‘It was like an air force bombing a village’
For Zhang Maotang, May 12, 2008, was the day his personal apocalypse began. For almost nine weeks it seemed to him that day after day a relative of his would die, and it plunged him into what he says was madness.
His daughter and her husband were killed by rocks, and a cousin and two nephews died before his eyes.
“It was like an air force bombing a village,” he says. “Houses had collapsed and there was rubble everywhere. I looked after my nephew for an hour before he finally died.”
His wife, who herded sheep on a mountain, was missing. Even as aftershocks continued to shake the area, he ascended the mountain every day, calling out her name.
“I was fearless, but I had completely lost my mind,” he says. “We had been married for more than 40 years and never quarreled or been in fights.”
On the 48th day Zhang decided to risk carrying his search further afield, into a valley where rocks continued to fall. Trying to move any rocks that had come to a rest was not only physically difficult, but also highly dangerous. In one spot as he moved rocks around he saw the unmistakable sign of what had once been life: a human foot. Eventually, as he recognized his wife’s clothing, he knew his search was over.
“I felt stabbing pains in my chest. I took off my coat, wrapped her up and took her home.”
The magnitude-8 earthquake had destroyed Zhang’s home, too, leaving him with 2 cows and 12 sheep.
His meager consolation was that his grandson had survived, and many people, including Xie Chunying, director-general of Luhuo County Health Bureau, tried to persuade him to adopt his orphaned grandson. He refused.
“All I wanted to do was kill myself, but as I considered my grandson I began to think straight. No matter what the challenges were, I was determined to raise him to continue the family line.”
The family now lives in a threestory house, and that boy is a secondary school student.
“It has been 10 years since the earthquake struck, and I have worked hard every day to bring him up with the hope of a better life,” Zhang says.
After the quake, Zhang received compensation of 20,000 yuan for the death of his wife, daughter, and sonin-law. As with other quake survivors, he and his children also received food and 300-yuan individual monthly transitional benefit from the government.
In the second year after the quake, Zhang says, he began spending most of his time on the mountain growing corn, keeping bees and raising chickens.
As the area recovered it was hit by another disaster. On July 10, 2013, a rainstorm swept Sichuan, causing severe floods and landslides affecting more than 800,000 people in Wenchuan county.
Roads and bridges were damaged, and power and telecommunications were cut, and as landslides struck, Zhang’s house, barely five years old, collapsed.
Yet again he set out rebuilding his life, and with the help of government disaster relief grants and money borrowed from his nephew he rebuild his house from scratch.
“I looked at things optimistically. As long as people around me were safe it was easy enough to rebuild my house.”
Over the past five years in China more than 66 million people have been pulled from poverty. In line with national goals on alleviating poverty, the local government in Wenchuan has implemented measures specific to poor households and individuals. For example, in 2015 Zhang was offered free plum saplings and technical support to work on his own plum plantation.
In addition to the income he derives from beekeeping and poultry farming, those plum trees are also now bearing fruit, and last year he made a profit of 12,000 yuan from them, he says. He plans to invest more in his plum growing, he says.
Zhang’s optimism and resilience made him a household name in Miansi township in Wenchuan. Last year the Aba Tibetan and Qiang autonomous prefecture government in Sichuan honored him with the annual Touching Aba award.
However, it is his grandchildren who remain his greatest motivators.
“As long as they live lives of joy I, too, feel happy. I want them to get into a good university and help others — just as others have done so much to help us.”