Zhang Dandan: At this moment, we are all Wenchuan people Narrator
At 14:28 on May 12, 2008, a massive earthquake measuring 8.0 on the Richter scale erupted in Wenchuan County, Sichuan Province, southwest China, and at the same time ripped open an unhealable wound in the hearts of the Chinese people. the major natural disaster, which hadn't been encountered for 30 years, got the great attention of the country's leaders, the government, the general public, and the media in the first place. The Foreign Languages Bureau of China also decided in a very short period of time to independently send an interview team to the front line of the earthquake relief efforts to "make the Foreign Languages Bureau's own voice heard". It was against this background that I, as one of the six members of the first advance team, stepped on a plane to Chengdu, less than 30 hours after the earthquake. My comrades and I - please allow me to call them that - traveled as lightly as possible; many of us didn't even bring toiletries, and I myself only had a razor in my bag, as we were all prepared to go over there and sleep on the streets and in tents. The units of the Bureau of Foreign Languages and Cultures provided the best equipment for our trip in the shortest possible time, including laptops installed with wireless network cards. In the Bureau of Foreign Languages and units of leaders, colleagues, friends, a "take care, pay attention to safety" advice, we went to the front line of earthquake relief with high spirit. Walking in the aftershock from the capital airport to Chengdu, the beginning is not very smooth. Because of the rain, aftershocks in Chengdu and the priority transportation of emergency relief workers, our flight was delayed. While waiting at the capital airport, the disaster relief scene shown on the TV screen in the waiting hall attracted the concerned eyes of many travelers. The members of our interview team were not idle either: we called our units to report the situation, grabbed the time to charge our cell phones, and got together to study the interview itinerary after arriving in Sichuan. I also used this time to randomly interview several travelers in the waiting hall. Many of them were Sichuanese returning home, and they were very worried about the situation at home after learning about the earthquake. The flight finally left at midnight after a delay of more than seven hours, and it was already 4 a.m. when we arrived at the hotel we had booked. On that drizzly night, we were worried that the rain would make rescue work more difficult. It was only when the sky gradually brightened that we could not resist the onslaught of fatigue and went to sleep.On the morning of May 14th, we experienced the first aftershock after entering Sichuan before going to Dujiangyan for an interview. I was washing my face in the bathroom, leaning over the sink when I suddenly felt dizzy for just a few seconds, and my first thought was that I was lacking oxygen. Then I heard the walls and the tea cups on the table start to rattle. The floor was shaking horizontally, but I was still able to stand still, and when I went into the corridor, I saw a few travelers nervously dragging their suitcases towards the stairway, and even the hotel cleaner put down the bucket in his hand and followed. Less than half a minute later, everything returned to calm. Since then, aftershocks have become a common occurrence, whether in Chengdu, Mianyang or Beichuan. I even summarized the rule that there is at least one aftershock between 12:00 and 2:00 in the morning every day. However, my colleagues did not take the aftershocks seriously. Shock came, we are still doing the work in hand, as if to achieve a kind of "let it shake the mountains, I am not moving" temperament. News everywhere in Sichuan interview a few days, each day's schedule is very full. During the day, I took the car to the scene, and at night I went back to the hotel to process the pictures and write the articles, and then uploaded them to the unified FTP of the bureau, and almost every day I had to go to bed at 2:00 am. In the face of this sudden disaster, I never felt fatigue, my nerves were always tense, and I felt like a perpetual motion machine, working without stopping. Every day, the leader of our interview team would convey to us the condolence text messages and phone calls sent by the bureau or the organization. Every time we talked to the editor-in-chief, we ended with the concerned advice from the other end of the line: pay attention to safety, drink more water, and wear more clothes. According to the publication cycle of the weekly newspaper, many previous business trips to interviews are more relaxed, only need to record the interview place, and then return to Beijing to organize and write the article. This time, however, the situation was different. In the face of such a major disaster, there were countless news waiting to be unearthed almost every day. For this reason, the online version of Beijing Weekly played a big role in terms of timeliness. I had to learn to adapt to the speed of the Internet and publish a short, quick and timely online article. on May 15, I didn't go to the disaster area because I had to attend a government conference in Chengdu. I planned to go to a newsstand to buy a newspaper, but before I left the house, I put on my camera and my interview book in case of some emergencies. When I was passing by the entrance of a community, I happened to come across the community was engaged in the activities of donating for the disaster area, and the scene was very enthusiastic. While being infected by the atmosphere, I didn't forget that this was a good news point, and my camera and recorder came in handy. After half an hour of interview, I went back to the hotel and started to write the article with pictures. The article was uploaded to the bureau's FTP library an hour later. In the evening, I met with a friend in Chengdu to learn more about Chengdu, and the meeting place was at the "Old Bookworm" bookstore in Chengdu, a famous place for foreigners. Here, I witnessed the bar's first spontaneous charity donation for earthquake victims by foreign friends. The owner of the bookstore issued a stack of volunteer recruitment forms for foreigners, and many of the international friends who visited the bookstore filled in their information on the forms, hoping to do their part to help this rare disaster in China. For me, this was another very rare piece of news material. In the field: I worked and moved in three real fields: Dujiangyan, Beichuan and Mianyang City, where the victims were resettled. The road to Beichuan was the most winding, but perhaps it was God's favor that we had a very smooth journey that day. From Chengdu to Beichuan, a *** only used two hours. In Beichuan County, there are still 6 kilometers from the time, we met the police block. Because of the pressure of traffic, Beichuan County only allows the entry of material trucks and ambulances. We decided to go to Beichuan on foot, when luck struck again and we ran into a motorcycle transporting people from the city. Eventually, we were lucky enough to ride the motorcycle into the county town. 16th, Beichuan county town was crowded with people. Rescue troops, volunteers, medical teams, survivors, and journalists were all busy in this small county. As I walked in the direction of the county town, I was greeted by a team of officials and soldiers carrying excavation tools, who had just carried out intense on-site rescue work and were rushing to the camp for dinner and rest. I stopped one of them, a young man wearing glasses, who had just come out of the rescue site at Beichuan Middle School, for an interview. I asked him the questions I wanted to ask very quickly, because I could sense in his words a kind of exhaustion that he tried to hide but could not. I hoped that he could rest for a while, but he told me that he would return to the scene immediately after eating to rescue those who were still buried, although he didn't know how many were still there. On the way to Beichuan County, the most numerous and tired people were those who had spent several nights crossing the mountains to escape. They were young and old, carrying what little possessions they had left at home in the form of dried food, leaning on wooden sticks, with the labor of the journey written on their faces and the fear from the shadow of the earthquake still detectable in their eyes. These people who passed by the death but still walk very stubborn. Along the mountain road into the county town, there were tents of medical teams and media on both sides. In one of the tents, I recognized a Hong Kong TV reporter who had been to Lhasa with me. She had been here for 3 days, with dark circles under her eyes, and was eating bread with mineral water. We didn't say much, she had to get back to work, and I had to move on to the county. To her, and to the many fellow journalists I met on the way, who were carrying cameras and camcorders, I could only say: Take care. When I walked to Beichuan Middle School, I saw an unforgettable picture in my life: a father lying on his back between the gap between the two floorboards looking in, he stretched out his hand weakly into the gap, whimpering and crying. Inside the gap was the quiet face of a child, the blood in his nose and mouth had already coagulated, and the child's eyes were closed forever. The father hadn't closed his eyes for three days in search of his child, and there were no more tears in his cries as he stood beside the body, futilely picking at the debris. A few meters behind the father was a pile of children's bodies, clasped together so tightly that the rescuers couldn't pull them apart. I was right next to the father, and I couldn't help but reach out my hand to help the agonizing father. At that time, I felt an unprecedented depression and suffocation in my heart. I wanted to give the father some comfort and strength, but it seemed that I could not bear it myself. I didn't forget my duty and connected with the web editor in Beijing. I had to open my mouth wide to breathe hard after each sentence, and there was a huge emotion in my heart that I wanted to let out. After hanging up the phone, I walked around the ruins anxiously, looking through the textbooks scattered on the ground. I kept looking for the children's names written in the textbooks: Zhang Huan, Liu Jie.