Three Days Later: The Moment 10 Lives Turned in the Great Earthquake | "Ten Years" ②

This is the story of the third day after the earthquake, and of the days before it.

A countable few ten-year spans make up a whole life.

One specific ten years holds an absolutely central place in that life.

We began this reporting two months ago. The stretch of time we document starts at the moment the whole world knows: 2:28 pm on May 12, 2008.

That moment changed the lives of the dozen or so people in these pages. Seen against a wider backdrop, their ten years are also the ten years of every one of us.

We filed this report from Yingxiu Township in Wenchuan, and from Beichuan, Dujiangyan, Chengdu, Beijing and Shanghai.

1

The third day.

When Zhao Xiaokang saw his mother and the rest of his family at the school, he couldn't hold it in, and cried.

In Zhao Xiaokang's memory, the sky over Wenchuan after the earthquake looked as if a huge sandstorm were blowing through — nothing but dust. More than 1,000 students who had escaped sat on the sports field of Wenchuan Weizhou Normal School, in remarkably neat rows.

At 5 pm, a crowd of white coats poured onto the field. Part of Wenchuan County People's Hospital had collapsed, leaving doctors and patients nowhere to go; the blocked Minjiang River had formed a barrier lake, and Weizhou Normal School, on relatively high ground in the county seat, had become the safest place around.

More than 100 wounded lay side by side on the field. Patients needed IV drips, so Zhao Xiaokang and his classmates stood beside them holding the bottles up high.

As the sky darkened, more and more of the wounded were carried in. Every few minutes there was another patient who could not be saved. The bodies at the edge of the field went from a few, to a slow-growing row, to a stack.

Zhao Xiaokang was 17. "You'd walk past and feel nothing anymore — you'd already been scared numb. A pile of corpses, a pile of people."

For safety, the school forbade students to leave the grounds, and the principal warned teachers and students over the loudspeaker not to drink water: water after an earthquake might be contaminated.

Twenty-four hours passed, and the more than 1,000 teachers and students had eaten nothing at all, and hadn't touched a drop of water.

The next afternoon, Zhao Xiaokang and four other buddies decided to split up. Two classmates who were heavy smokers climbed the wall to find a cigarette stand; Zhao Xiaokang and two others were to comb the streets for food.

Outside the school, Zhao Xiaokang was pulled straight into a brutal reality. The Wenchuan county seat looked as if it had been ransacked: cars sat abandoned every which way in the road, engines still running because no one had had time to switch them off; shop doors stood open with no one inside. "All of a sudden the whole town was in chaos. All of a sudden you had no idea what had happened — it felt like the world was ending."

"A crowd of people came running saying we should run this way, and honestly I had no idea why I was running — everyone was running that way, so you went too. There was no way to think for yourself about what to do."

The plan had been to take food from a classmate's family's corner shop, but by the time they got there it had already been picked nearly clean. So they went to another shop to buy water, and asked volunteers on the roadside for some compressed ration biscuits.

In Zhao Xiaokang's memory, it started to drizzle on the way back. He remembers the slap-slap of flip-flops through puddles and broken rubble; a figure flashing past the bank at speed; what he later thought might have been a warning gunshot; the figure suddenly running faster... And then, the next second, Zhao Xiaokang saw a person go down in a pool of blood.

Zhao Xiaokang stopped chewing the food in his mouth, jaw open, eyes wide.

Zhao Xiaokang and his buddies didn't get past the armed police either. The officers demanded to know where the things in their hands had come from. Zhao Xiaokang hid what he'd taken without paying behind his back and handed over only the food he'd bought with money. Not until the police marched the three of them back to the shop where they'd paid, to confront the shopkeeper, were they let go.

Back at the school, later that evening, planes began dropping biscuits and bottled water over the sports field.

Zhao Xiaokang had no appetite.

Out on the street he'd heard that "Wenchuan county has been flattened, no one survived," and he thought he might never see his parents again.

Not until the third day, when he saw his mother, did he stop holding it in, and cry.

2

It may have taken a full half hour for the dust to settle.

Yang Yuerui had run out of his classroom, and what he remembers most are the bodies he saw once the dust cleared. Some had only their heads left; some had no eyes; some had their organs exposed.

His mother found Yang Yuerui on an open patch of ground and led him by the hand back to the shelter point near their home to join their relatives. At 5 pm the government announced that, with mudslides and floods coming off the mountains without a break, everyone should move to the basketball court at the staff dormitory of the Yingxiuwan Power Plant, which sat on higher ground.

Large tents went up on the basketball court; people sat on planks laid across bricks.

That night brought wind and heavy rain, lightning flash after flash. More than 3,000 surviving residents of Yingxiu crowded into the tents, listening to the thunder and to the mudslides coming down the mountainside.

In Yang Yuerui's memory, the rainwater running below was red.

At 10 pm the Yingxiu government came round the tents handing out bread and milk, children and the elderly first. Yang Yuerui's uncle's son was still half a month shy of his first birthday, and the whole family gave up their share for the baby.

People rescued lower down the mountain kept being carried into the tents, one after another.

At the same time, the bodies of those who could not be saved kept being carried back out. With every step, people held up flashlights to light the way.

At 2 pm the next day, Yang Yuerui's father crossed the mountain from another village in Yingxiu and found Yang Yuerui and his mother. The three of them held each other and cried. Before long his father told them: "Stop crying. I have to go help with the rescue at the elementary school."

That afternoon, more and more people died in the tents. Worried the risk of disease would reach his younger brother, Yang Yuerui's family and relatives moved back near their old house. A little after 6 pm on the 13th, planes dropped supplies; after the army took charge of the food, it was still handed out in the same order — children and the elderly first.

On the 14th, a military tent went up across from the one belonging to Yang Yuerui's family. No one had had a proper meal; Yang Yuerui's mother found a chicken in the ruins of their old house, crushed to death. With no salt, they could only season it with instant-noodle flavor packets. He remembers his family and the soldiers each holding a bowl and taking one small mouthful, and it was gone in no time.

On the 15th, Yang Yuerui's uncle came from Dujiangyan, planning to take him, his cousin and the other children out first by speedboat. As they left, the five bodies Yang Yuerui had seen outside the tent two days earlier were still lying there, and had begun to smell.

By that day, Yang Yuerui felt he had already grown calm. "So many bodies, all unrecognizable — I didn't feel anything anymore."

He was only 8. He had no idea how long it would be before he was truly calm.

3

Yang Yunqing, 58, struggled out of the insurance company office, and his first instinct was to run to Yingxiu Elementary School — an hour earlier those children had been playing in his backyard. His house stood right beside the school, and every day at noon his backyard became the school's second playground; the day students would gather there to play, Yang Yunqing's own granddaughter among them. When the bell rang for afternoon class, the chattering children went back to school.

Yang Yunqing and his wife knew every one of them by name.

The school that an hour earlier had been full of life was now a heap of rubble. He had no idea where to start, so he started from the spot nearest him, prying bricks loose one at a time from the top of the pile — wherever he saw a hand, or heard a faint cry for help, he dug with everything he had.

The principal was screaming for someone to save the students.

Yang Yunqing, older than the principal, remembers telling him: "I've worked in road maintenance. You need to stay calm. You need to have the numbers in your head — how many are inside, how many are outside."

Those numbers later became widely known: Yingxiu Elementary School had 473 students; more than 300 died "inside," and only 140 were left "outside."

After pulling two students out of the rubble, Yang Yunqing ran into the streets of Yingxiu to look for his wife. He could barely recognize the road he'd walked for more than 50 years — collapsed houses, faces smeared with blood. Hearing cries for help along the way, he'd stop to help, then turn and help on the other side; he pulled out two more people as he went.

"I was in a daze. I was out on the street like a madman, one end to the other."

He never caught sight of his wife. For a while, he told himself she must already be safe.

Yang Yunqing hurried back to Yingxiu Elementary School. A young man from the village was up in a crane, helping move the collapsed concrete slabs of the school building. Yang Yunqing told him: "Get down, I'll run it — go save your own family."

As night fell, Yang Yunqing climbed down from the crane. He didn't feel tired. He sat under a tree beside the ruins all night, thinking that once it got light he might find his wife. The moment it was barely dawn, he climbed back up. "No resting — 24 hours in rotation. Even the concrete mixer on my construction site can't stop running, let alone when you're saving lives. Twenty-four hours and you can't sleep."

Twenty-four hours later, Yang Yunqing found his wife. She had been buried in the rubble, and had stopped breathing.

He had come too late.

He never got the chance to say goodbye to any of them. Across the four families of the four brothers, his own included, ten people died.

4

Three days on, Qiu Shenghong's 5-year-old son had started complaining: the whole trip the adults had talked about nothing but the earthquake, and he wasn't having any fun.

What puzzled the boy even more was that, from the 13th on, these ten adults spoke nothing but Mandarin — not a word of Sichuanese anymore.

Qiu Shenghong learned of the earthquake from a screen on the Bund, and after that he and the nine other tourists from Shifang, Sichuan, had no heart left for sightseeing. When he got through by phone to his boss, he was told they couldn't come home yet: the airport was closed to civilian traffic so it could move disaster-relief supplies. The ten of them had no choice but to stick to the plan and spend the next two days touring Suzhou and Hangzhou.

That night, back at the hotel, phone service to Sichuan gradually came back, and bit by bit they pieced together what was happening in Shifang: "There were already so many dead in Shifang's public squares, nowhere left to bury them, and parents everywhere searching for their children."

Only Qiu Shenghong had a Nokia smartphone that could get online and load web pages. Over the next two days, that phone was their only window onto the earthquake. Every time he refreshed the page, the death toll — printed in red — had climbed again.

The other tourists at the scenic spots were all talking about the Sichuan earthquake too. The ten of them made a decision.

"We agreed among ourselves: whatever you do, don't speak Sichuanese. The moment you speak Sichuanese people know you're from Sichuan, and they'll say, an earthquake that big happened where you're from and you're still out here having fun, still this cheerful — it's beyond understanding."

5

By the third day, Yu Yuntao badly wanted something to do.

When he woke in front of the ruins of Beichuan Middle School, his mother and older brother were around him; nothing before his eyes had improved — his mother had been hurt in the earthquake and was barely clinging to life.

Yu Yuntao slumped to the ground, his legs useless under him. His first thought on waking was to rush back into the rubble and keep searching for his son; his brother, the only one nearby still thinking clearly, dragged him away in one go.

Yu Yuntao remembers not closing his eyes once on the night of May 12; the next day he felt 20 years older. His skin had a layer of dust on it, and a ring of his hair had turned white. "Just like the White-Haired Witch — that's not a figure of speech, it's really how it was."

On the morning of the 13th, the disaster victims of Beichuan were told to evacuate together to the Jiuzhou Gymnasium in Mianyang, where services would be provided for them. Only then did Yu Yuntao — now a "Beichuan disaster victim" — register that the plumbing-and-electrical shop he ran, and the more than a million yuan in savings that went with it, had also turned to rubble.

Leaving Beichuan, Yu Yuntao had in his bag the 200 yuan in cash he'd gone out with at noon the day before. That was everything he had left.

Sixty thousand people gathered at the gymnasium; the sound of crying was everywhere.

In Yu Yuntao's memory, "you'd hold a bowl of rice and eat it in silence all day." He couldn't taste anything — he was a walking corpse.

After two nights at the gymnasium, Yu Yuntao, as head of the Beichuan Islamic Association, led more than 220 Beichuan Hui Muslims to a mosque in Mianyang, which could take in halal relief supplies for all of them.

He badly wanted something to do, so that his son and his wife would stop appearing before his eyes. He set up a communal kitchen and led the Hui Muslims in prayer at the mosque. "The only way I could move the shadow inside me somewhere else was by doing things."

6

Late on the 13th, close to midnight, Mu Yunping and her husband got back to Chengdu from Shanghai. A few hours earlier, in Shanghai, Mu Yunping had confirmed that her parents and her son were alive.

Her son was in third grade at Beichuan Qushan Elementary School. Of the more than 40 students in his class, 6 survived, and Mu Yunping's son was one of them. But her mother had been buried in the rubble for more than 10 hours, her legs crushed and immovable; after the rescue she went into acute kidney failure, and her condition was critical.

On her husband's side, things looked much worse. His fourth aunt's family of four all died. Her brother's son was ten days younger than Mu Yunping's own son and in the same class; he didn't get out. Her sister's son was in the class next door; all 40-some children in that class died.

"It's as if we picked up a son," Mu Yunping and her husband said.

7

Yingxiu Elementary School gathered more than 100 surviving students on an open patch of ground. By then the students had lost any sense of which class they belonged to — in some classes the homeroom teacher had died, in others every single student had.

Leng Yuxue sat ringed by faces she didn't know; fewer than 10 of her own classmates had survived.

She sat frozen on the ground, saying nothing. She was so tense she couldn't feel her own hands or her own body. She tried to keep her eyes off the teaching building not far away, already reduced to rubble.

Her cousin, still in preschool, found her, and she became the one he leaned on.

Leng Yuxue spotted her godfather. On ordinary days they didn't talk much, but at that moment he was the only person who could make her feel safe, so she took her cousin and followed him — at least he could get them some food.

Her godfather had his own family to look after, so minding the cousin became Leng Yuxue's job. The boy was too small and kept darting about in the chaos; her godfather scolded her: "Why can't you keep him under control?" Leng Yuxue only felt a tightness in her chest; she had no strength to argue back. She says she had forgotten, at the time, how to open her mouth and speak.

The night of the earthquake, Leng Yuxue didn't sleep at all. "It felt so long."

On the afternoon of the 13th her grandfather found Leng Yuxue and her cousin. Leng Yuxue had grown up with her parents and was not close to her grandparents. Her grandfather walked them from Yingxiu Township back to Laojie Village, about 2 kilometers away. The whole way, Leng Yuxue did not say a word.

It wasn't about her grandfather. "In those two days I didn't say anything to my little cousin either. It felt like several days had gone by."

The shock, the panic, the hurt and the fear of the earthquake all poured into this girl not yet 8 years old, and silence became her natural defense.

On the night of the 13th, Leng Yuxue's parents finally made it home. She had held it in for more than 30 hours, and now she let out a wail and burst into tears — the first sound she had made in more than 30 hours.

8

After the earthquake, the campus of Northwest Normal University, far away in Lanzhou, went back to normal fast — students went to class on schedule, everything as usual.

But once night fell, the panic couldn't be hidden.

Almost nobody slept in the dorms. Gong Jianfen's room happened to be in the last dorm building along the road, with a large open space below it. On the nights after the earthquake, Gong Jianfen remembers that space packed with a dark mass of students.

Lanzhou was 1,000 kilometers from the epicenter at Yingxiu, and still the panic reached every corner of the campus.

The television kept replaying scenes of the devastation, and Gong Jianfen's phone kept receiving messages about the earthquake, true and false alike: "The Wenchuan earthquake is being kept secret, another aftershock is coming..."

Before she had time to sort out her own feelings, on the 14th her counseling-psychology teacher called together a group of volunteers, Gong Jianfen among them, to go through the literature in preparation for heading to the disaster zone to do psychological intervention.

9

Close to dawn on the 15th, Tian Wanliang finally made it back to Chengdu.

From the moment he got the call about the Sichuan earthquake, the schedule for his musical-theater production in Wenzhou fell apart. Tian Wanliang's talent agency and its staff were all in Chengdu, and they had to work out what they could do.

That afternoon Tian Wanliang called his team together at a teahouse. This group, all of them talent agents by trade, eventually hit on a way to take part: matching up the celebrities who wanted to help the disaster zone with a way to get there.

That afternoon at the teahouse they worked through the practical problems of relief work — for instance, with the roads closed, how do you get in? They thought of collecting bottled water and instant noodles wherever they could, and buying cucumbers and tomatoes straight from farmers' fields. "You say you're delivering some very concrete supplies, and then they'll let us in," Tian Wanliang said.

Two days later they received an important figure — Jackie Chan. "Big Brother Jackie was coming back to Sichuan, and all the coordination on the ground — the donations, the reception arrangements — all of it was prepared in advance in Chengdu by our team."

What he hadn't expected was that the earthquake would also give him a celebrity "son" who called him Dad: a boy from Class 2, Grade 2 at Yingxiu Elementary School named Lin Hao, who together with Yao Ming would carry the flag for the Chinese delegation at that year's Beijing Olympics. Tian Wanliang became his talent agent for the next ten years.

10

Fan Meizhong could not take his eyes off the teacup beside him, even on the third day.

The instant the water in it trembled, he was on his feet ready to run. "Startled like a bird at the twang of a bowstring — my reaction to the earthquake had reached the point of hearing an army in the wind, seeing an enemy in every blade of grass."

Under the weight of panic, reason wore away bit by bit. Fan Meizhong got a text saying a chemical plant in Dujiangyan had leaked and Chengdu's water supply was contaminated. Like everyone around him, he too went hunting for jars and jugs to store water, and rushed to the shops to buy up bottled water.

Fan Meizhong, who on ordinary days took his own judgment to be a cut above other people's, realized then that he was no better than anyone else.

Ever since he had been the first one out of the classroom, his nerves had stayed at full stretch.

Sitting on the sports field at Guangya School, with no calls going out and none coming in, they knew nothing about what was happening outside. At 5 pm a teacher's radio picked up the Deyang broadcasting station: "Magnitude 7.8 earthquake, epicenter at Yingxiu Township."

People kept running onto the Guangya School field. It was one of the few schools in Dujiangyan with no casualties.

Fan Meizhong and the students could only sketch out the world beyond from what these people said: "The teaching building at Dujiangyan Juyuan Middle School collapsed, students from eighteen classes buried underneath, hundreds dead, the head of the education bureau on his knees crying..."

"I was in a shop at the time, I ran fast — the buildings on both sides of the street came down in an instant, and I ran over corpses..."

Fan Meizhong wanted to get back to Chengdu and make sure his family was safe. When the earthquake hit, his younger daughter was only a few months old. He ran back to his dorm room: the jug on the water dispenser had shaken to the floor, clothes that had been hanging on a stool were scattered everywhere, and a large crack had opened in the wall between the washroom and the bedroom.

He took his money and rode with a student's parent heading for Chengdu. "Traffic in Dujiangyan was a complete mess" — the roads were full of cars veering about, the whole city in chaos. "The Second Ring Road alone took nearly an hour, and it was past ten at night before the car finally got onto the Chengguan Expressway."

On the open ground at the Waldorf school in Chengdu, Fan Meizhong found his wife, and his daughter asleep in the car, and let out a long breath. That night he slept curled up on the Waldorf school bus; several aftershocks came in the night, and he stayed half-asleep, half-awake through all of them.

So that his wife and newborn daughter could sleep, Fan Meizhong kept his eyes half open every night, several nights of keeping watch in a row; at the first aftershock he'd call to them to get downstairs. "Night after night the same thing — tension, worry, half-sleep, fright."

By the third night, Fan Meizhong was worn out. He began to look at fear again. "I realized that the fear of something that's coming, but that you don't know when it will come, is the most terrifying thing of all."

He tried to shut himself off. He had even less interest in volunteering: as he understood it, a volunteer was a non-victim helping victims, and he was a victim.

And besides, "I barely have time to look after my own family — how would I go be a volunteer?"

Fan Meizhong was turning over a bigger question. Seven days later, on May 22, he wrote a piece on his Sina blog that set off an uproar. From then on the name "Fan Paopao" — Fan the Runner — was tied to the Sichuan earthquake, and became a label he would carry for good.

On the afternoon of the day after the earthquake, Lin Tianhong, a reporter for China Youth Daily, reached Dujiangyan. His career was about to reach its peak. On a ten-year timeline, he and his peers in the trade were all about to hit their high point — and then drop off a cliff.

*From the next installment on, we follow how each of these people's lives changed over their ten years.

Cover image: Unsplash

Note: at the interview subject's request, Mu Yunping is a pseudonym.