Preface
In 2008, 16-year-old Zhang Yue was rescued from the ruins of Juyuan Middle School in Dujiangyan. Her left eye has been completely blind since that year, her leg has undergone several surgeries, and she still walks with a slight limp. She says her memory has become particularly bad since the earthquake, and it’s not much to say about this decade. “I forgot everything at that time, and I don’t dare to remember. Our family also never mentions 512 things, and the difficulties after that, I can only get used to it and can’t think much about it, because my family is considered good in comparison.” She also said that she often dreamed some years ago that the classroom would collapse like a piece of paper, blowing in the wind. “My mother, though illiterate, said to me that no road in life is smooth, and that bumps are normal.”
1
At 3 p.m. on May 3, 2018, the petals of roadside magnolias fell out, and the new goose-yellow leaves on the branches shone white in the soft breezy afternoon sun.
In a cafe near Wanda Square at Chengdu North Railway Station, I easily recognized Zhang Yue, a pair of thick-heeled high heels with a light blue sarong, smiling when we met, like the brilliant sunlight outside the house.
Zhang Yue has grown up and is no longer the little girl she was 10 years ago – the year she was buried for more than 8 hours under a jerry-built school building.
Zhang Yue now lives in a shared studio in Wanda Square, works in an office building in Qingyang District, commutes by subway every day, and hands me a business card that says, “Sales Manager of XX Home Improvement Company.
In the company, Zhang Yue is also considered a small team leader, under the control of five or six “children”. She said she is good at team building and her daily work is to play chicken blood for her team members. The night before, after a busy May Day holiday focused on promotional activities, the company organized a dinner, she led the members to show off to colleagues at the neighboring table that they should “come to see more of Sister Yue’s group”. When talking about this, her tone was flirtatious and self-deprecating.
I was a little relieved to hear this, but it was good, it was all good.
Because I had just returned to Chengdu from Beijing, we talked about Beijing. Zhang Yue’s first job after graduating from vocational school was in Beijing, working as a store salesman for a company that sells tea.
“I came back from the hospital almost in September, close to the start of the school year, I especially especially wanted to go back to school, I chose a vocational high school – this is what I regret the most for a long time, I can not figure out why I made this choice in the first place, rather than go to a regular high school. “
Six months after entering the vocational school, the school had also prepared to organize college entrance examination classes, hearing the news, Zhang Yue jumped up with joy in the dormitory, ready to regain the once missed dream of college.
However, there were not many people with the same ambition as Zhang Yue, and in the end, due to the insufficient number of applicants, the college entrance examination class was not held, and Zhang Yue was very disappointed for a while.
When recalling the experience in Beijing, Zhang Yue frowned and showed a strained look. What she can still recall at first is an image that made her feel warm and fuzzy: In the hot summer, her elder sister suddenly called Zhang Yue and gave her a special job as a newcomer – scrubbing the refrigerator. In Zhang Yue’s mind, this was a kind of unspoken care, scrubbing the refrigerator would be very cool, a small benefit. Several years later, Zhang Yue still clearly remembers the warmth that came from her heart.
2
Zhang Yue was born in a village in Juyuan Town, Jiangyan City, and was the only child in the family. Her parents were farmers, farming about three mu of land on the northwestern edge of the Chengdu plain, and her father worked in a private factory in the steel industry.
She grew up doing farm work, pulling out birdhouses, and playing a game of marbles in a four-square grid with the boys. When she was in elementary school, her mother gave her some rabbits, and every day after school, her greatest joy was to carry a bamboo basket and a sickle on her back and roam the trails of the wide plain, picking out juicy grass for the rabbits at home.
One day, on a whim, she got on her old bicycle and rode home 20 minutes at noon when the bell rang, just to get a big handful of cherries hanging on the branches in front of her house. This is the glittering childhood experience that makes Zhang Yue especially happy.
In junior high school, Zhang Yue’s academic performance was always below average, but her teachers described her as “a girl who is willing to pay attention”. Love to play with boys, love to play basketball, in the eyes of the neighbors full of “Han Qi”, the dream is to get into college – these through Zhang Yue’s adolescence, until 10 years ago on May 12.
Zhang Yue does not want to recall the scene at that time.
In the media’s account, Zhang Yue, a junior girl, was sitting in the second floor of the school building during a political science class at the time of that afternoon disaster. Later, the Ministry of Construction experts Chen Baosheng measured the columns of the collapsed school building and found that the diameter of the reinforcement inside was only “1.2 cm”, “the reinforcement is thin, not normal requirements”, “the reinforcement has no tie bars “, “the connection between the column and the wall does not have a tie bar”.
“Due to the lack of investment in education”, Zhu Chaohong, the branch secretary of Sanba village who contracted the school building project back then, recalled that “the main beam reinforcement of the school building designed on the drawing was only 2/3 or even 1/3 of the normal diameter”.
The strong earthquake wave hit, Zhang Yue where the jerry-built school building collapsed instantly, but “the buildings around the Juyuan Middle School did not collapse, and the serious ones only became dangerous”. Zhang Yue and other students were buried in the ground, and some of her classmates died around her. Zhang Yue tried to comfort her classmates who were moaning around her when she was still conscious.
Eight hours later, Zhang Yue was rescued by parents who rushed to find other children, but because of the long-term compression, her left eye was closed to the world forever. In addition to the crushed eye, Zhang Yue’s right leg was also seriously injured, and amputation was avoided only after several consultations at West China Hospital.
3
In September of that year, when Zhang Yue enrolled in vocational school, she still looked like she hadn’t recovered from her serious injury and could only walk with her right leg in tow, relying on her left leg to move in small steps.
When she first entered the school, she made a point of finding her counselor and saying, “Don’t care about the care of those who love and care for me, just treat me like a normal person.”
Later, someone also tried to do counseling for Zhang Yue, but after talking to her, in Zhang Yue’s own words, “They think I don’t need any counseling, I can do counseling for others myself.”
Zhang Yue said and laughed again. She said her inner life force is primordial.
Back then, in the ward where the Prime Minister had visited, Zhang Yue, wrapped in gauze, had sung an adaptation of “Sailor” with the theme of the earthquake to the reporters who came to interview her. She also told the reporters an almost darkly humorous witticism about her bandaged, likely-to-be-blind eye, saying, “Now you can see it, it can’t see you ……”
But apart from that, whether there are other things that cannot be overcome by optimism, even Zhang Yue herself does not know.
The afternoon Starbucks is getting more and more lively, I propose to go out for a couple of steps to find a quiet tea house to continue talking.
When we passed the intersection of Renmin North Road and the First Ring Road, we stopped to wait for the green light to come on. When we reached the middle of the crosswalk, Zhang Yue suddenly turned back to the right and pointed to a towering office building on the North People’s Road side of Wanda Square, saying that the first company she had ever worked for in Chengdu was on the top floor of that building. She said that the owner of the company is a middle-aged man who likes to have a wide view.
But Zhang Yue’s next words gave me a momentary glimpse of the scars left by the cataclysmic disaster in the sunlight right in the middle of the crosswalk on Renmin North Road.
On August 8, 2017, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Jiuzhaigou, sending strong seismic waves all the way south, causing the towering office building to shake violently. At that time, Zhang Yue was working in the office and felt a strong tremor at once. Zhang Yue’s reaction at that time was more frightening to other colleagues than the earthquake – she was so frightened that she “screamed” – a Sichuan dialect that describes a hysterical, frightened screaming.
All colleagues saw the usually calm and collected saleswoman turn blue and scream uncontrollably in a flash. Later, she could only cope by saying that she was just overly frightened.
In all her workplace experiences, Zhang Yue never revealed to others that she was a survivor of the Wenchuan earthquake burial. She wanted to be a buried survivor, she wanted to try to live as an ordinary person.
But the fear inside is still something that needs to be faced by herself.
In April 2013, the earthquake in Lushan, Ya’an, Zhang Yue was at home in Juyuan town when the tremor came and she had her first stress reaction. After the shock, she came to West China Hospital in a “trance”, hoping to become a volunteer to fight the earthquake, just like the people who rescued and helped her back then.
What she wanted to fight was not only the recent earthquake in Ya’an, but also the one that had shaken her heart back and forth. Perhaps by joining in a collective effort, she can suppress the fears that are at work in the hearts of individuals.
4
To this day, under Zhang Yue’s long, flowing dress and bright smile, the scars have not completely faded.
On the outside of her right calf, a long scar like a curved moon is still visible, and her leg and foot occasionally “disobey” and appear to be bumpy when she walks. In the quiet teahouse near the riverside street in Xinchun, Zhang Yue showed me a comparison photo of her blind left eye, a year later, the once still bright eye, and out of focus and darkened some; her left eye would often weep, the eyelid, around the orbit, and sometimes signs of inflammation, molting; monocular vision also brought inconvenience to life, several times, she failed to notice the vehicle coming from the side because of limited visual field, nearly accident; even, she was not qualified to take the driving test.
I’ve forgotten all about that time
During the 10 years, she often fell because of the inaccuracy of her monocular vision’s distance, and her knees were bruised everywhere. She also tried to pick up a basketball again, but was disappointed to find that she could no longer find the basketball’s center of gravity with her monocular vision.
The scars have been a constant pain in the past 10 years, and have never stopped getting worse. The shadow of the natural and man-made disaster is growing on this tender girl’s body, and the strength to fight it still comes only from this tender body.
After her first job in Beijing for several months, Zhang Yue returned to Sichuan and enrolled again in an early childhood education college in Jiangyou City. After graduation, Zhang Yue returned to Dujiangyan and became a teacher in a public kindergarten, which was a very common part of her rich and varied career experience. Before finally finding a career in sales, she was also a community administrator, a company administrator and accountant, and a vendor.
In addition to her rich professional experience, Zhang Yue also has numerous visions of a better life. She longs for a trip, for a sunny afternoon, sitting on a neat sofa, sipping tea, with a book at hand that she can read at will; she loves the dreamy primeval forests, the meandering lakes, the endless plains and seas, and the gentle rolling hills of her hometown in southern Sichuan. These mostly unrealized visions have been shining brightly in her uncertain future years.
But Zhang Yue has never had a pure trip so far, she has only seen the sea once. That was in a small town on the coast of Guangdong, she and her friends went to a beach opened by fishermen, it was cloudy, no blue waves, sea and sky, white clouds flying magnificent scenery, only dirty and dangerous beach and gray and gloomy sky. Zhang Yue still felt very satisfied, and she could never forget the fish that tumbled and leaped on the fishing boats returning to port.
It was 2016 when Zhang Yue accepted the help of a volunteer who had long been concerned about her and went to Guangdong alone. That volunteer opened an English training school in the small town, and Zhang Yue’s job was administration, accounting and logistics.
“At that time, I thought to myself that I was only 24 years old and hadn’t really experienced society yet. I just wanted to go, one way or another, just to go.”
According to Zhang Yue, there was a tacit agreement between her and the kind-hearted volunteer uncle: the job in the small town was just a springboard, and her ultimate goal was to go to Guangzhou. Once again, Zhang Yue received help from a couple who ran a renovation and corporate training business, and she became a salesperson for corporate training courses.
This was her first time in the purest form of sales work, initially telemarketing, and Zhang Yue’s voice was shaky when she picked up the phone to speak. What Zhang Yue gained most from telemarketing was failure. Those people who had the patience to listen to her either thought she was a fraud or suspected her of being a pyramid scheme. Those days for Zhang Yue, as if there is a ditch in front of her, she must cross.
However, in that year, Zhang Yue’s mother had a car accident, until she saw her mother out of danger in the video, she could barely let go of the guilt of not being able to go home immediately – there was no money, so she had to ask people to borrow money to buy air tickets.
Shortly thereafter, her father and grandmother were injured one after another. Soon after, her cell phone was also stolen from the unprotected, low-level room Zhang Yue rented, and the thief used a special device to reach into the bedroom and hook the phone while she was asleep. Another night, the sleepy Zhang Yue vaguely felt someone peeping out of the window, and for a moment, she was so frightened that “chickens were crowing and geese were screaming”, and in an emergency, she even shouted “catch the thief” in Sichuanese, switching to Mandarin, before the neighbors came.
When the Spring Festival came that year, Zhang Yue left Guangzhou and returned home to Sichuan, and has never left since then.
5
We walked out of the teahouse’s roll-up door together when the pale twilight had slowly descended, and we decided to walk together to South Tai Sheng Road to repair her cell phone. In the meantime, passing by a residential community to be built, she immediately took out her phone and took a picture, explaining that she might be able to come here later to develop business.
I vaguely feel that Zhang Yue’s anxious, low mental state has something beyond the pressure of work.
While waiting for a traffic light, I talked about depression, and Zhang Yue listened, suddenly turned her head to look at me and said, “Can you see that I have the look of the aftermath of depression in me?”
She said she envisioned the worst case scenario: complete blindness, deterioration of her legs, becoming a “one-eyed dragon and a cripple” – she always flirted with these discriminatory terms without mincing words, just as she did with her own poverty.
In the Spring Festival of 2017, the company had fewer things to do, so Zhang Yue returned home a month early, idle, she ran back to Chengdu, to the wholesale market to buy back a batch of couplets, lanterns, in the town of Juyuan pulled up a small stall to do business, more than 20 days, the goods basically sold out, but also a small profit. The Chengdu plain in winter is still sunny, in the unobstructed streets of the town of Juyuan, the sun shines Zhang Yue can not open her eyes, she wrote in her circle of friends: “so so so big sun, why I am still here to set up a stall? I am love is it, is it responsibility?NONONO, are not, is fucking let poor to force!
At the end, it is the popular expression of the face covered with tears and laughter.
It is appropriate to describe the house of Zhang Yue’s family as simple.
Walk out of the wide main road, into a white concrete path, on both sides of the road, spacious two-story buildings in order, in front of the Weiwei flowers, clean and neat yard, from time to time, a beautiful appearance of the car, the building walls have the traces of the years – the reconstruction of the house after the earthquake, but also almost 10 years – this is a quiet and rich rural well-off life scene, I thought Zhang Yue’s house is also one of them.
But it was not until we passed the small building, followed the white concrete road for about 500 meters, turned into a dirt road, passed through a eucalyptus forest, passed through the rape fields with full and bulging seed pods, and turned a few corners on the ridge full of vinaigrette that we arrived at Zhang Yue’s house.
It was a triplex bungalow, with two side rooms surrounded by aluminum iron sheets and covered with simple felt tiles as toilets or utility rooms. The brick main room had three rooms, and the middle room had a double wooden door painted yellow, but the bottom of the right one was damaged and had a basket-sized opening. The brick roof is still covered with felt tiles, and a large gap is left between the jagged wall roof and the roof tiles. In case of heavy rain and wind, or after the branches of the trees behind the house swept over the roof, these simple felt tiles basically lost the function of shelter from the wind and rain.
The simple country bungalow was built in 2009, and the house collapsed in the previous year’s earthquake, and when it was rebuilt, it received a government subsidy of 5,000 yuan. But in Zhang Yue’s mother’s account, this is a big difference from the policy that the neighbors initially understood.
For 10 years, Zhang Yue’s mother remained the village woman who farmed, and the car accident in 2016 made her unable to carry heavy things now, and she went to her bedroom to lie down and rest after lunch. After Zhang Yue’s eye injury, the disability level was determined, and this permanent injury caused by the poor quality of the school building in exchange for a monthly disability allowance of “a few dozen”, Zhang Yue has been taking back to his mother to use.
Zhang Yue’s father is still doing the job of polishing iron tools, wearing a thick cotton gauze mask to work every day, earning a monthly income of a thousand dollars. There are five or six washed masks hanging on the clothesline in the yard, with rusty yellow stains left on them. In the factory where Zhang Yue’s father works, those workers who have health problems are dismissed in the form of “going home to rest”.
Today, Zhang Yue’s most urgent wish is to renovate the family’s house again. In that renovation company, she gets a monthly income of just over 2,000, and over the years, the stubborn and brave earthquake survivor’s salary has always hovered at that level.
In Chengdu, due to the new home improvement industry policy, small and medium-sized home improvement companies can only survive by constantly expanding their business outward to surrounding cities and counties outside the Chengdu area, which means higher costs and fiercer competition. Despite this, Zhang Yue is still confident. That day, I sent Zhang Yue home, she was on the phone with customers all the way, and her words were so familiar and sophisticated that a business deal was soon to be made.
Conclusion
For 10 years, Zhang Yue has been struggling with the unchangeable physical scars, the lingering shadow inside her heart, and the mire-like poverty.
In Zhang Yue’s circle of friends and her mouth, there are many philosophical maxims, such as: only forward, forward even if you fall, you can get up again; tell yourself that everything is the best arrangement; as long as you do not admit weakness, life can not take you down.
But in my opinion, her most powerful “motto”, or sitting across the long table at McDonald’s, after a helpless sigh, the sentence: “No way.” In the first few years, she still did not give up the hope of regaining her eyesight, but once she heard the doctor tell her mother that the other eye would be affected in the long run due to the nerve.
From the very beginning, I tried to talk to Zhang Yue about emotion-related topics, and she said a lot, but she wished I wouldn’t write about it.
(Xiaoya also contributed to me, all characters in the article are pseudonyms)
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