everything back to normal

Some of my junior students from last semester with whom I had become close friends stayed at my house the past two days because they had been locked out of their dormitories. A few of the undergraduate dormitories had apparently been damaged slightly and the school, instead of providing alternative housing for the student body, had promptly shut the doors and denied access to anyone attempting to enter. The junior friends of mine had called me and asked if they could stay at my house, a first floor apartment, and of course I agreed. Their options were to either sleep on the street in a makeshift tent with a rice-paper tarp or sleep on the couches in my house.

They were still very concerned about the possibility of a second earthquake, something that I had to dispel numerous times over the past couple days. Many students were afraid to stay in their off campus housing unless they were on the first or second floors because living any higher up would certainly mean their demise in the event of a repeat quake. Li Jia Li perhaps was the most scared of them all; she refused to sleep in her third floor apartment building, purchased sticks of incense to burn at Qing Quan Si (Buddhist temple in Nanchong), spent one night with a blanket in an internet bar chair, and seriously considered flying home to JiangXi province (a four hour trip) to escape the ensuing aftershocks.

An additional wave of panic came when a number of people (who knows who started this?) reported they had seen snakes and rats around Nanchong and predicted that there would be another earthquake soon. The logic, indeed flawless, was that animals have some uncanny sense to perceive impending earthquakes, and that the presence of snakes and rats was somehow a harbinger of an enormous aftershock that would soon take place.

Downtown Nanchong is absolutely normal. You would have never known there was an earthquake at all just from looking around the city. There's no damage to any of the buildings, stores are doing business again, and there are no rescue or assessment crews around. It seems almost as if the craziness of the rumors and borderline paranoia is limited to the student body on campus; understandable, though. Fear spreads pretty quickly when the population has limited access to information and the outside world.

Another big rumor yesterday was the water shortage. I got a call from the waiban explaining that there had been some large chemical factory northwest of Nanchong that was destroyed in the quake. As a result, the water of the Jia Ling river had been contaminated and the water supply in Nanchong was going to be hopelessly limited for an unknown period of time. One hour? One day? Who knew for sure. People started buying bottled water as if the impending blizzard were going to trap as all in our homes for weeks. Crowds thronged around bicycle trucks and pushed and shoved in order to pick up the ever precious case of bottled water; the life source when Y2K hit... I mean the earthquake, oops! (this picture here is from later in the day. earlier there would have been 20 people around these cases of water.)

Needless to say, there was no earthquake, and although I had calmed and comforted the students staying in my house last night not to worry, they still wore their jackets and backpacks to sleep just in case. Class was held as usual this afternoon, except for teachers with classes in the C and D buildings (such as myself) because of minor superficial damage to the roof tiles.

Without downplaying the tragedy of WenChuan and the other parts of China where there had been serious damages and losses of life.. let's get back to reality here.