介绍:
It was July 27th, 1976. In Tangshan, a city sitting in north China's Hebei Province, the weather was sweltering and muggy. Even when the night fell, the heat was still almost unbearable.
Yet after a whole day's work, by midnight, most of the Tangshan dwellers were sleeping soundly on their beds. Only a few people stayed awake. Nightshift nurse Li Hongyi was one of them.
"Because it was so hot inside, I walked outside to cool myself. I sat on a stone bench for a while. "
Around 3:20 AM, he noticed something unusual.
"I stood up on the bench with my hands on hips. I looked up and wondered: why the night sky is so bright!? "
At 42 minutes past three, all hell broke loose.
"The earth arched up and then hurtled down like waves!"
"I called out: 'Goodness! Earth…!'I hadn't finished the word 'earthquake' yet and then the building collapsed. For about five seconds, it was a dead silence. After five seconds, I heard people screaming for help. "
"I used my right hand to move all the bricks that fell on my body. Accidentally, I touched the top of my head. The ceiling was right beside my head. "
The earthquake was so strong that even in Beijing, the capital city sitting over 200 kilometres away from Tangshan, people felt the shock.
Ragnar Baldursson was a foreign student at the Beijing Language Institute around that time.
"Suddenly, somewhere between half-awake and half-asleep, everything started shaking and there was this noise. My first reaction…my first thought was there's a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. I hadn't really realized how tense the situation had been until when I thought about it afterwards. And then, when I was still alive a couple of seconds later, I realized 'OK, this is just an earthquake.'"
But it was not a low-magnitude earthquake that he used to experience in his home country Iceland. Though the nightmare in Tangshan only lasted for 23 seconds, the earthquake unleashed a destructive force that was four hundred times greater than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima during the Second World War. In this city with a population of nearly one million, almost a quarter of its inhabitants died while more than 160,000 people were severely wounded in this nightmare of pure horror.
Help and rescue were sent right away from places all over the country. At that time, Qian Gang was an officer of cultural affairs with the People's Liberation Army based in Shanghai. Appointed by a local magazine, he arrived in Tangshan with the Shanghai Medical Team. The scene was traumatizing for the then 23-year-old young man.
"In fact, I got there a week after the Earthquake. What I saw was so appalling. Almost every street and building in Tangshan was beyond recognition. The smell of dead bodies filled the air, which was very strong and pungent. "
Staying in the post-seismic Tangshan for over two months, Qian spent half of his time assisting the medical team, another half in the company of Jiang Yichao (蒋忆潮), an old friend of his parents. As the then Director of Tangshan Civil Affairs Bureau, Jiang was in charge of disaster relief.
Even now, Qian still remembers the day when he and other social workers were entrusted by Jiang to escort children who lost their families to orphanages in other cities.
"Most of the children came from the surrounding countryside of Tangshan. They had never left home, not to mention travelled by train. On the surface, they played and teased each other. They even appeared to be quite excited for this train trip. But if you spent time with those kids, you would notice they hide their feelings and the pain of losing loved ones deep inside. They were very dependent on adults. The closer to the destination, the more glued they were to us. I didn't have the heart to part with those children. But uncle Jiang ushered me to leave before the kids noticed, otherwise bidding farewell would be too painful and emotional for their vulnerable minds. So I left the platform without saying goodbye. It was very, very heart-wrenching."
But Qian didn't tell the stories of those survivors until the mid-1980s.
"In the 1980s, the society has become more liberal, human condition became the essence of literature. So when I was asked to write something about the Tangshan Earthquake, the core of my writing became those Tangshan citizens who suffered during the disaster. "
Eight years after the Earthquake, Qian Gang went back to Tangshan. Inspired by Jack London's San Francisco Stories and John Hersey's Hiroshima, the budding journalist acted as an investigative journalist to explore the ins and outs of one of the most devastating earthquakes in recorded history. By tracing down and talking to witnesses, survivors and government officials, Qian picked up the jigsaws and pieced together a panorama of this calamitous incident in his celebrated non-fiction: The Great China Earthquake or "Tang Shan Da Di Zhen" in Chinese.
Following his sober, collected yet humane words, we are exposed to those heartbroken moments, when mother died trying to protect her baby and cries for help from those who were trapped gradually faded out under the ruins. At the same time, we also learn the strength of human volition and spirits, like how five miners miraculously survived for fifteen days under the collapsed colliery and a young couple supported each other in utter darkness.
For the author himself, no detail is too small.
"My curiosity drove me to probe into some unfamiliar places, such as detention house, asylum and the area where deaf-mute people lived. I call these places 'another world' in my book, (because we don't often hear about them in our daily lives.) In a way, details could correct preconceived ideas. People's responses towards the earthquake are beyond imagination."
Flipping through the pages, the sparks of humanity are fleshed out, as Qian Gang meticulously documents those soul-reaching moments, such as how soldiers risked their own lives to secure the dam while inmates and prison guards supported one and another. But the writer does not shy away from the ugliness of human nature. Stating in all-out honesty, he also depicts the rapacious lootings after the disaster.
"Some of my interviewees tried to avoid this topic. They told me not to mention it. But these incidents are sheer facts, which reveal another side of life. "
Since its publication in 1986, Qian Gang's documentary-like book, The Great China Earthquake, or "Tang Shan Da Di Zhen" in Chinese, has become a national sensation. The work is not only made into an audio book, but was also introduced as a must-read in the schools of Hong Kong. Hailed by some as the most authentic writing for the Tangshan Earthquake, this non-fiction has been reprinted for three times and translated into several foreign languages.
But for author Qian Gang, his endeavour did not stop right there. Retired from the army in the early 1990s, he joined the China Earthquake Administration and co-founded the newspaper, China Disaster Reduction Paper. A few years later, he co-edited a tome that chronicles the one hundred deadliest natural disasters in China during the 20th century.
"Human is adept at forgetting rather than memorizing. In other words, we have selective memory. We are not good at memorizing the whole picture of the historical truth. That's why we documented the greatest natural disasters in the 20th century. I think what we did is meaningful to the future generations. From a practical perspective, it will help us to reduce the damage that disasters bring. As a reporter, I am duty-bound to note down history."
In the appendix of his book, Qian Gang wrote that, the reason why disaster is so powerful is due to their ability to overwhelm the human spirit. It lets mankind build a self-imposed prison and even drives us to self-destruction. As long as we are born into this world, we have to accept the capriciousness of this planet. This is our fate. But don't be afraid, because our spirit could surmount any adversity.
大家还在听
