Shaken To His Foundations; Scale of China’s Disaster Makes an Imprint On A Reporter

The LA Times correspondent Mark Magnier writes from Beichuan, China:

Images run through my mind when I’m brave enough to let them in like the click-click of an old slide projector. The body of the security guard five days after the quake, his keys still on his belt, his uniform and badge struggling to lend some dignity to his bloated corpse. The body of the student, a boy slightly older than my son, his sneakers battered, his shirttail out.

Like most people, I move through life clinging to a few assumptions that give me a modest sense of control. That the floor and walls around me will hold. That my loved ones will die of old age. That my life has meaning.

Many of these comforts were blown apart over the last two weeks of covering the Sichuan earthquake, a staggering natural disaster that left more than 67,000 people dead. How do you absorb the random nature of death on such a scale, so many thousands of children buried alive in schools meant to nurture their energetic bodies and soaring spirits?

Friends sometimes question the sanity of being a journalist, and particularly a foreign correspondent. When everyone else is running away from danger, reporters head toward it. Shortly after the magnitude 7.9 earthquake hit May 12, this was the drill: racing to the airport, somehow managing to get a seat on a full plane, landing in Chongqing and driving all night to reach a school where 900 students were buried, all in time for deadline.

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