Wish You Happy Forever (34 page)

The vice minister left with his entourage. Gan escorted us outside. I felt dizzy.

“We have registration?”

ZZ swallowed me in a bear hug. “It's true! We worked so hard!”

“We're legal?”

“The third American NGO to be registered!” shouted Mrs. Gan. “First Bill Gates Foundation. Then Clinton. And then Half the Sky!”

For the first time, after ten years of operating in the shadows, we could legally open a bank account, legally hire staff. We were recognized. We existed.

“I almost shed tears,” said ZZ, laughing and sniffling and wiping behind her glasses.

“Well,” I said. “Wow! I guess we're really part of the family now.”

“That's right!” ZZ said.

“Not ‘the other kind'?”

“You're
zijiren,
one of us,” she said.

And then the true test came.

Hongbai Town, Sichuan Province
May 12, 2008

One thousand miles from Beijing, in the mountains of Sichuan, a kindergarten class in an isolated township was waking from naptime. Sprawled or curled atop green painted desks, cozy under quilts from home, the children were just beginning to stir when the rumbling began.

Kailu

Four-year-old Kailu tried to sit up but couldn't. Everything was shaking, even the ground. The desk toppled, with Kailu clinging to it. She wiggled out from underneath. Everything around her was tumbling and cracking. The air was filled with dust and dirt and falling things. It was hard to see. The world was crashing and breaking and roaring loudly.

Somehow Kailu could hear Granny Yu, her teacher, cry out, “Children! This way! Run! The walls are falling! This way out!”

Kailu crawled through the heaving wreckage; wooden beams were starting to fall from the sky. Her hand touched something soft. She saw the face of her friend, Pingping, on the ground. Sleeping. She clutched Pingping's hand and looked around desperately.

“Granny Yu! I can't find my shoe!” Kailu cried, choking on dirt.

She tried to stand, pulling on Pingping, but now something was pinning her leg. Sudden strong arms grabbed Kailu around the chest, lifted her high, and held her tight. It hurt her tummy.

“My shoe . . . I lost it.”

Granny Yu lurched forward, hugging the child, pushing through falling debris. Then something heavy fell and it was dark. The roaring sounds faded to nothing.

Part Three

Zijiren

(One of Us)

Forget the years, forget distinctions.

Leap into the boundless and make it your home!

ZHUANG ZI (369–286
BC
)

Chapter 19

If the Sky Falls on Me, Let It Be My Quilt

May 2008

BEIJING
(
GUARDIAN
)—The death toll from the most deadly earthquake to hit China in more than three decades today reached nearly 10,000 in Sichuan province alone, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

Worst hit was Sichuan province's Beichuan County, where a further 10,000 were feared injured and 80% of the buildings were flattened, including eight schools and one hospital. Photos posted on the Internet revealed arms and a torso sticking out of the wreckage of the school as dozens of people scrambled to free the students using small mechanical winches or their bare hands.

Even as the Ministry of Civil Affairs called asking for help, we were already on the phone, trying to reach the orphanages affected by the earthquake. We sent two of our Beijing staff, both Sichuan natives who could speak local dialects, to Chengdu, the provincial capital, to coordinate our efforts. No more questions about mission. Children were in trouble. Family helps family.

They needed tents, food, water, blankets, diapers, medicine. We called in favors from every business we thought might help us get supplies. Dick called a friend who ran a film production services company in Beijing and asked him to mobilize his team to help us with procuring goods, transport, and distribution. In an instant, we were “in production” on a massive scale.

Mrs. Gao called us from the ministry every few hours with updates on the children needing relief. Along with a plea for help, I began to send whatever information I had to our supporters. The world grew smaller still. Our family would have to grow larger.

Hongbai Town

Two days passed before soldiers finally marched into the little mountain town of Hongbai.

Like most of the buildings there, the kindergarten had collapsed. Parents and grandparents clawed at the twisted wreckage with bare hands, afraid to do further damage, calling plaintively for their children. Of more than eighty in the school, only about twenty had emerged before the building fell. Almost all had been rescued by their teachers, who had managed to pull another eight, still alive, from the rubble. Now the surviving teachers wept in the courtyard for the children they had failed. Beside them lay twelve small corpses, roughly covered. Alongside a few, parents wailed, clutching at the bodies in disbelief. The fate of forty children was still unknown.

The soldiers fanned out and gently pulled the parents away from the rubble. The parents protested. How could they leave their children? A child's head and arm stuck out of the debris. No one had come for him yet.

Some of the soldiers linked hands to form a blockade, holding the parents back.

“I hear someone in there!” a woman sobbed. “Please, children are still alive!”

“We can help them if you will let us do our work,” one soldier said, choking back his own anguished tears. He looked no more than sixteen. The parents had no choice but to stand and watch as the soldiers moved carefully, all too slowly, across the mound of shattered lives.

A small voice sang from beneath the rubble:

The soldiers moved in, cautiously removing heavy bricks and beams and twisted metal piece by piece.

Finally they uncovered the cold body of Granny Yu. She was hunched over little Kailu, giving the child air and life.

Kailu didn't know that Granny Yu was crouched dead above her. She didn't know that her own leg was crushed and would soon be amputated. She didn't know that her own dear grandparents, the ones who cared for her while her parents worked far away, had died in their beds during afternoon nap.

Kailu blinked back dirt and squinted at the light. She peered up at the hazy faces of young soldiers and said, “Uncles, my friend Pingping is sleeping. Will you wake her up?”

Chengdu

It's Monday afternoon here in China. As I write this, the entire country just held three minutes of silence to commence a three-day period of national mourning. It began at 2:28
P
.
M
., marking the very moment the massive quake struck in Wenchuan County, Sichuan. Flags flew at half-staff; the people wore white flowers and, heads bowed, held hands. Across the country, horns and sirens wailed in grief.

There are 32,477 people confirmed dead, more than 35,000 still missing.

Children in the institutions are all still well. We have now reached every affected orphanage, with the exception of Aba Tibetan-Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, where the orphanage is said to house fifty-two children. We will let you know as soon as we make contact.

Mianyang has become a major refugee center. Of the more than 20,000 refugees in the city's Jiuzhou Stadium, “scores” of them are young children. We are told, but this is not confirmed, that the entire center area of the stadium is reserved for toddlers and infants.

Perhaps today's most heartbreaking story was about some of the seventy injured children who'd been carried down from the affected areas to West China Hospital in Chengdu. Most of the children were reunited with parents or relatives; some were even well enough to leave the hospital after treatment. But a few remained alone and unclaimed. They were required to sign their own consent forms so that the doctors could amputate their limbs to save their lives.

There were more reporters than doctors in the teeming West China Hospital corridors. Lights, mics, and cameras were focused on one ward where a
famous
television presenter was “counseling” a young boy who'd lost an arm, a leg, and his entire family.

A nearby high school had been commandeered to serve as temporary shelter for displaced children. ZZ and I found them there, curled on rows of cots, cuddling stuffed toys or gazing at photos, if they were lucky enough to have them. Meals and warm clothes provided, but no adults—all available volunteers were closer to the action.

Children alone with their sorrow
. I began to see our role in all this. We were getting more information about children newly orphaned. Many hundreds, perhaps thousands more were separated from their families. All raw with trauma and grief and confusion. We needed to set up safe places for them. Places where they could take refuge in the arms of caring adults.

In this land of eating bitterness, there were no resources to address trauma of this scale. Most Chinese mental health professionals dealt with disease. They prescribed drugs. A supporter told me about a group of American pediatricians and psychologists who had come together after 9/11 to help communities heal from disaster: the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement. I contacted them and began to make plans to bring a team to China to train doctors, teachers, caregivers, and volunteers in Sichuan.

I drafted a quick proposal to our ministry partners to allow us to create instant Half the Sky Centers in tents—we'd call them BigTops—in refugee camps or wherever there were large numbers of newly orphaned and displaced children. We'd use our skills to help them heal. We'd stay as long as we were needed.

But, of course, first we must do what we could to get the children out of danger.

IN SOME WAYS,
if you ignored the tents and tarps set up on sidewalks and in parks, the city of Chengdu seemed untouched. We had definitely managed to give the Chengdu orphanage a makeover, though. The unsafe Half the Sky activity room, with its cracked walls, was piled high with boxes and sacks of diapers, clothes, food, formula, tents, and medical supplies. Our first BigTop (this one the size of a basketball court, purchased from a Beijing wedding planner and trucked in by our filmmaking friends) stood in the courtyard outside. Aftershocks were frequent and severe; everyone felt safer sleeping outside.