Health matters

By Liu Shinan

After they had observed three minutes of silence to pay their tribute to compatriots lost in the earthquake, the people gathered in the Tian’anmen Square in Beijing on Monday afternoon refused to disperse. Waving national flags and thrusting fists in the air, men and women, the elderly and children shouted, “Stand upright, China; Stand upright, Wenchuan!” and “Long live China!”

The spontaneous rallies took place in other cities as well.

The Chinese were roaring their defiance against the deadly blows of capricious nature; they were demonstrating their will to overpower any kind of adversity; and they were expressing their most profound love for their motherland that had suffered humiliations and aggressions in late modern times and suffered two major natural calamities over the past few months.

The Chinese people are far from being overtly expressive - and are the least aggressive - by nature. They are shy of showing their emotions in public. But whenever in adversity, they stand erect with their chins up, united as one. And especially in times of adversities, they demonstrate a strong willpower to put up with pains and a tenacity to overcome difficulties. In the past week, there were too many examples of such courage, tenacity and unity.

Since the earthquake struck Sichuan province last Monday, I have been doing nothing except reading reports from newspapers and webs or watching TV coverage, besides doing my regular work. I was moved to tears by one story after another - of people struggling to save their loved ones from collapsed buildings, of teachers sacrificing their lives to shield students from falling ceilings, of military and police forces racing against time searching for survivors under the rubble and of doctors and nurses sticking to their posts without taking a minute off even to look for their own missing family members.

The second day after the quake, I read the story of Qu Wanrong, a kindergarten teacher, who shielded a child with her back against a falling slab from the collapsed roof. She died but the child was saved. I was deeply moved and told the story to a foreign colleague of mine, who wrote a column mentioning the heroic teacher. In the following days, I read too many of such stories. In many cases, both the teachers and the shielded students died. But the teachers still merit our respect, for they flung themselves between danger and their students reacting to their instinct as a teacher.

There are also other examples of people choosing to honor their professional duties rather than taking care of their own loved ones. Yuan Shicong, an official of the Qingchuan county government, passed the debris of his home three times on his way to rescue residents in collapsed houses but did not stop to save his mother and niece who he knew were trapped under the rubble. Later the women died.

An unknown doctor and a nurse I saw in a TV footage were as idealistic as Yuan. They busied themselves attending wounded people saved from the ruins but did not make any attempt to save their own children who were trapped in the rubble a few meters away. When asked by a reporter, they said it was useless for them to watch the rescuers working on the debris. “Our post is here,” they said, tears running down their cheeks.

Children were as brave as the adults. Ma Jian, a student of the Beichuan middle school, dug the debris for four hours with bare hands to save a classmate. Yin Quankui and Zhu Hualin, students of another middle school, were escaping from their collapsed school when they heard the cry of a little girl. A grandpa tossed the child about three years old onto the street before the falling walls buried him. The two students stopped to pick up the child despite the danger and brought her to safety. In the rescuing camp, they took care of the orphan like “parents” though they were children themselves.

To cite more examples may be meaningless for this column. But I couldn’t help continuing to read similar stories online and save them in my files. I have become sort of “addicted to” being moved by our people’s kind-heartedness and tenacity.

E-mail: liushinan@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 05/21/2008 page10)

By Raymond Zhou

This has been a week of grief and helplessness.

This has been a week of enormous courage, compassion and of help.

This has been a week when humans were thwarted by nature, yet the human spirit shone brighter than ever.

This has been a week when geographic or demographic differences vanished and we all felt the pain and suffering of the Wenchuan earthquake victims.

We have all been drenched in tears over the loss of so many brothers and sisters. The wailing of mothers and fathers, the sight of dust-covered bodies of teenagers, cold and pale, pulled from the debris, haunt us day and night. The chilly rain, which exacerbated the misery, serves as a manifestation of our collective mourning.

This week, we are all Sichuanese, living in the fear of aftershocks, and in fading hopes of finding more survivors. Whenever one more survivor was extracted from a flattened building, it was an occasion for joy.

This week, we all want to reach out and touch those affected and say: “We’re with you. We’ll always be with you - through thick and thin.”

Yet, time is running out for those still trapped underneath tons of rubble. Can they hold on without food and water, with possibly injuries? What despair must have filled their hearts? So close to life, yet unreachable.

What despair do the parents feel? Are they capable of shedding more tears? Should they cling on to a slim ray of hope and wait for a miracle, or should they give up and be surprised by a miracle if it happens?

And what despair and frustration must be gnawing at the rescuers? They are giving their utmost, yet fate determines the life or death of a person more than their blood and sweat. An ill-placed beam, a cracked slab, a fallen wall, the difficulty of moving rescue equipment through damaged roads, the shortage of power to drive them - they are the Grim Reaper personified, constantly flashing its menacing glare.

This week is for mourning. Tears have a therapeutic power. The teary glint in Premier Wen Jiabao’s eyes has cleansed our souls and created a bonding and catharsis that I’ve never seen before. We feel so pure, as if the world were devoid of lesser concerns such as the pursuit of money.

This week, life seems so vulnerable, fate so capricious, and everything else so trivial.

This week, we desperately want our prayers to be answered by a benign and responsive god or supernatural force. Spare the children, spare the elderly, spare everyone who was living a normal and peaceful life. Why treat us so cruelly?

This week, love and humanity rise above the rubble of destruction.

After this week - long after this week, when the total toll is tallied, tears wiped dry, and our wounds healed, we’ll take time to thank those who rushed to the worst hit areas in the massive rescue operation, those who risked their own lives to help when help was most needed, and those whose kindness and compassion lit up a mundane, harsh world.

And we’ll explore whether the science of forecasting earthquakes could be improved and probe why buildings in rural towns and schools were more prone to collapse.

And we’ll help survivors rebuild their homes.

A natural calamity of such magnitude has brought out the best in us. Let’s use it for the good of all.

Email: raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 05/17/2008 page9)

by Liu Shinan

Peng Fei, an 11-year-old boy of Jiangjin, Chongqing municipality in Southeast China, saw a man stealing money from an old man on a bus. "Stop, you pickpocket," he shouted. The thief grabbed the boy by the throat and slapped him hard. All the other people on the bus, including the driver and the conductor, watched silently; nobody tried to protect the boy, who burst into tearful cries.

Shame on these adults!

Nowadays, it seems to have become common for people to turn a blind eye to thefts on buses. But the event last week is shocking, for more than 30 adults remained inactive in front of a bandit bullying a boy who bravely tried to stop the man twice his size. What happened to the manhood of the male passengers at the scene? Did they not have even an iota of righteous indignation?

When robbery becomes more and more violent today, it may be understandable - and forgivable - that onlookers dare not step forward to stop the crime. But there is a limit. When a weak, defenseless child is threatened, as in the case of Peng, any man with a sense of righteousness will fly into a great rage and shout a "Stop!" to the thug. Regrettably, nobody did so in this particular event.

To avoid bringing possible dangers or troubles to themselves, many people choose not to do anything when witnessing a criminal attempt. Their intrinsic sense of justice is submerged in the selfish worries over their own safety.

Certainly, such selfishness is not to be blamed when a danger is involved, for anyone has the right to protect his/her own safety. But in the Peng case, the men on the bus should well have been moved into action for at least two reasons. First, a child was being tortured. Second, the danger to their own safety was not so serious, for so many men could well overpower the thief.

It is lamentable that we have become so cowardly in the face of criminals. Don’t we feel ashamed thinking of the bravery of the boy? And what kind of a lesson do we expect our kids to draw from the case? Now educators tell children that they should not try to prevent a crime for it would bring dangers to them. This advice is right. But the problem in the above-mentioned case is not that of safety; instead, it is the imprint we adults have left in the heart of the boy - and all children - with our cowardice.

It will be a real danger for our society if cowardice prevails more and more over our righteous indignation at evils from one generation to the next.

Children’s intrinsic and untainted sense of righteousness is precious. We should never do anything to hurt this feeling. Many adults, however, are ruining this innocent feeling with their dishonorable behaviors. An event reported by Shijiazhuang, Hebei province-based Yanzhao Evening News last month was such a scandal.

A 7-year-old boy picked up a coin of 10 fen (0.1 yuan) from the ground in a park. He went to the street outside the park and handed the coin to a traffic police officer. The man, however, threw the coin to the ground and went away, leaving the boy puzzled over what he had been taught by his teachers.

For several decades in the latter half of the last century, a song titled One Fen encouraged children to hand money they came upon on the ground to the police. It helped people of several generations foster the virtue of not pocketing the money they found on the street. By throwing away the coin, the policeman in Shijiazhuang actually told the child to throw away the good tradition.

Now our living standards have greatly improved. We can afford to provide more material comforts for our kids. But we seem to be ignoring a more important "nutrient" for their growth - a sense of morality.

E-mail: liushinan@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 05/14/2008 page8)