the earthquake whatsoever," Zhang Liang said.

4

Two years into elementary school, Yang Yuerui still could not get used to the constraints of it. He was so unruly that he was held back a year, and in 2008 he was doing second grade again: second grade, Class 1.

His new homeroom teacher kept encouraging him and his allergy to school finally eased a little. His grades had just begun to pick up when the earthquake came.

Yang Yuerui's classroom was the last one on the right side of the second floor, and he sat in the back row. Looking back, both of those were pieces of luck.

At 2:28 pm there was an enormous crash. Dust started falling from the ceiling and the classroom windows blew out with a bang. The teacher at the front shouted "Run!" Yang Yuerui bolted out of the room. The stairwell was already packed with students fleeing in every direction, colliding like ants.

As he reached the side of the staircase a brick struck his shoulder. He kept going down, and at the height of the shaking he got clear of the building. Outside, he fell to the ground. The teaching building was less than a meter behind him. "One or two seconds after I got out, the whole building just came down."

Yang Yuerui says he was the last student out; almost nobody came out after him. "The worst of it was right at the stairwell of the teaching building. Basically anyone who got that far was buried."

5

Yang Yunqing was somebody in Yingxiu. Of four siblings, he was also the one who lived best. He had started out driving a crane and had been in business locally ever since the Cultural Revolution ended. Forty years of work had bought him, in Yingxiu, two sand quarries, two cranes, two buildings, a fish restaurant and a wild-fish pond. The pond alone was worth more than 1 million yuan.

In 2008 he was 58. All the money he made was in equipment and fixed assets, and his three children, all living in Yingxiu, wanted for nothing in their father's shade.

One of his vehicles had been in an accident, and on May 12 Yang Yunqing was at the local insurance office in Yingxiu waiting to see the estimate. The insurance manager, complaining that he couldn't get online, came out of his office to chat. Yang had lived here his whole life; everyone in town knew him.

They had barely started talking when they felt the shaking. Yang Yunqing shouted "Earthquake!" and ran for the door, and before he had gone three meters he was thrown to the ground. "Like a frog — bounce up, come down, bounce up, come down again."

Flat on the ground, he watched a Santana bounce into the air, its tires 40 centimeters clear of the road; when the car had finished going up and down, it started rocking side to side.

Right behind the car, the buildings began coming down fast. "Mountains collapsing, the earth splitting, the ground moving, the hills shaking — not one of them was missing," Yang Yunqing recalled.

The sixth floor of the insurance building had already sunk down into the first. What saved them was that a few thick pillars on the ground floor held open a narrow space, and four people, Yang Yunqing and the manager among them, survived in that gap.

Yang Yunqing and the other three tried to stand, but in the violence of the shaking they could get no purchase at all. All four could do was press together and hold on to one another's shoulders. "You grab me, I grab you, two legs each and eight legs between us, rolling one way and then the other like a bunch of drunks," Yang Yunqing said.

6

At school, Zhou Yuye was the kind of student the others envied. Most of her classmates at Yingxiu Elementary were left-behind children whose parents worked in other cities and came home once or twice a year. Zhou Yuye's parents were both teachers at Yingxiu Elementary. Being at school was much like being at home; the three of them were simply in the same place doing different things.

The family lived frugally in Yingxiu, but every year on Zhou Yuye's birthday her father made sure to buy her a birthday cake. It was the thing she looked forward to most all year.

On May 23 the next cake was due. That was the day she would turn eight.

At 2:28 pm on May 12 a collapsing wall came down on Zhou Yuye's shoulder and pinned her where she was. Her father, preparing lesson materials at his desk on the fifth floor of the teaching building, was buried before he could get up.

Zhou Yuye's mother ran from her office at the other end of the teaching building out to the sports field. The moment she reached it, she found she was alone.

7

Mu Yunping, from Beichuan County, worked with her husband at a Taiwanese electronics company in Shanghai; their son stayed in Beichuan for school. In 2008 she was 30 and had been away from Beichuan for 14 years.

She had spent her first four years on the company's factory floor in Guangzhou, then moved to Shanghai. In her eighth year there her workplace changed from the shop floor to an office and she became a manager, drawing 2,400 yuan a month. For someone with a vocational-school diploma, that was not bad.

In May 2008 Mu Yunping and her husband sent home the 100,000 yuan they had saved over those years away, to build a new house in Beichuan. Her mother used the money to buy the building materials.

By May 12 the foundation was in and they were ready to start on the brickwork. That afternoon, far away in Shanghai, the couple were full of expectation for the future. It was some time after 2:28 pm before she learned there had been an earthquake, and that it was in Beichuan.

8

In 2008 Zhao Xiaokang was in his second year of senior high at Weizhou Teachers' School in Wenchuan County. He was president of the dance club and made himself visible around campus; plenty of teachers knew who he was.

Just after 2 pm on May 12, during the midday break, Zhao Xiaokang was lying on his dorm bed playing a video game. When the earthquake hit he was still in the middle of it, and the head of his dorm room dragged him toward the door.

His first instinct was to put his shoes on. The dorm head yelled at him: "No time for shoes, go!"

They ran from the second floor to the first, and the moment they were outside they saw the two teaching buildings across from them slamming into each other. They ran straight for the sports field while the walls of the building behind them split open and bricks and tiles came down.

Barefoot, one slipper in his hand, Zhao Xiaokang finally made it to the field.

9

In 2008 Li Mingliang was in his second year of junior high at the middle school in his town, 57 kilometers from the city of Shifang and 127 kilometers from Yingxiu town in Wenchuan County. In 2004 his parents had died of gas poisoning while working away from home, and he lived in the small town with his grandmother and his younger sister.

On the afternoon of May 12 he was sitting in class doing math problems. His desk suddenly started to shake and he was annoyed, assuming the boy in front of him was playing a trick. Outside the window, the gap between the adjoining science building and dormitory building was splitting wider and wider, and tiles kept dropping off. Only then did they understand that an earthquake had come, and the students ran for it.

Li Mingliang remembers his math teacher standing in the corridor directing students down the stairs. By the time everyone had reached the sports field, the gap between the science building and the dormitory was two hand-spans wide.

10

By 2008 Qiu Shenghong had worked at the Shifang family-planning service station for six years. Ordinarily she staffed the outpatient clinic and occasionally performed procedures — abortions, IUD insertions. All told, the job was fairly light and fairly stable.

One of its best benefits was that every year the unit organized a week-long trip, and you could bring family.

In 2008 the destination was Shanghai. Qiu Shenghong brought her son.

On the afternoon of May 12 she was on the Bund with about ten colleagues. Sometime after 2 pm, she remembers, the words "Massive Earthquake in Sichuan" appeared on one of the big screens across the river in Lujiazui.

The out-of-towners all pulled out their phones to call family in Sichuan.

What came back was a busy signal, or a recording saying the call could not go through.

11

In 2008 Lin Tianhong was 29 and a lead writer at Freezing Point Weekly, the supplement of China Youth Daily. At China Youth Daily he counted as young, and his editor, Du Yongtao, thought highly of him. He had also bought an apartment in Beijing before turning 30.

His career was going well, and his life was getting more and more ordinary.

On the afternoon of May 12, 2008, Lin Tianhong had an interview scheduled with a writer at a publishing house. He was on the subway heading for Hepingmen in Beijing, and 2:28 pm went by without his noticing.

12

Lanzhou. In May 2008 Gong Jianfen had finished her senior thesis. Graduation was still two months off and she felt settled: with a psychology degree from Northwest Normal University, she could count on being assigned, back home in Tianjin, to a decent school as a mental-health teacher at the very least.

It was the safest arrangement, and one she genuinely wanted.

Gong Jianfen spent the whole of May idle and unhurried.

At 2:28 pm on May 12 she was lying in bed reading while two Hui classmates said their prayers. When the bed first began to shake, Gong Jianfen assumed the two classmates in the bunk below were messing about on purpose; only when she looked up and saw the ceiling light swinging did she cry out, "Earthquake!"

She climbed down, put on her shoes, took her wallet and got ready to run out. But the two Hui classmates at prayer did not move. She could not bring herself to leave them. Close to 2:40 pm the prayer ended, and the three of them ran out of the dormitory.

By then the dormitory was empty.

13

On the afternoon of May 12, Leng Yuxue was sitting in the second-grade Class 1 room at Yingxiu Elementary. The hot midday sun came in through the windows and she was nodding off. Leng Yuxue had always been the best-behaved student in the class and her homeroom teacher counted on her; this period happened to be the homeroom teacher's, so she pulled herself together and propped her cheek up on her hand.

At 2:28 pm the desk began shaking hard. Groggy from the near-nap and startled by the sudden noise, she froze in her seat.

Her homeroom teacher grabbed her hand and ran with her toward the stairwell. It happened so fast that all she remembers now is being pulled along by a strong hand. That hand saved her life. "The classmates who didn't react in time and stayed in the classroom were all crushed to death," Leng Yuxue said.

Leng Yuxue stumbled toward the sports field as the ground rolled under her. She fell hard and could not get up however she tried. Her homeroom teacher, already ahead of her, came back, took hold of her and pulled her on.

When she finally reached the field, Leng Yuxue went silent for a long time.

14

Tian Wanliang was born in 1976 in the Anhui countryside and graduated from college in 1998. One of his dreams on graduating was to get out of poverty: "The first thing about poverty is that you want to beat it materially."

In 2001 he came to Chengdu, got into stage theater and became a musical producer. This seemed closer to the dream. By 2008 a musical he had in hand, The Little Match Girl, was touring the country; he called it, proudly, China's first original fairy-tale musical.

In May 2008 he traveled with the company to Wenzhou, where the musical had already been staged three times.

Just past 2 pm on May 12, Tian Wanliang and three colleagues from the production were crowded into a standard room at a Wenzhou guesthouse, their lodging in the city. While they held half of a celebration dinner in the room, they were also working out the next stage of expansion: the contracts for performances in Zhejiang and Hangzhou were already signed.

At 2:28 pm the discussion was going full tilt.

Next: "Three Days Later."

Cover image: Unsplash, Wen Xinyu

Note: At the interviewees' request, Mu Yunping and Li Mingliang are pseudonyms. Yan Wenjing also contributed to this article.