来自四川的信笺：地震之后

Mr. Hessler, the Internet connection has been broken for 30 hours, I just opened my email, thanks very much for writing to me. I am sorry to say my parents’ house collapsed, but they are fine, when the earthquake happened, they were working in the field, but my niece was badly wounded when she was at school. My parents are with me in the city center. We are busying go to and coming back to hospitals to see our relatives. my house is full of people, my uncles, my aunts, and many other. I am too busy to write, I will let you know more when I am free. Thanks.

 David

海斯勒先生，网络中断了30个小时，我刚刚打开了我的邮箱，谢谢你的信。我家的房子倒了，但我的父母还好。地震发生时，他们正在地里干活。但我的侄女当时在上课，因此受了重伤。我父母现在跟我一起在市中心。我们忙着去医院照看我们的亲戚。我家挤满了人，有我伯父、姑妈和其他亲戚。我真的是忙的没时间写下去了。我有空再给你写信。谢谢。

戴维

At my home in Colorado, I received David’s e-mail early Tuesday morning, as the news about the earthquake in southwestern China worsened. As of now, the official death count is more than thirteen thousand, and that number will undoubtedly rise in coming days. I hope that I continue to hear from friends who are safe. David was a student of mine in the mid-nineteen-nineties, when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Sichuan province; that was the English name he had chosen for himself. Like most of my students, he had grown up in the countryside. Many of the e-mails I’m now receiving indicate that people in rural settlements have generally fared better than city residents. A young man named Willy described his wife’s village in northern Sichuan:

周二早晨在科罗拉多的家中，我收到了戴维的电子邮件。此时关于中国西南地震的新闻变得越来越糟。现在，官方公布的死亡数字已达13,000人，而且这个数字毋庸置疑的仍会上升。我希望能不断收到友人平安的消息。戴维曾是我上世纪九十年代中期的学生。其时我正在四川省做“和平队”志愿者；戴维是他为自己选的英文名。像我的大多数学生一样，他在农村长大。我现在收到的消息表明震区的农村人过的比城里人好。一位叫威利的青年描述了他妻子所在的川北小镇：

In Nancy’s home town . . . their parents were dealing with the newly picked tea and they found the house shake, and they ran out of the room, and the tiles fell off, the windows shook hard, and the water in the jars in their yard jumped out of the jar. People found it very hard to stand and many of them just took hold of the trees to keep balance.

在南希的家乡…她的父母正在处理新摘得茶叶。他们发现房子在摇晃，就跑出房间。屋上的瓦片不断掉落，窗户震得很厉害。院子里水罐里的水漾了出来。人们很难站稳，很多人扶着大树来保持平衡。

But the truth is that nowadays rural Chinese villages are home mostly to the very old and the very young. Virtually everybody of working age has migrated, and the population of urban centers has exploded—the National Bureau of Statistics estimates that a hundred and thirty million rural Chinese are now living in cities. Construction is fast and often slapdash; during a recent visit to Lishui, a city in Zhejiang province, I was told by workers that it generally takes fifty days to build a two-story factory. This is the kind of structure that has collapsed in cities such as Mianyang, which is close to the epicenter of the quake. A former student named Lucy wrote:

但事实上，当下的中国住在农村大部分是老人和孩子。基本上所有的青壮年劳动力都走了，城市人口爆炸式的增长——中国国家统计局估计现在有一亿三千万农民在城市生活。建设速度很快，导致很多豆腐渣工程的出现；在我最近的浙江丽水之行中，我通过工人了解到，建一个两层楼的工厂只要50天。这种建筑在绵阳等离震中较近城市被震塌。一个名叫露西的学生写道：

We are really sad to see China is experiencing so many bad things. . . . I called one of my friends in Mianyang, and she told me the things there are very bad. Many people are under the broken buildings. Many students are crying for help. Many children are also crying because they have not eaten anything for 28 hours. Today, when I called her again, I could not reach her. I really hope all the things will be better soon.

我们看到祖国受此灾难真的很难过…我给我一个在绵阳的朋友打电话，她告诉我那里的情况很糟。很多人被压在废墟下。很多学生在哭喊呼救。很多孩子也在哭，因为他们已经28个小时没吃东西了。今天我给她打电话却打不通。我真的希望一切会变得好起来。

In the minds of many Chinese, major earthquakes are often connected with political events. This week’s disaster is the largest since 1976, when a quake in eastern China killed more than two hundred and forty thousand people. That was the year that Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong both died, and the Cultural Revolution ended. At that time, Willy was a newborn in rural Sichuan, far from the epicenter, but even there his parents felt the tremors. His mother was bathing her two sons and her first instinct was to put some clothes on them—later, she said that she couldn’t stand the thought of them dying naked. In a neighboring village, the peasants slaughtered all the pigs, even the smallest ones; they believed that it was best to enjoy what they had before the world ended.

在很多中国人心中，大地震是与政治事件相联系的。这周的灾难是1976年以来最大的，76年中国东部地震杀死了二十四万人。那年周恩来和毛泽东逝世了，文革结束。那时，威利刚在四川农村出生，离震中很远，但即便如此他的父母还是感到了传来的震动。他的母亲当时正在给她两个儿子洗澡。她的第一反应是给他们穿上衣服——后来，她说她不能让她的孩子光着身子死去。邻村的村民杀了所有的猪，包括猪仔；他们觉得在世界毁灭之前应该享受他们拥有的一切。

This week, Willy told me that many people are responding in similar ways to China’s recent string of disasters. First, brutally cold weather in January and February caused major transportation-related delays and deaths and disrupted the Spring Festival holiday; then the protests occurred in Tibet and during the Olympic torch relay overseas; and now the earthquake has devastated parts of Sichuan province. He wrote:

这周，威利告诉我很多人用相似的方式面对中国近期发生的一连串灾难。起初，一月和二月的极端寒冷天气造成了严重的交通问题并导致伤亡，还干扰了春节；然后，藏独闹事，奥运火炬海外传递受阻；现在，大地震摧毁了四川省的很多城镇。他写道：

People here are likely to connect it with the Olympics. Almost everyone thinks that this year gives China disasters and it is a bad year. Interesting enough, when the snowstorm occurred, when I was watching TV, I just said for fun to Nancy that the year of 2008 was so bad that possibly an earthquake might happen in China. It seems that my sixth sense is right. And the authorities in Sichuan just predicted that there would be severe drought during the summer.

这里的人们会将地震与奥运会联系到一起。几乎所有人都认为今年是灾年。有趣的是，在雪灾期间，我在看电视时对南希说2008年不是好年景，说不定会有地震。看来我的第六感是对的。四川政府还曾预计今年夏天会有大旱。

In China, when bad things happen, they happen in places like Sichuan. The province is landlocked, remote, and rugged; it’s always been heavily populated, and it’s always been poor. When I was in the Peace Corps, Sichuan was home to a hundred and ten million people, a staggering figure: roughly one of every fifty human beings on earth was Sichuanese. Since then, the central government has divided the region into two parts, Sichuan province and Chongqing municipality, but that has done nothing to change the sheer sense of massed humanity. And the recent earthquake is by no means unusual. If you’ve lived in Sichuan, and continue to follow it in the news, you become accustomed to terrible stories—floods and landslides and collapsed bridges. Periodically, I’ll receive an e-mail that stops me cold, such as the one that Kevin sent last May:

在中国，灾难总是降临在四川这样的地方。这个省份地处内陆，偏僻多山，人多地穷。当我做“和平军”志愿者时，四川的人口有1.1亿，这多么惊人：地球上五十分之一的人是四川人。之后，中央政府将其分成两部分，四川省和重庆直辖市。但这无益于改变人口众多的事实。近期这场地震并不出人意料。如果你住在四川，持续关注新闻，你会习惯于灾难的发生——洪水、滑坡还有桥梁垮塌。我会不时地收到刺激我的电子邮件，下面这封是凯文去年五月发给我的：

I am sorry to tell a bad news. My town is called Yihe in Kaixian County in Chongqing. Two days ago, a big thunder hit my wife’s village school. It killed 7 students and wounded 44 students. It was not my wife’s class. But sorry to tell you about the bad news. These days my wife and I are both sad and scared at home.

我有个坏消息。我家住在重庆市开县义和镇。两天前，我太太所在的学校遭到了雷击。7个学生死亡，44个学生受伤。这没发生在我太太负责的班级。很抱歉告诉你这件事。这些天我太太和我很悲痛地呆在家里。

The Chinese often believe that human beings are shaped by the land around them. After my time in Sichuan, I came to agree; I had never lived among people who were so tough. The Sichuanese are natural workers, and they dominate construction crews in many parts of China. They are patient and tireless and determined, and they’re famous for pragmatism—Deng Xiaoping came from Sichuan. The people are also surprisingly good-natured and optimistic. Maybe that’s what happens when you’re a survivor, and maybe that also accounts for their sense of humor. On Tuesday, I received another e-mail from Willy:

中国人认为，一方水土养一方人。去过四川之后，我接受了这个说法；我从没与那么坚韧的人一起生活过。四川人是天生的工人，他们在中国很多地区是建筑工的主要来源。他们吃苦耐劳，他们的实干精神很著名——邓小平来自四川。四川人民还非常地友善乐观。也许，苦难赋予了他们这些以及他们的幽默感。本周二，我收到威利的另一封电子邮件：

…a minor quake measure 6.1 occurred again in Chengdu at around 3:00 and I called my friend there, they said when it happened yesterday, the whole house was like a swing. But this afternoon, when I called him, he said many of his colleagues (some teachers) were playing mahjong happily in the wake of the terrible quake.…

…三点钟左右成都又发生了6.1级余震。我跟在那边的朋友通了电话，他们说昨天地震时，整个房子晃得像秋千。但今天下午，我跟他通话时，他说他的很多同事（教师）在那么大的地震之后已经开始玩起了麻将。

This week, it’s unlikely that there will be much good news coming from China. But the rescue crews will, one hopes, make progress, and there may be reason for some Sichuan-style optimism. First, it seems that the Chinese government has been relatively open about news coverage, and it doesn’t seem to be restricting e-mails and phone calls. Second, the scale of destruction could easily have been worse. The epicenter was near the city of Dujiangyan, which in May of 2001 started construction on a massive hydroelectric dam on the Min River. Big dams are common in China, and Dujiangyan was one of the nation’s “Ten Key Projects” aimed at producing electricity and better water supplies.

本周之内，恐怕不会有什么好消息来自中国。但大家都希望救援队能有进展，四川式的乐观总需要一些理由。首先，似乎中国政府对媒体相对开放，并没有限制电子邮件和电话通信。其次，震中离都江堰市很近。2001年五月，一个岷江上的大型水电站项目在那里动工。大坝在中国很常见。该工程是中国的“十大重点工程”，旨在发电和更好的自来水供应。

By 2003, there were signs that the government was quietly expanding the project, and silt had begun to accumulate at a second location on the river. Dujiangyan is home to a local irrigation system that has functioned for more than two thousand years and has been declared a World Heritage site; it would have been effectively destroyed by the new dam. The city’s World Heritage Office opposed the project, contacting journalists from Chinese publications. The press was allowed to report with relative openness, in part because it portrayed the dam as destructive of cultural heritage. But one of the local entities that openly opposed the dam was the Dujiangyan Seismological Bureau.

至2003年，有迹象表明政府正在暗中扩大这项工程。淤泥开始在岷江的第二个施工地点淤积。都江堰是一个已经运行了两千多年的水利灌溉系统，并已被宣布为世界文化遗产；新的大坝可以完全毁了它。该市的世界文化遗产办公室反对建设新的大坝，并联系了中国国内媒体。媒体被允许对此进行有限的报道。但都江堰地震局是公开反对这项工程的地方单位之一。

In August of 2003, dam construction was forced to stop. In the history of the People’s Republic, this represented the first time that an engineering project on such a scale had been cancelled because of public pressure. (For a full account, see “Unbuilt Dams,” by Andrew C. Mertha and William R. Lowry, published in the October, 2006, issue of Comparative Politics.) Today, with Dujiangyan in ruins and the government struggling to respond, there’s some small consolation in the fact that at least there wasn’t another major dam on the site. And maybe later, after the emergency has passed, officials will remember the importance of the press and the seismological experts in stopping the dam. Sichuan’s greatest resource has always been its people, and sometimes the government just needs to listen to them.

2003年八月，大坝工程被强制叫停。在人民共和国的历史上，一个如此规模的工程由于舆论压力而被取消还是第一次（欲知详情，请阅相关报道）。现在，都江堰一片废墟，政府在忙于救灾，值得庆幸的是那里至少没有多一个大坝。也许以后，在灾情解除之时，政府会想到媒体和地震学专家反对大坝工程的意义。四川省最重要的资源是它的人民，有时政府应该听听他们的呼声。