May 21, 2008
Dongguan Times ran a special edition today with its front page designed to resemble a manila envelop.
The headline reads “the memory of a middle school”. Inside is a selection of diary entries by students from the Beichuan Middle School who survived the May 12 eartquake. Over 1,200 students and teachers were buried alive when the earthquake hit Beichuan. Previously home to about 13,000 people, around 4,000 of Beichuan’s residents survived.
One of the details revealed by the diaries is that there had been smaller earthquakes shortly before the big fatal one. However, largely because Beichuan County is on an earthquake belt and small quakes are not unusual, some people were so jaded that didn’t pay much attention to the tremors. “I thought it was just another joke the earth played with us” a student wrote. A joke it was not.
According to the diaries, when the earthquake happened, some teachers asked their students not to run away, but to take cover by hiding under the desks, which seems to have saved the lives of some students, although it didn’t help many others. The desks, understandably, were not designed to withhold the weight of a collapsing building.
Most of the student survivors expressed their faith in the government and the Party in their dairies, though in one of them, a student showed his anger that it took five hours for the rescue team to arrive. But when he knew Mianyang (a big city nearby) was also affected, he began to understand the seriousness. “I have no complaint. Who should I complain about?” he wrote.