‘The earthquake turned my life upside down in an unimaginable way’
Nothing and no one was going to stop Li Xiaoxia going back to Yingxiu, epicenter of the earthquake, where her parents, husband and son, 2, were trapped in rubble.
When the earthquake struck, Li was on her way to Chengdu to buy her son some medicine.
“Hearing that my father was dead and my son missing I collapsed and lay prostrate, wracked with anxiety,” she says.
Ignoring any dangers, Li decided to do all she could do to get back to Yingxiu, about 30 kilometers away. However, roads were blocked, and she would need to make the journey on foot over some extremely rugged territory, during which there were constant aftershocks, and the landscape was pitted with the bodies of earthquake victims. The whole journey took her more than 10 hours.
“I was quite feeble and disoriented. My body was stiff and my feet were covered with blisters.”
The quake, which had killed 6,566 people in the town of Yingxiu, had leveled Li’s home, and her father was buried in the rubble.
“I knew he was dead but I knelt down and called out his name again and again.”
However, Li’s mother, covered in blood, clung to life, lying with dozens of other victims in the open.
“Her face was disfigured and her ribs broken. I clasped her to my bosom, weeping loudly. A doctor came over and urged me to stop crying, saying this emotion could worsen my mother’s condition. I tried to repress the sobs, but I could barely choke back my tears.”
Li later found her husband, who was helping people set up makeshift tents, and a local was looking after their son.
“Seeing my son alive rekindled all my hopes. I love my parents, but at that very moment my son was the most important person to me.”
The next day Li’s mother was taken by helicopter to Nanjing for specialist treatment.
The earthquake wiped out her family property, which included an apartment and a beauty salon.
“We started everything from scratch,” she says. “Most my savings were invested in the beauty salon.”
To make ends meet, Li worked on several small businesses including retail tobaccos and selling noodles on the street, but none of them ended up being profitable. She also worked as a street barber.
However, after the quake, “people were less concerned about their looks,” she says.
Over almost 10 years there has been a huge reconstruction effort in Sichuan’s worst-hit areas. In the three years after the quake, 19 wealthy provinces and municipalities dispatched more than 2,700 officials, 310,000 construction workers and nearly 30,000 doctors, teachers and other workers to Sichuan.
In June 2009, Yingxiu was being rebuilt from the ground up, and Li and other Yingxiu residents were resettled in Chengdu, Li’s family going to the city of Dujiangyan in Chengdu.
She is thankful for the financial aid she received from the government, but says that she still had many worries.
“I wasn’t well educated and didn’t have much professional experience. I didn’t know what kind of job I could get to support my family.”
Her husband also wanted to divorce her, she says, and she started to constantly suffer from severe headaches and insomnia. She was later diagnosed with moderate depression and severe anxiety and received treatment.
In 2010 work on the new Yingxiu was all but completed, and Li and many other residents moved back there. She applied for an interestfree loan and bought a house at what she says was a moderate price.
With the help of 1.7 billion yuan the central and provincial governments have invested in Yingxiu, it has been transformed from a small industrial town into a tourist city.
Li received professional training organized by the local government and landed a job as a tourist guide in 2012. Among her duties as a guide, she interprets quake-themed tourist attractions and local cultural heritage.
Two years later she paid off her debt and married a middle-school teacher, and they had a son a year later. This year her sons have turned 12 and 3.
Today, Li says, she still suffers from minor depression, but knows how to manage it.
“The earthquake turned my life upside down in an unimaginable way, but it also taught me how to be strong and tolerant. I have made peace with it.”