After the Earthquake He Was 42, Had Nothing, and Had to "Start Over" | "Ten Years" ③

With this installment, we begin telling the stories of the individual people caught in the earthquake.

In 2008, Yu Yuntao was 42 and ran a plumbing-and-electrical shop in Beichuan. Years of hard work had built up a family fortune of one to two million yuan. In his spare time he served as chairman of the local Islamic Association. He was living the comfortable middle age he had imagined for himself.

His son was his greatest hope. The boy had just moved up to Beichuan Middle School. "His first year there he won a scholarship," Yu Yuntao said, plainly proud.

At 2:28 pm on May 12, the wife who had been with him for nearly 20 years and the son who was sitting in class at Beichuan Middle School were buried under the rubble for good.

Overnight, he went from riding high to having nothing.

Among his brothers, the job of looking after their mother fell to him. She was 80 that year, and the quake had injured both her legs. Two people in one household, both covered in wounds. Yu Yuntao ate what was in his bowl every day and tasted nothing.

In Beichuan, 2,000 people lost a spouse in the earthquake, as Yu Yuntao did.

A year later, Dai Qiyin, 32, married into Beichuan from Huajie, a town 40 kilometers away. The wedding was held in a 20-square-meter transitional prefab unit, and she became Yu Yuntao's wife.

In her memory of her first two years in Beichuan, Yu Yuntao's eyes were always drooping and he sighed constantly. "Every year when May 12 came around, his mood would sink, and he'd talk about his boy, his wife, all the time."

It sat badly with Dai Qiyin. "He could never stop going back to his past," she said.

Their daughter was born at the end of 2009, and things still did not get better. Only when the girl learned to talk and called him "Daddy" did Yu Yuntao slowly take in the new role he had been given. "Life has to go on, and you have to build a family and a living," he said.

On the afternoon of February 24, 2018, we met Dai Qiyin at a tobacco shop in the new Beichuan county seat. No one, she said, understood that stretch of memory better than her husband.

At 7 pm, we met Yu Yuntao at the shop.

"When I came out I had nothing, just two hundred yuan on me. All my money was tied up in the business, and there was nothing in my bank card either — very little, only a few thousand yuan. Back then the banks hadn't restored their systems, so you couldn't withdraw anything; it took three months for the banking system to come back. I never thought about spending money then anyway, and there was nowhere to spend it. All around you there was food to eat and clothes to wear. The clothes were donated by volunteers, handed out through the Red Cross according to your size. Nobody cared whether the clothes were good or shabby, as long as there was something to put on.

I never thought about leaving Beichuan. The way I saw it then, I'd lost so much in this disaster that striving for anything had no value left. I was getting old too — I was 42 when the earthquake hit. Before that I still had a family fortune of one or two million yuan, and in an instant it was all gone. Forget the property. The two people closest to me were gone, and after that nothing had any value.

At first we were housed over by the Justice Bureau. We had a Hui street, a street put up specially for Hui Muslims, because we have to pray and keep our customs. Anything halal was distributed to us, and anything not halal went to the other disaster victims. We also set up a communal kitchen."

There is no such thing as earthquake radiation, but Yu Yuntao liked to bring it up. He put his wound, the temples that went white overnight, and the shifts in his skin color — first pale, then dark — all down to radiation from the quake.

He was trying to explain to himself the sudden turn his life had taken.

"The radiation from the earthquake made my skin very dark and it wouldn't change back; it took half a year for my skin to slowly recover. But the wound on my leg would not heal no matter what. I went to see doctors at the Navy Logistics Hospital later on, and it still never healed, never closed up. Wounds hit by earthquake radiation can't be cured — I put medicine on it every single day.

Back then I was listless all day. In the six months after the earthquake, everyone's spirits were sunk in that atmosphere; sometimes I'd cry myself awake in my sleep. That went on for close to ten months. It was only after I met the woman who is my wife now, and she looked after me, that my spirits slowly came back. Volunteers from other provinces did psychological care too, and they often gave us comfort and support.

We lived in Leigu town for a bit over two months first, then moved to the government-planned Yongxing prefab settlement, where we stayed two and a half years. The prefab site covered fifty or sixty mu, and I had 20 square meters to myself. It was allotted by household: if your household had three people you still got 20 square meters, and if there was only one of you, still 20 square meters. Cooking and sleeping all happened inside the unit, and there were shared toilets and bathhouses, separated by sex. The public management zone of the settlement was disinfected every day, and there was a rehabilitation center too, because there were a lot of disabled people. There was also a community management committee and a prefab-settlement management committee, and the area was divided into several communities."

The earthquake flattened the old Beichuan county seat. The new county seat was sited at Anchang, a town in An County 23 kilometers away.

In early 2011, the Beichuan government allocated housing in the new county seat at 30 square meters per person. People who had held both a house and household registration in old Beichuan paid 1,600 yuan per square meter. Those with a house but no registration, or a registration but no house, paid about 2,000 yuan per square meter. The government offered loans of 50,000 yuan, interest-free for three years.

Yu Yuntao's family was allotted 106 square meters, at a total price of nearly 170,000 yuan. After the government's 50,000-yuan loan, he had to borrow from every direction to scrape together the remaining 120,000.

That did not count the loan on the plumbing-and-electrical shop from before the earthquake. "The shop still had tens of thousands of yuan in loans on it. If we hadn't paid that off first, we couldn't have bought the new house at all," Dai Qiyin recalled.

"We've lived on a tight belt the whole way through."

"Later I moved into the new house built in the new Beichuan county seat, and I got married around the same time, and things slowly recovered. You have to recover. You have to do something, or there's nothing to eat. The government's help was only ever meager; it can't feed you for the rest of your life.

You can't survive on the minimum living allowance. That doesn't work. The government's allowance back then was only a hundred-odd yuan. What can you do with a hundred-odd yuan? The government had already put out the call — big banners hung everywhere, the slogan announced: reconstruction 'basically complete in three years.' Every day there were study sessions, the loudspeakers in the prefab zone and the televisions were playing speeches, and every day you had to take the message in. At that point you had to fix yourself a direction.

The government gave me a reconstruction payment of 16,000 yuan. Everyone affected who had both a house and a registration got it. It was a resettlement fee, to get your life going. The Party's central fund gave every household another 6,000 yuan in living subsidies. Back then the government subsidies were basically enough to live on, and people were satisfied. There wasn't much to spend money on, and nowhere to spend it anyway."

Yu Yuntao had to face the question of "starting over."

Forty-two is an awkward age. Starting from scratch costs more than it does for a young person, and parents are getting old and need care.

Most of the people who stayed in Beichuan after the earthquake were, like Yu Yuntao, over 40: they had parents to look after, and their bodies were no longer up to migrant labor.

Yu Yuntao decided to stay in Beichuan and give it one more push. "After the earthquake we really had no money, we were poor beyond helping, and he thought he was still young enough to go out and do something," Dai Qiyin said, recalling his first venture after the quake. He and a friend invested in a post-quake reconstruction project that cost more than a million yuan, and lost 300,000 on it.

After the earthquake, because the reconstruction timetable was so tight, many projects were built before approval came through, or designed and built at the same time. Once reconstruction auditing began, according to figures from China's National Audit Office, audits of Wenchuan earthquake reconstruction had by the end of February 2010 saved reconstruction funds and recovered losses of more than 1.2 billion yuan.

Yu Yuntao's 300,000-plus was part of that total.

"Beichuan was mostly rebuilt with aid from Shandong; they had the money. After the quake Shandong built an industrial park here, with more than a hundred companies working out of it, but they wouldn't hire people like us. You had to be under 35 — at my age it was out of the question. After the earthquake my whole age group simply didn't fit anymore, and I'd lost so much of what I once knew, so I went to study at Southwest University of Science and Technology. I'd trained in industrial and civil construction, straight out of a technical school. In 2013 I went back to study marketing: tuition was over 7,000 yuan, classes two or three times a week, half a year of it, and a diploma at the end. You have to learn to dig up your own materials, how to work a market, how to build templates.

While we were in the prefab settlement I did all kinds of odd jobs, some renovation contract work. I took a contract in 2009 and went on site in April, and the whole road held the job up for a year or two. Building a village committee office should have cost a hundred-some thousand yuan, but after the earthquake it dragged on a year or two before it was finished. There was no way around it: the old village committee was up in the mountains, and after the quake there was no road, so we had to haul materials by horse, and a horse can't carry much in a day. Work would start, then stop, then start again. Delays like that will wear down even a boss with plenty of money, and there was no money in the job to begin with.

For more than a year after the earthquake, we all assumed reconstruction projects wouldn't be audited, so we costed them by the construction industry's old 2005 quota standards: so many square meters, so much money.

The policy kept changing.

Then the central audit team gave the order that every reconstruction project had to be brought into the audit. Reconstruction wasn't emergency rescue work; anything that counted as reconstruction, design or planning had to go through the audit.

Those auditing firms audit you against the standard, calculated at pre-earthquake costs. Whatever was to be deducted got deducted, and there was nothing you could do. After the deductions my costs had gone way up.

They won't take any of those cost problems into account. There were no roads after the quake, so everything was built off rough tracks, and materials cost double what they had. A brick used to be 0.3 yuan and became 0.6. Steel used to be 2,000 yuan a ton and became 4,000. Cement used to be 500 yuan a ton and became 1,000. Labor was very expensive too, 300 yuan a day on average, when it used to be only a hundred-odd. Everything had doubled. Because back then nobody in Beichuan wanted the work — no prospects, no direction, no goals — and some of the craftsmen I knew had died, so you had to take on green hands, or bring people in from elsewhere, and that cost a lot.

The central government had allocated 940,000 yuan to build a police station in Beichuan, and the site had already been surveyed. But by the time it reached the local level and went through the audit, the station came to only five or six hundred thousand; the most distant one came to seven hundred-odd thousand. At 940,000 yuan a station, two stations should have come to more than 1.9 million, but after the audit it was only just over 1.3 million.

It wasn't only my family that took the hit. Countless families did; some were ruined. The construction of Shandong Avenue was bid at more than 40 million yuan, and after the audit it came to just over 20 million. All you could do was cry, and crying doesn't help — the state has this rule, and you have to follow the policy documents.

At the time I had two contracts worth more than a million yuan together, and I lost more than 300,000 on them. That was another blow. It came exactly when I needed money most, and there went another 300,000-plus. My life really has been one rough patch after another.

I start a business, and just as it's steadying, the earthquake hits. After the earthquake more problems come up, and I start from zero again — build a house, marry a wife, raise a child. Just when I thought I could make a bit of money and settle life down, who knew I'd lose money again."

Beichuan is China's only Qiang autonomous county, home to 31 ethnic minorities — Qiang, Tibetan, Hui, Tujia and others — and more than 60,000 religious believers.

In the earthquake, 1,397 religious sites in Sichuan province were damaged to some degree, 90 of them completely collapsed. In 2009, the reconstruction projects approved by the Sichuan provincial government included restoring 474 badly damaged religious sites.

"Under the reconstruction policy, religious temples weren't supposed to be rebuilt. Then in 2009 Sichuan province put out another policy, to restore religious sites to what they had been before the quake, and the provincial government put up 400 million yuan, and all the destroyed religious buildings were rebuilt. That was the opening — the policy kept changing. The old mosque was in the old Beichuan county seat, built in 1884. In 2009 a new mosque went up, at a cost of more than 4 million yuan.

Beichuan is a place where all five religions are present.

After the earthquake, Christianity spread into Beichuan very fast. Their psychological comfort arrived quickest. Christianity, Catholicism and Islam really all come off one stream, but Christianity puts the weight on this life, on living this life well — that's what it seeks, and so it suited the taste of people coming out of the earthquake. That idea catered very well to the disaster victims' state of mind, along with the comfort and consolation it offered.

Its funding came from wide sources too. Ask it for money and it can hand the money to you at once. It proselytized illegally. If it gives me money, then sure, I say I believe — but I don't really believe. What the people spreading it wanted was to expand fast.

Our Islam isn't aimed at outsiders; it's the faith of the Hui people only. But Christianity doesn't sort by ethnicity or by person; it spreads to everyone. That's its form.

People came to talk to me about Christianity too, and handed me flyers. They didn't know I was Muslim. Faith is my own line of work, so I already knew everything they were saying. But once I believed in Islam I couldn't also believe in Christianity.

Christianity was developing fast in Beichuan then; in the Sichuan disaster zone there were soon more than 700,000 Christians, and that figure was released and reported officially. Because I have ties to the religious association, we were in meetings constantly. The government was afraid religion would cause disorder, and very quickly began cracking down, coming in to investigate and even making arrests."

Yu Yuntao can take hardship. He has stumbled through the past ten years. "I've done everything — restaurants, shops, a supermarket, I've run them all. It's exhausting."

Over the ten years, the good luck on Yu Yuntao's list included remarrying and having another daughter, which helped him climb quickly out of the earthquake's pain. But bad luck came right behind: he started over in business and lost another 300,000 yuan; he ran a supermarket for a year and a half, then came down with cholecystitis and a herniated disc and handed it over to a relative.

These days he spends most of his time working for the mosque, and copies out documents now and then for a little loose change. Dai Qiyin prefers to call the work "charity" — much of the time they end up putting their own money into it.

The family lives every day with its belt tightened. "There's no other way — you just get through it, bit by bit," Dai Qiyin said.

"It was only the year my younger daughter was born that I felt better in myself. My daughter is where my spirit rests, and she is precious, hard-won. However tired I am out there, I come home and see her and my heart is at ease. What strikes me most is that once I had a wife and a child, my spirit came back and I had hope again. Once the child was born I had to go out and strive; I have to support her, and that is the point of the striving.

I started taking construction contracts again, building houses. Life has to go on, and you have to build a family and a living.

Now I've taken a loan out on my wife's house as well, and all I can do is pay it back slowly. I still haven't paid off the 300,000 I lost, and I'm not doing anything big right now, just small jobs here and there, enough to hold the family's life up, paying back a little each year, like a mortgage.

I'm still chairman of the Islamic Association. I've kept at that, but there's no income in it.

There's no way around it, but honestly, I'm not afraid of having no money. I don't care much about money. As long as the family has enough to live on, as long as everyone is safe, that's enough.

I never used to study; all I knew was fooling around. From 35 to 40 I didn't study at all, I'd dropped my books, and for three years after the earthquake I dropped them too. Now I'm working at studying again — in an age of high technology, learning matters. These days I write and study and take notes every day, but my head isn't what it was; I can't hold onto things.

I hope that in this life we can set an example for the next generation. That we came out of a natural disaster on that scale and rebuilt our home — what we learned from it can leave them a kind of spiritual wealth.

Now, whenever I have a spare moment, I write in a diary, remembering the rough patches of my life. Life now is so good."

Cover image: Unsplash Photos in text: Wen Xinyu

Note: At the interviewee's request, "Dai Qiyin" is a pseudonym.