DUJIANGYAN, Sichuan, China—As the clock struck 2:28 pm on May 12, 2008, the earth underneath Huang Yanxia, 40, began to shake violently. Sideways, then lurching forward—it made her so dizzy she almost wanted to throw up. The only thing that kept her focused were thoughts of her family’s safety.
“Fortunately, I was not inside the house,” she tells us, a media group from Manila on a familiarization tour of Southwest China, through an interpreter. “I was outside…but I was very scared. The ground was moving.” As her house crumbled into ruins before her eyes, she took comfort in the fact that at least, she and her family were still alive and together.
A businessman in Wugui Village, Huang, dressed simply in a black top and coffee brown stretch pants, her medium-length hair tied neatly into a ponytail, recalls the terrible tragedy with scant trace of the pain of losing neighbors and personal belongings.
Wugui Village is in the town of Cuiyuehu (Green Moonlake), just one the many that make up the city of Dujiangyan. The latter is well-known among foreign tourists as a site of an irrigation system built in 256 BC, declared as a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization World Heritage Site, and which continues to water the county’s farms for miles.
(At least 80,000 were confirmed dead in Sichuan province from the magnitude 7.9 tremblor. In Dujiangyan alone, over 3,000 are believed to have perished, as per the city’s post-earthquake reconstruction. According to international published reports then, quake survivors in many parts of Dujiangyan quickly turned their grief into fury at local officials whom they accused of scrimping on building materials for schools, a few of which had collapsed, killing hundreds of children, even though older buildings remained standing.)
Strong aftershocks hit Dujiangyan, and she and her family hunkered in fear at their government-built temporary shelters, Huang says. But by then, soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army had already cleared the blocked roads and streets of debris, helped restore power to affected towns and villages, and regularly brought food, clean water, and other basic commodities to many survivors like Huang.
Today it would be difficult to identify Huang’s village as having been devastated by the earthquake. Everywhere, there are concrete two-story houses, with some cars in the driveway.
The surrounding fields, as well as backyard farms are lush with vegetables, irrigated from clean water running through street canals across this village of 523 people who make their living basically from agriculture. The same is true across Dujiangyan whose recovery has been described as “rising like a phoenix” from the ashes.
Where her large house stood before, Huang’s family now lives in a modest concrete two-story 200-square-meter home with five bedrooms. A shiny pewter-colored four-door Toyota sedan is parked in her driveway, which could probably accommodate one more vehicle. Her off-white living room has an oversized beige sofa, with a lacquered wooden coffee table in the center, and mounted on the wall is a flat-screen TV, while a white Wi-Fi router sits under it, connecting her family to the world. (We see her husband quickly tapping away in front of the computer in one of the rooms just off the house’s main entrance.)
Her 18-year-old daughter, Huang says, is away at the university. Living at her new home are her husband, a woodcarver; her sister and their parents. It only took six months for her new home to be constructed, “not a long time” to wait, she adds.
Heading the reconstruction effort in Dujiangyan is Sun Ling Xia, a petite woman in her mid-30s with a round smiling face, shoulder-length brown hair with bangs, who during our visit to her office, recounted the long difficult work that accompanied rehabilitation of post-quake Dujiangyan.
Although wracked by economic losses as much as $8 billion due to the quake, almost all survivors had new homes a year after the calamity. Huang’s family, for instance, received a government housing subsidy of 200,000 Renminbi (P1.4 million)—or 40,000 Renminbi (P280,000) per person—to build a new home. Recipients of the housing subsidy were allowed to build larger houses, but had to pay for the additional space out of their own pockets.
Sun responds humbly as we ask her the secret to her success: “I have no engineering degree. I am a simple daughter of a farmer. I have an agricultural background.” But when she was called on to head the reconstruction office, she agreed to do it without any hesitation, she says. “It was my way of giving back (to the community).”
Sun was remarkably efficient at her job, quickly responding to the needs of the victims. Perhaps, she could empathize with the quake survivors as she, too, suffered from the earthquake. Fortunately, she says, “none of my family members died.” (After completing her job as rehab czar, she now heads the housing restoration office in the city.)
Stressing the extent by which the government listened to the survivors’ wishes, Sun says, the local government drew up its own post-disaster plan by consulting with some 20 planning groups. “We did scientific planning but respected the people’s wishes,” when it came to the settlement areas and how their homes should be built, as well as the infrastructure requirements of each village.
“It was really important to keep alive the spirits of the survivors,” Sun emphasizes. “They should continue to believe that the government will help them.”