The old man called to me from the side of the road.
Sit for a while, he said.
It was getting late.
The earthquake had extinguished the neon signs that still clung to the shells of abandoned buildings.
His face was creviced and deep.
He didnt offer me anything to drink because he had nothing to offer.
But the old man wasnt one of those people.
He lowered his voice as he told me.
Years ago, while he worked away from home, his wife started sleeping with his best friend.
This was back then, long ago.
He said he hadnt seen his wife around for years.
So the whole situation seems ironic to him.
He didnt know what to think about that.
The town simply materializes out of the forest.
We sat in the twilight, exchanging occasional questions.
After a while, the excavators stopped, and there was something approaching silence.
And now there was almost nothing.
Across the river, a lone player on a stringed er hu lobbed sad notes into the night air.
Not everyone was listening, of course.
I took leave of the man and walked down the river.
When I walked back, I saw that the man had moved off down the road.
He had taken his stool and perched himself behind some people a few tents over.
He slowly smoked a cigarette and watched TV over their shoulders.
Everyone was on the street, under the tied canvass of temporary tents.
They were seated on low wooden stools and the mood was joyous.
They called me over and asked me to sit and watch the show.
When the girls started their giggle-laden song and dance, the group roared with applause.
You know, she said, before the earthquake I didnt know what an earthquake was.
When it started I thought it was a war.
And then I thought, why would anyone attack Qingchuan?
It was over fast.
An aftershock, the teacher said.
I asked her if she was ever scared, and she laughed.
Two months of this, she said, and its become routine.
AP photo by Ng Han Guan
In the immediate aftermath of the quake, images of devastation were everywhere.
It was a watershed moment in China, a convulsion of national mourning and, strangely, exultation.
Then, time started to pass.
Questions were raised about shoddy construction and military training for rescue, and press openness quietly and definitively ended.
I arrived two and a half months after the disaster and toured the area for about a week.
Our stops were Dujiangyan and Hanwang, places that had been eviscerated by the quake.
Everyone had an agenda.
Our car pulled up along the depressed streets on the outskirts of Dujiangyan.
The day was gray and cool.
Electrical wires hung low over the quiet, dusty streets.
Along one side of the road, wooden boards and aluminum siding lined a vast pile of rubble.
This was once a school, a combined elementary and middle school where hundreds died.
He lowered the flap.
My journalist guide was perched on a small mound of rubble, taking pictures of the empty school grounds.
He was holding court with a family of out-of-towners, who were also clutching their cameras.
I heard people died here.
Yes, many, the journalist said.
Like, over a hundred?
The man began taking pictures.
I wondered aloud about the lack of any sort of memorial.
There were no flowers, no plaque nailed to the warped boards surrounding the nothingness.
The journalist told me that wasnt entirely true.
And, then, there they were.
Amidst the cracked sections of sidewalk were dark charred circles, the ash long since blown away.
The parents are quiet now.
Maybe someday there will be a plaque, maybe on the wall of the new school.
The journalist took me aside.
I have it, he said.
The list of all the parents whose children were killed.
And their phone numbers.
A contact gave it to me.
Well, would it be any use to call them now?
He looked at me for a minute.
It didnt seem likely.
The officers were playing cards, and trailed us with their eyes in between hands.
Our cameras had all disappeared into pockets and backpacks.
We turned around and surveyed the school.
Then we hurried back to the car and drove on to the next site.
In the weeks after the disaster many friends of mine made the trip to Sichuan.
It also enabled one to speak as an authority figure.
Parents kneeling by the sides of their children, weeping.
Children screaming near the corpses of parents.
Death affects different people differently.
His work was familiar.
Of course, he didnt see it this way.
he chirped, corpse!, pressing his finger against the computer screen.
I hadnt slept well.
The images were hard to process and after a couple of days here they were catching up with me.
The street was on the outskirts, and was dominated at an intersection by a soaring metallic statue.
The statue was starkly majestic, futuristic by way of the space-age aesthetics of the 1970s.
It was a huge, sweeping, gleaming thing, and it presided over absolutely nothing.
The place was like Satis House, or the jungle ruins of the Aztec.
Huge sprouts of flowering weeds lined the road.
Outside, though, were children, grimy and exploding with energy.
I took pictures of the kids while their parents beamed from the chairs outside their tents.
One of the dads walked me to his factory, which had been undamaged in the quake.
Good bricks, he said.
The other factories in town had all been destroyed.
As we walked, we passed doors painted with date and time stamps by the army.
When, exactly, had rescuers arrived to check the place out?
The factory owner shrugged.
They did a good job, the army.
Just not quite as soon after the disaster as the markings would have you believe.
Miraculously, there wasnt a trace of bitterness in his voice.
His family, I guess, had survived.
They hacked at walls with sledgehammers, women using adzes to chip away bits of cement from bricks.
The excavator struck me as odd.
People worked without saying much, kneeling to load baskets of bricks and unload them a hundred feet away.
A shelter had sprung up in the shade from a structure of stacks of reclaimed bricks.
A few guys, sweating and smoking, were perched on the brick tower.
They hoisted me up, and we talked when we werent coughing from the dust.
We didnt move much.
I sat next to a young guy.
The wall was lifted but it didnt make much difference.
They were all crushed, the children underneath, scores of children betrayed by their classrooms.
But now, he said, this was something more like business.
The slim factory owner clambered aboard the bricks and offered me a cigarette.
I made these, he said, over there.
He pointed out at his old plant, where walnuts were seasoned and packaged.
The structure was gone, and the excavator presided over a mound of rubble several feet high.
He had a fanny pack on, a simple black one that he wore at the front.
He unzipped it and took out a laminated picture of what the building used to look like.
The old building had been a massive affair, built of terra cotta-colored bricks and striking plastic columns.
It was built three years ago using money cobbled together from family members.
Business used to be pretty good.
The baijiu and the beer keep flowing, and an hour-long meeting typically stretches into the late afternoon.
So the man wasnt back in time to die with his daughter and his mother.
There were psychiatrists roaming the quake zone soon after the disaster.
I asked the man if he ever went to see one but he shook his head.
My friends were all telling me to go talk to the doctor but I did not need to.
I have lost everything, what is there to say?
It will help you move on, I offered.
He looked at me, the look of a man who has worked nearly every day of his life.
Who does not move on?
Dont you have to eat?
Before all this happened, everything I ever did was for my family, my daughter.
And now she is dead and there is no reason for me to do anything.
But me dying too wont help anything.
He pulled out a few more laminated pictures.
One showed his frail mother standing before his terra cotta factory.
She was round-faced and short.
He stayed away from the site of his daughters death.
He tried to work.
Waves of sadness overwhelmed him nightly.
He couldnt conscience trying to move on so quickly.
So he made other arrangements.
He dug into his meager savings and hired a demolition outfit from Chengdu.
They made the ride up to town.
Their mission was to erase the building completely, shovelful by shovelful, while the man watched.
This was the process I had stumbled upon, large-scale excavator psychotherapy.
Im glad we can help, one of them said.
The man shook his head and started crying.
Then he stopped, and dried his eyes.
He looked at me.
You know what would really help?
Everyone laughed, but he was serious.
I know how to create the best walnut factory around.
I will create another one.
I just need some clients again.
Long trails of bricks and bent rebar tumbled into a dump truck.
This was a city of death.
Buildings were cracked tents sprawled everywhere.
The city hospital had sandwiched upon itself, the upper floors obliterating the lower ones.
And he was livid.
The blue tents were stifling and the government continued day in and day out with its lies.
It was one thing to lie in some Beijing paper.
Fine, tell them the temporary housing was finished and no one would be the wiser.
But to put it in the local paper?
Where everyone reading it was an earthquake victim living in a blue tent?
I was walking on the far edge of town when I saw the flowers amidst the omnipresent gray.
They were the flowers of a grand opening.
A new business, a freshly constructed restaurant around the corner from a field of tents.
I wondered about who could imagine investing in the future when the past was still weeks away from demolition.
I sat down alone at a massive table for eight.
The waitress came over and I took her recommendation and then sat back, looking at the empty streets.
A single tent stood at the intersection a few feet away.
Li, the restaurant owner, is a wispy, quiet man of 28.
After the earthquake he, like everyone else, lost his home and was forced out in the streets.
Thankfully, no one died.
They smiled as he drew out the characters he chose for his sons name.
The man explained that finally, something beautiful had emerged from the wreckage.
In the days after the quake, rescue workers combed Beichuan for survivors.
Then they combed it for the corpses still buried inside.
And then, amazingly, they did nothing at all.
One leader declared it a permanent museum.
The government brought in fencing and razor wire.
Here, though, was a place abandoned to time.
But it was still early, and she was the only one operating.
The driver and I pulled off the road and walked towards the cliff face.
Down in the valley once tall buildings kneeled before each other.
The place was immense.
After a while, the driver suggested we move off road for a better look.
We rounded a concrete barrier and headed down a path behind some Chinese people with their cameras outstretched.
We stepped down on white stairs overrun with the ash of burned incense.
We stood on platforms and looked out.
Everyone was snapping pictures.
I wondered, though, if they saw what I saw.
The forms were familiar.
I sat down for a while, overwhelmed.
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