Quake-stricken Qiang Community Back to Normal.docVIP

Quake-stricken Qiang Community Back to Normal 　　I made my first visit to Luobozhai, a village of the Qiang ethnic minority near Wenchuan, the epicenter of the 2008 earthquake, in a mid March snowstorm in 2009. Cloaked in glaring white and thick in deadly silence, the region with the romantic nickname “village above clouds” (for its altitude of 1,950 meters above sea level) remained in a complete shambles from the disaster a year before. In makeshift shanties, its people coped with the inconveniences of a make-do daily life while grappling at every moment with a persistent and instinctive mourning for the loss of their loved ones and ancestral homes. 　　Amid this crushing distress, however, gleamed signs of hope. On the slope behind the destroyed village the aid team from Jiangmen City, Guangdong Province, were racing against time to rebuild the community. Buildings were going up with the assistance of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, designed and constructed to best restore the cultural identity of the local ethnic community. And the work was supervised and financed by the central and local governments. 　　The brisk progress on the site was inspiring courage and confidence among the villagers, many of whom had been stripped of almost everything in the quake. One of the persons I talked to was the village committee’s accountant Wang Guorong. The massive tremors wrecked all his properties, including an orchard of 56 cherry trees that were soon to be harvested. When I stepped into his dimly lighted plank shelter, the 49-year-old man was preparing dinner. Besides a handful items of furniture that he had pulled out of the ruins of his house, the only possessions he had were an electric cooking pot and a used, donated computer. Amid the irritating smoke from his coal-fueled stove Wang told me his three dreams: “Have a new home, make more money and learn how to use the computer.” 　　When I returned to Luobozhai this January, Wang Guorong greeted me at hi