A Young Social Worker in Post-Quake Yingxiu: "They Don't Take Part, Don't Pay Attention, Don't Care What We're Doing" | "Ten Years" ⑧

Zhao Xiaokang discovered that social work heals — the people he served, and himself.

Like a lot of small towns in China after the earthquake, Yingxiu lost nearly all of its young people. Zhao Xiaokang was one of the few who stayed on to live there.

When the quake struck, Zhao was in his second year at Aba Teachers College, at the time a junior college that trained elementary school teachers. He belonged to the school's dance club.

He spent that night on the school sports field with more than 1,000 other students and over 100 injured people. "You'd walk past and feel nothing. You were already scared numb — a pile of bodies, a pile of people," Zhao recalled.

Three days later, when he saw his mother at the school gate, "I couldn't hold it in. I cried anyway."

Zhao's home collapsed in the earthquake. His family, luckily, was alive.

He graduated from Aba Teachers College four years later, and most of his classmates became elementary school teachers. Zhao took a slightly different route: he joined the Yangjiaohua Art Troupe in the Wenchuan county seat and danced for two years.

But his parents insisted, stubbornly, that "you can't dance your whole life." After he quit, the earthquake crossed his path again.

He landed a job, unexpectedly, as a social worker in Yingxiu. At the time neither he nor his parents knew what the job meant.

This was 2014. Most of the volunteers and social workers who had come to Wenchuan after the earthquake had already left.

Two social work organizations were still in Yingxiu: Guangzhou Datong, and a social work service project run by Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Zhao worked for both in turn, and he was the only local among the social workers. His job was to use dance to link up the eight villages of Yingxiu township and to improve the lives of local women.

His parents read this as "running a dance class, teaching people to dance — and for free, no less."

But Zhao found that the work heals — the people he served, and himself. Even the difficulties in it made him think about "how the world got this way."

In 2017, on a colleague's recommendation, Zhao left Yingxiu for Chengdu. Most of his energy now goes to Sichuan University's "earthquake babies" project, which studies the schooling of children born after the quake.

Ten years on, Zhao's life is still tied to the Wenchuan earthquake.

On March 2 this year, we met him at Wenjun Well in Qionglai, Sichuan, where he was busy with a social work project for the local civil affairs bureau.

"I graduated from teachers college in 2012. My classmates all went off, one after another, to be teachers or civil servants, but I loved dancing, so I spent two years with the song-and-dance troupe in the Wenchuan county seat. The post-earthquake reconstruction was under way, and the government sent us to other places to give charity performances on the theme of gratitude. The pay was very low then — 1,500 or 1,600 yuan a month.

But my family thought you can't dance your whole life. As it happened, Guangdong Datong was hiring social workers in May 2014. I passed the interview and they posted me to the Yingxiu station. Later I joined Hong Kong Polytechnic University's Sichuan disaster social-psychology social work service project, which had the backing of a Hong Kong foundation that sent several million yuan a year.

After a survey, the Hong Kong research team found that local residents had four problems: daily life was monotonous; relations between neighbors were strained; work was hard to find; and there was the parenting question — husbands working away from home, wives raising the children alone.

So in the first and second phases we did post-disaster recovery, psychological support and emotional support. I came in for the last phase, mainly doing community service, responsible for linking up Yingxiu's eight villages.

For the monotony we started dance classes. The local women liked dancing anyway — guozhuang, the Tibetan circle dance, is part of Yingxiu's own culture.

We began in Zhangjiaping village, going out there every Wednesday and Friday afternoon to teach them body movement, yoga, ethnic dance, guozhuang and so on, all free. We picked their free time, so it didn't cut into their work.

After Zhangjiaping I set up a dance center in Yingxiu township itself, and invited five women from each village to come learn and then go back and teach the other women in their own village.

Besides dancing we taught classes on losing weight, makeup and Qiang embroidery, and brought doctors in to teach them CPR and other medical knowledge. At the bonfire parties we held in the villages, the women would even auction off the Qiang embroidery they had made.

There were ten of us social workers, and I was the only local; a lot of them came from outside — Shaanxi, Beijing, all over. Different people took part at different stages, including social workers and interns from Chengdu University of Information Technology, Sichuan University of Science and Engineering and Sichuan University.

Many of the college students were eager, but they didn't know local ways. We couldn't say the word 'earthquake,' for instance — there were a lot of sensitive words we never used, because they set off all kinds of associations. But plenty of the students just plunged in blindly. They didn't understand.

A college student turns up with less experience of life than the residents have, and you have him providing services to those residents. That's a big problem."

Before the earthquake Yingxiu was the largest industrial zone in Aba Prefecture, and most locals worked in factories like the Yingxiuwan power plant and Jiuzhai Pharmaceutical. As with declining industry everywhere in China, the number of people Yingxiu's factories employed fell year by year after 2000, but they still gave local residents plenty of work.

After the quake the factories moved away, and residents had to find new jobs. Liu Qibao, then party secretary of Sichuan province, set the task of "building Yingxiu into a modern museum of earthquake-resistant architecture."

Local residents built their tourism work around that "museum."

But the "museum" drew far fewer people than anyone had imagined.

No surprise there. Even before the earthquake, in a province as crowded with attractions as Sichuan, Yingxiu was only a stop on the road to Jiuzhaigou, Wolong and Mount Siguniang.

The Yingxiu Epicenter Memorial and the Love Cube Exhibition Hall — billed as "China's first great-love culture tourism brand," now closed — went up after the quake, but they were not enough to make a tourist destination that could compete.

By 2014, when Zhao started his social work, Yingxiu's young people had gone. Those left were mostly middle-aged and old people living on government subsidies, and they were the main group he served. The earthquake had taken their farmland and, for some, their families. They had to start living again.

"Yingxiu's problem now is mostly jobs. It used to be an industrial park; after the earthquake every factory was pulled down, so there's little work. Except on holidays there's almost nobody in Yingxiu — you can walk the main road end to end without seeing a single person.

That bustle is gone.

All the town has is tourism. A few years ago people ran restaurants or ran guesthouses, worked for one another, sold tourist goods, worked as guides. But compared with 2014 the number of holiday visitors to Yingxiu has dropped by more than half — you could almost say there's none left.

Tour groups going to Jiuzhaigou used to pass through Yingxiu, but Jiuzhaigou is gone now too (a magnitude-7.0 earthquake hit Jiuzhaigou on August 8, 2017). Only the independent travelers heading for Mount Siguniang come through, and they don't sleep or eat in Yingxiu.

We used to run a lot of job fairs. Chengdu, Dujiangyan and Aba Prefecture held them regularly and we passed the information on to residents; for the big ones we'd put up posters — hiring at the shoe factory or the garment factory in Wenchuan county, say — and we'd visit homes to ask what people needed.

But they didn't want to go. Most of the people we dealt with were over 30, and they felt there was no need to go out to work at that age. Some went and came back, and we didn't follow up; if they didn't want to, we couldn't force them.

In the early years we updated this information fairly often, but later it felt pointless, because nobody went.

So we changed direction. Yingxiu still had many poor households with few employable skills, so we found resources, helped some of them buy young sows and taught them to raise the animals, so they could sell the piglets for money. We got the local animal husbandry bureau to teach them how to keep the pigs and how to use the medicine.

They killed the pigs and ate them.

They don't have that way of thinking; it comes down to their level of schooling. The mother in that household had a mental illness, and had also had children over the birth quota. We tried it on that one household and never did it again.

There are too many difficulties in doing social work in Yingxiu, far too many…. First, we stand low in the eyes of the residents and the government alike, because they simply don't understand what social workers do, don't know us. Plenty of people would say 'they're the ones who put on activities,' or 'they do psychological services' — all one-sided.

They think you're a volunteer, so they can join in or not, as they like.

Our earthquake-preparedness group needed ten women and ten children to put emergency kits together, but they just didn't understand why we were doing it. They'd say, 'If I have to run, I'll run for open ground' — without knowing what medicines to take with them while they ran.

They don't take part, don't follow the social workers' directions, don't pay attention, don't care what you're doing.

Social work is a university major to begin with, and social workers are paid; we were paid for this project too. We work with an idea, a method and a plan, and afterwards we sum up and reflect. It is systematic work, whereas volunteers just come to help — willingness is enough, and what they give is their own goodwill.

The government side is hard too. Any event with more than a hundred people we had to discuss with the government, which amounts to inviting them, and if they said it couldn't be done, it couldn't. You're working on their turf; it's bad manners not to invite them. To put it bluntly, you work for them, and you have to hand them the credit.

The first time we put on a 'women's culture festival' we needed a big sports ground; we had recruited more than two hundred women, and we needed the fire service and the urban management people, which social workers could never arrange, so we had to go from the top down and let the government front it. We went to the Yingxiu township party secretary at the time and gave him our plan, and he ignored us completely. He thought a small matter like that wasn't worth his time — as long as the villagers weren't making trouble it was fine, and he didn't want anything stirred up.

Then we found another township head, the one in charge of the militia and military affairs. He understood us better, because he'd taken part in a lot of earthquake-preparedness work, and we reached the party secretary through him. All of it meant the timing and schedule of our events kept shifting, because once you send things up through different channels, the government is slow, and delay means change."

Zhao was 24 when he joined the social work organization, earning 800 yuan a month. "By the local income level in Yingxiu I could break even, but if you look at it from a young person's point of view, then…"

The job was a long lesson. He had to learn to get along with residents who didn't understand him, and to bargain with the local government at the same time. Along the way his pay rose from 800 yuan a month to 3,000.

When the Hong Kong Polytechnic University project ended in 2016, Zhao began to think seriously about social work as his career.

He could see that Yingxiu still needed long-term support and poverty relief, and he wanted to keep these services going.

Without Hong Kong Polytechnic's money, though, he had to find a new funder. The civil affairs bureau became one of them. In 2016 he registered a social work organization locally and took on projects for the Wenchuan county civil affairs bureau — among them the women's culture, sports and education services he had run before, plus elderly health, training young volunteers, and disaster preparedness.

By then he was the only social worker left on the project, and the only local. He planned to grow the organization, draw in more social workers, and keep serving Yingxiu.

If it went well, he thought, it might be one way to make a living.

A year later the organization ran out of money and had to close. "I said at the time I had to keep it going, but I really did have to think about surviving, so I didn't keep it up," Zhao said.

What he regrets is that once the social work services stopped, "these people's lives went back to what they were before."

"As the Hong Kong Polytechnic University project was ending in 2016 we wanted some continuity, so I stayed another year and took on Wenchuan county civil affairs bureau projects in Yingxiu. We packaged up some government projects and handed them to the women, so they could go and find out what the people struggling in the community needed.

But the organization lasted only a year. First, I was thinking about my own development: while I was in Wenchuan I kept in touch with projects in Chengdu, and some of them appealed to me; staying in Wenchuan the whole time would hold me back. Second, the government gave very little money that year, extremely little — funds were badly short — so I stopped taking the work on.

When it finally stopped, I felt it was a great pity.

When we first set up the dance center we picked five core women from each village and started a WeChat group. The point was to get them acting on their own, so that once we left they could keep it up themselves. The dance center is still there, the group is still there, but with no social workers behind them it has simply stopped.

We used to organize themed events and invite the government to come; once we left nobody organized them, and the government only does it when it has no choice. But the government's way isn't ours. The government cares more about ceremony; we care more about companionship and taking part.

We trained core dancers too, but with no outsider in the middle running things it couldn't go on; words would be exchanged while they were putting a dance together, and they'd start quarrelling. We also picked leaders for each area — captain, costumes, makeup, finances — but they simply couldn't go on coordinating it. They didn't have the will, and they didn't have the ability.

Once every village had a dance troupe, the government would call on the troupes to perform whenever it held some event or other, and the women of course didn't want to, because they had their own work, and it cut into their work and their lives.

These events have been especially frequent the last two years — themed campaigns like 'targeted poverty alleviation' or 'civilized social conduct.' Inspectors come from all over, and the officials have to show that the residents of this village, this place, live happily: 'Look, there are people dancing here every day.' Those are the government's methods, of course.

So it's contradictory now. In the end it feels like we're the ones helping them get these things done, and the women resist it too, but there's nothing to be done (helplessly).

Wenchuan has become a knot in our hearts now.

It's hard to get anything going. Nobody wants to work in that place except the locals. If we wanted to, we could pull a social work project over from Chengdu, but there'd be no point. Organizations are still working there, but from what I can see what they do has little to do with social work any more — the government tells them what to do and they do it, because they're taking the government's money.

Right after the earthquake there were hundreds of organizations, hundreds of volunteer teams, rescue teams and foundations working in Yingxiu, far too many people to count. Now they've all pulled out. All gone.

Part of it is that there's less money; the other part is that once you take the government's money the government has demands — if it gives you money you'll certainly have to fit in with its work, meet its goals and its results. But social work has its own professional value, doesn't it? Our team was very clear: we wanted to do our own thing. But doing things on someone else's turf is hard.

The government supported us before only because the dance troupes we trained were useful to it — very useful, because Yingxiu is a special place, a spot where receptions come thick and fast; there are delegations at any hour.

Anything else that doesn't touch them directly, though, and to them you're just making work. They're slow themselves — when would they ever have time to deal with your business?

When our team first came to Yingxiu for the initial assessment we had to do a huge number of questionnaires — going to the government, to residents, to all kinds of people to have them filled in. The government found it very off-putting; they thought all that meant nothing to them.

They thought we were a cult. They didn't know us — and a lot of people on the Hong Kong project came from outside and couldn't speak Sichuanese, or couldn't make themselves clear when they tried."

Three labels have followed Zhao all along — "rural," "teachers college," "junior college."

After graduating he didn't take the track those labels laid out. He chose social work instead, a job he had never so much as heard of while he was studying, and didn't understand until he had been doing it a year.

He faces the pressures every young person in their twenties faces: marry, settle into a career, hold a steady job.

His pace is slower than his peers'. "I don't feel I have to rush after all those so-called arrangements for a life," Zhao said. "Some of my classmates are still taking the teaching-certificate exam, still taking it after they're married," he said. "Some classmates got married and now they're divorced."

Zhao is happy with his current job — the pay is better than before — and the professor on his project has encouraged him to apply to Sichuan University's social work program. He plans to sit its graduate entrance exam this December.

"I'm quite satisfied with my life."

"I've thought about giving this job up. It's been a struggle.

My family doesn't support me. I can't explain to them what I do — all they know is that I run a dance class in Yingxiu, teaching people to dance, and for free (laughs).

They think I spend all day volunteering, that it isn't a proper job: low pay, only social insurance, no housing fund. Every time my mother asks, I answer 'yes, yes, yes.' I don't have the money, and I still say I do.

My classmates who teach now also ask me: 'What exactly do you do?' I'd explain for ages and they wouldn't get it, so I stopped explaining.

But if I could go back and choose again, I'd still choose social work.

There's a word, 'assimilation.' We're the ones doing the treatment, but while I'm treating them I get healed as well. The people we dealt with in Yingxiu were a special group, and we had to find every way we could to guide them. In the middle of that I'd also think about how I get along with my own family. I've let go of a lot, and I don't complain as much.

That old lack of confidence, that sense of inferiority, has eased too.

I came out of the countryside, and when I started social work straight out of teachers college the people I dealt with were mostly highly qualified, highly educated people from Guangdong and Hong Kong. They talked in theory and I couldn't follow it — I felt the gap, felt a bit inferior. I didn't dare speak, I just put my head down and worked, but I didn't know whether what I was doing was right, so I worked in a state of nerves, with no ideas of my own at all.

Now I'm the one leading students from those same schools. Sometimes, explaining something, I surprise myself that I can say it. Maybe I've been through more; I feel a thing should simply be done this way, you shouldn't be afraid of it, just do it. Whether it turns out well or badly doesn't matter that much. I don't hold back the way I used to.

My biggest pressure used to be marrying and settling into a career. A lot of people back home in Wenchuan were sitting the civil service exam — that way your whole life looks settled — and my parents pushed me to sit it too.

But now, every time I go home they can see I'm happy. They can see it in how I get along with the friends and colleagues around me.

They've stopped pushing me. They've given in.

My confusion? (pauses) I suppose it's resolved. Time resolved it.

I used to think about teaching dance at a commercial studio. I don't now, because I'm calmer. I have my own working experience, and I still feel this job suits me better — because you get to see a person change, the whole environment change, a group of people change because of what you did.

When it comes to making up my mind to leave, I still hesitate. I can't bear to give up this job, because there are so many memories in it."

Cover and inline images: Zhao Xiaokang, unsplash, haiwainet