In the 2004 Daping mine disaster in Henan province, 148 people died, and the journalists and the families of the mine disaster were asked to stay in the same guest house. I met a girl in the corridor of the hotel and asked if I could help her read the agreement. I read it as a compensation scheme or something like that, one or two sheets of paper, 200,000 in compensation, without specifying who the compensation would go to. She was 20 years old, had been married over for a year from a distance, her husband had died and her own Family was not around. I told her that the spouse is the first in the first order of succession to the estate. All the rooms in the reception were open, and I don’t remember where I hid from her to read the contract. I had to avoid the local officials, and “private” contact with the families of the deceased was still a cause for alarm. She was hiding from a large family that occupied her room, the family of her dead husband. I know what the function of a large family is at a Time like this, to provide kinship support and to help the old couple in the battle for the inheritance, over the daughter-in-law. I would love for her to get her share of the money, and after talking to her for about ten minutes, I went back to the site to see if there was any way to get in and take a look.
I didn’t publish a story on the Daping mine disaster, or even write about it. This was my first time covering a coal mine disaster, and the emotional impact was said to be the strongest.
I always remember that girl for many years. I don’t remember her face anymore, but her memory has become a part of my Life. At that time I thought, what if my sister was in this situation. Many times later, I still think of this girl. This girl and this thought, connected together.
It was just an episode. I myself, or anyone else, had to be trapped in the traditional, male-dominated undertones of the worldview, which is really the worldview of the big man, that this was an episode and not news. Towards the end of the year, I wrote in a very short essay about my impressions while covering this mine disaster, and I searched for two small paragraphs.
“And so it was: people died that day, people acted, people got rich, and no one was the least bit surprised. I still remember clearly what I heard and saw that day: the wind over the forest, the play was babbling, like thin threads floating in the air; the cold autumn rain diffused over the mountain beams, that seemed to float swaying, it is our hundred years of difficult Central Plains rivers and mountains. “
Seems to be a local propaganda staff furiously questioned me why I want to interview the things that do not allow interviews, “I froze. I didn’t know what to tell this person: we can’t be forever young, forever hot and tearful, yet still nostalgic for a better world. “
Even in this little essay I don’t mention the little widow. Drawing attention to an ordinary little widow in a tragic mining accident is a creative endeavor, a Trevor thing, a McLeod thing for writers who write about life in coal mines, etc., not my thing. But if you ask me what a better world consists of, I’d say it consists of people and systems to protect a little widow.
I wrote before that, in fact, I wanted to report on the kind of news that, for example, in Beijing, at night, a girl sees a street lamp shining on an acacia tree, and she suddenly feels like she’s going to cry. I think this is the news. I don’t think it’s necessary to see the world exactly as the big guys see it, politics, war, disasters, economics, and so on. But the world doesn’t see it that way.
I’ve been sad about a lot of things in my life, and I think I’m at least endowed with the ability to be sad more often than others. The little widow made me sad twice, first because she might not get the money that was rightfully hers, and second because I couldn’t write about her. I wasn’t much of a celebrity then, and I didn’t have the confidence that I could write anything.
Later I witnessed such a story as a model for a story about a widow, a family that threatened her husband’s family, an indemnity that came up again and again in the course of the disaster coverage I later participated in. Most of the time, of course, in places like Fuxin, Liaoning, for example, the widow is mostly a local and has the support of her own kin, and things are better. But the stories themselves, as I’ve told my friends privately, are always the stories of Dickens’ time, the scramble for property, without pity. This is true in the midst of all disasters, where cruelty and ugliness always follow one layer after another.
This is indeed part of the feminist issue. When bad things happen, women are always the most oppressed and deprived. I always thought that feminism today was the dismantling of misogyny, the more intangible and essential part, the improvement of the system, the raising of the level of Perception, the saying to a three-year-old girl, “Of course you can, of course you can be a policeman, you are the It’s saying that and helping, it’s realizing that it’s a male responsibility, and it’s always going to be. I didn’t know you guys were actually talking about this kind of thing. I’m not as sensitive to this kind of thing as I used to be, or rather, I’ve decided to be less sympathetic, and that’s true.
The last time I went to a coal mine was to Datong, Shanxi, and one of the jobs was to a small private kiln. That interview left a warm and even sexy impression on me. Their situation was not good to say the least. Young miners from Sichuan, with their female companions, came to Shanxi, did work that the locals didn’t do, used technology from a hundred years ago, and lived in kilns. Because digging coal was not the problem, the problem was how much coal they could bring up, so their income depended on how good the mules were. It was winter, and the girls were washing their clothes in aluminum tubs on the sunny hillside, tiny snow-white bubbles floating in the air as they chatted and enjoyed their social life. Most were in their late teens and early twenties. In the kiln, the fire was burning extremely hot, and to the right of the head of the double bed, a large hole was gouged into the wall or the mountain, which looked extremely strange, and I asked a man in the mine what it was for, and he said it was for the mules. I really didn’t think of this, I thought of the mules sleeping right next to the miners and I thought to myself this is too magical. The valley was quiet and sleepy, and I had a crafty coal boss to deal with. The miners were coming up in a few hours, and by then there would be a little couple here and a mule there. The coal is going up in price. And the fires are so hot. How nice it would be if life went on like this.
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