Wang Yuzhen

Standing in the rubble of her house in Bandao Cun, Wangyuzhen watches me speak with her neighbors. When I turn to leave, she calls out. Would I like to see her house? Of course, I say. She is a tiny woman with a beautiful smile. She too was in the fields when the earthquake stuck. None of her family members were hurt. But they were badly frightened and her son, daughter and grandson all left for Shenzhen soon after the earthquake. She and her husband remain. She tells me she has always lived in this village. As a little girl, she grew up only 200meters away. When she married, she moved in with the man who grew up in the house that now lies in rubble at her feet.

The ruins of Wang Yuzhen’s house

I ask what happened after the earthquake. Soldiers arrived at the end of the second day, she tells me. Lines of young soldiers marched towards their villages, carrying nothing with them. “At first they were only here to rescue trapped people. They didn’t have food or water, they didn’t even have shovels. They just dug people out with their hands.” For three days, she and her neighbors tell me, they had no food and no clean water to drink. They drank the muddy water straight from the rice paddies since they had no pots to boil it in.

On the fifteenth, food and water arrived, but even then there was not enough for everyone. “The people near the road got food first,” she says, “so it was a little longer till I got food.” I must have look concerned because she took my hand to assure me. “We are ok now, though, enough food, enough water.” She points at a TV, somehow undamaged, that sits on a broken wall near her tent. “Still no power though,” she laughs, “We can’t watch TV!”

The tent where Wang Yuzhen and her husband now live