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SHIFANG, China-At the moment of greatest despair, Wang Zhijun tried to kill himself by twisting his neck against the debris. Breathing had become harder as day turned to night.The chunks of brick and concrete that had buried him and his wife were pressing tighter by the hour, crushing them. Their bodies had gone numb.Then there was the rain, sharp and cold, lashing at them through the cracks.“I don’t think I can make it,” he told his wife, Li Wanzhi, his face just inches from hers, their arms wrapped around each other.She sensed he was giving up. “If God wants to kill us, he would have killed us right away,” she said. “But since we’re still alive, we must be fated to live.”And they lived. They were pulled from the rubble of their collapsed six-story workers’ dormitory(picture left) 28 hours after last Monday’s earthquake, spared the end met by at least 32,000 others.Their tale of survival is also one of a rekindled love, of two people who might have died had they been trapped alone.They whispered to each other. They talked of their 14-year-old daughter-who would take care of her? They recalled their life together, the shape of it before and the shape of it to come, all the changes they would make if they ever got out alive.Days after their rescue, they lay in separate beds in Shifang People’s Hospital, a loud place with too many patients and too few doctors. Their daughter stood by their side. Mr. Wang’s stout body was covered in cuts scabbed over with blood and pus, and he drifted in and out of sleep while talking to a reporter.Ms. Li, 38, her petite frame dressed in a pink nightgown, spoke softly and stared at the ceiling with teary eyes. A blanket covered her left side, where her arm had just been amputated. She had pleaded with a doctor not to cut it off, but there had been no choice: It had turned gangrenous after being trapped beneath Mr. Wang in the collapse.Yet they were both thankful. “My colleagues said, ‘You’re the lucky one. You don’t know how many people died,’ ” Ms. Li said.Of the 28 hours, Mr. Wang said, “It was more terrifying than facing the god of death.”Like for millions of Chinese, the life they knew was completely eradicated at 2:28 p.m. last Monday, when the 7.9-magnitude earthquake sent wave after wave of tremors through the river valleys and glaciated mountains of Sichuan Province, one of the most beautiful corners of China.Mr. Wang, 40, had just returned home two days earlier, after traveling around the country for half a year and trying his hand at small businesses. He had lost a lot of money. He and his wife rarely spoke. He spent the Chinese New Year in the city of Guangzhou by himself, skipping China’s most important family holiday. Mr. Wang is the kind of itinerant worker found in China by the millions, wandering from city to city in these boom years, and so it was chance that brought him home two days before the earthquake.Ms. Li was raising their daughter, Xinyi, on her own while working at a chemical factory in the town of Luoshui. “My husband doesn’t have a stable life,” Ms. Li said. “He goes wherever he can get a job. I told him, ‘Why don’t you have a rest? Stay away from business. Just try and enjoy life for a while.’ ”Last Monday, she and her husband had just sat down in her fourth-floor apartment to watch a police soap opera on DVD when the dormitory, which houses dozens of factory workers, began shaking violently.He flung an arm around her as they sprinted for the bathroom eight feet away. The entire building collapsed right as they got there, knocking them to the ground. The wooden bathroom door slammed against Mr. Wang’s back. Clouds of dust filled their lungs.They were frightened but did not feel any pain at first. “In our minds, everything was clear,” Ms. Li recalled. “We were buried in the rubble.“As a woman, as a mother, my first thought was, ‘What about my daughter? Who’ll take care of her if I die?’ ” she said.To read more go to:
As in the days of Noah....
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