NPR’s Louisa Lim wrote a heart-warming story on her experience of being caught unexpectedly in an aftershock panic outside of Chengdu:
When I set out to interview panicky people sleeping outside, little did I imagine that I myself would become one of them. In fact, I’d confidently predicted that I’d be back at the hotel within an hour. But that was not how things turned out. I’d taken a taxi to a place where many people were still sleeping outside in tents and cars, a week after the shock. When I first arrived, it seemed this constituted only a tiny minority of people, generally the elderly or the very nervous. But as I was interviewing, suddenly a massive influx of people came running to the square, quilts and tents under their arms, jostling to commandeer a space of their own…
She couldn’t get back to the city and had to spend the night outside with thousands of Chengdu residents.
As I lay outside I realized how much of a bubble we’ve been living in at our reinforced hotel. The reality for most Chengdu residents is that every time they leave home, they’re still not entirely sure that they’ll be able to return. Every night they weigh up the relative safety of their buildings and the speed of their legs. And everybody here is traumatized to a certain extent. But people are finding comfort in community. When the kind couple who’d lent me the blanket left, another elderly neighbor pressed his red plastic raincape on me. I said I’d be fine. He told me what a hard time we journalists were having and that I mustn’t get sick. I told him I didn’t need his cape. He shoved it at me. I shoved it back. Then we had a comic tussle as he attempted to tug the raincape over my head, while I tried to pull it off. Intense negotiations ensued over the ownership of the raincape. Raising the stakes, he threatened to throw it in the bin if I didn’t take it away with me…
She recounted her emotional bond with farmers in an earthquake-struck Sichuan village in an earlier post To Eat or To Mourn:
“Sit down! Eat!” was the order. Bowls of steaming rice porridge were shoved into our hands and stools jammed under our knees. We looked at each other, unsure of what to do next.
We’d just watched as the Ma family buried their eighty-seven year old matriarch, Li Mingxiu, on the hillside above the devastated remains of their quiet country village. Her reflexes dulled by her age, the old lady had been too slow to run outside when the earthquake struck, and she’d been crushed when the kitchen wall collapsed on her.
But we had to admit we were hungry. And the family’s neigbours were refusing to take no for an answer. “Eat! Please eat!” they kept on urging us, pushing the bowls of hot food into our chests. Finally we gave in and sat down. They looked relieved. When I thanked them for their hospitality under such difficult circumstances, they broke into smiles. “That’s what Chinese people are like,” they said.
